Last Week's Business

Wednesday: We played Fishcenter Live at Adult Swim. I'm not sure who watches this show (which seems to be four stoned guys hanging out, and the only thing on the screen is a live feed of an aquarium), but they now have bands come through and perform.

Here's a representative example:

Thursday: I played the lead tenor chair with the Atlanta Latin Jazz Orchestra at Venkman's. Love this band! Great music and a great group of people.

Check out these excellent photos by Emily Butler Photography.

The big challenge for this particular show was a clarinet feature called Lorenzo's Wings that scared me to death--I'm not the most electrifying clarinetist, to begin with, and adding an improvised solo? Yikes! Rob asked me about it at the beginning of the year, so I spent a lot of time working on it (22 of the 24 days I had available), and...I played really well!

Friday: Back to Yacht Rock--got up and flew to Utah for a gig for AMC at the Sundance Film Festival. It's our third year playing the event, and fortunately, they moved the gig to a ballroom with an actual stage and better acoustics.

The major downside to this gig is the fact that it's a long flight, and then an even longer time of sitting around. The show began at 10 PM local time (midnight for our Atlanta body clocks), which made for a loooooooooong day.

The party was well attended by good looking people who danced all night, which helped. All things considered, we played really well!

However, this gig did have a video screen on the wall behind Mark Cobb (and one directly across the room from us) that played 70s music videos and commercials and stuff. I'm pretty sure I saw the same clip of Michael McDonald and the Doobie Brothers six times.

Also, CeeLo Green was there! I think he only showed up for the last twenty or thirty minutes. I guess he dug it, though.

And then we drove an hour back to Salt Lake City and slept for four or five hours.

Saturday: Got up and flew back to Atlanta. I had just enough time to go home, drop my luggage, pick up some different gear, eat, and head out to a rehearsal for a show I'm playing this week--a concert performance of the musical The Color Purple. My brain, surprisingly, did not turn to mush. I do love the challenge of playing the book, too. Flute, clarinet, and alto sax on this one.

Sunday: Yacht Rock played the Giving Kitchen's Team Hidi 8 event--it's a benefit to raise money to help injured/uninsured restaurant workers. We've played every one of them. While I fully support the cause, this room is a pretty awful place to put a band. The load in/out is almost as frustrating as the acoustics.

Anyway...once we got into it, everything was fine. I was home by 10:30 PM, and it paid a lot more than my church gig would have.

Here's What's Up

Thursday: Yacht Rock played the Georgia Theatre in Athens. It was a very full house, which, for some reason, surprised me. I guess I was thinking that Thursday wouldn't be a big night, especially with a 9 PM start time. Also--ugh! 9 PM! That put us back in Atlanta around 2 AM. 

Kind of an average gig for us, playing-wise, though.

Friday: We played a private/corporate party at The Roxy. This one had a some things working against it--first, I think the room was too big, so when people left or walked off to the bars, it felt like there was no one there. Also, they had a long program (dinner, awards, band), and I think we'd lost a fair number of people before we even took the stage. The long day also affected us, as we had to get there really early, set up (and after hanging around, never get a soundcheck), and then hang around for three or four hours before it was time to play the show. I did squeeze in a lot of practicing and a run, so I got something out of this night.

We we kind of coasting through this one.

Saturday: We played Venkman's. It's sort of a similar situation--there's a lot of down time between setting up and playing the gig, which kind of drains some of the enthusiasm for playing.

Venkman's was packed, though, which helps!

There was a DJ after our set. That always inspires me to exit as quickly as possible.

Week One

The first week of the 2020 Yacht Rock tour is in the books!

The weekend began in Lexington, Kentucky at the Manchester Music Hall. We played here once before, a few years ago--I remember it as the first gig with new equipment (after some of our gear was stolen in Louisville).

It's pretty decent for a Thursday night. The room looked to be a comfortably full--a good showing for our second time here in two and a half years.

Friday was night one at the Egyptian Room in Indianapolis. We've played here several times, and I like it, mainly for it's large stage and multiple dressing rooms. Also, we pack this place out, hence the two shows.

Here's my solo on the end of Biggest Part of Me. Thursday's version had gotten a bit harmonically abusive, so I tried to stay more on the bluesy side of things.

Saturday, I slept late, had coffee, ran on the treadmill, ate at the Indian buffet, practiced, and walked to the gig early (and got all my flute warmups done).

Night two in the Egyptian had even more people stuffed in there. After playing well on Friday, I was worried that I wouldn't be able to match the energy on this show, but we gradually relaxed into the evening, and everybody played equally well.

Biggest Part of Me was on the setlist again this evening, and I was pretty sure that I liked what I'd played the night before, and I thought there was a good chance that I would try again, but that I'd overblow and get uptight and all that, and the solo would turn into a bunch of rambling bullshit. HOWEVER! This night's attempt held together well, and I especially like the opening few melodic ideas I had before it got down to playing some fast crap. So...dig it!

Sunday morning, it was time to head back to Atlanta. Our hotel in downtown Indy used to be a bank--you don't see a lot of hotel lobbies like this!

Last One, First One

End of the year gig, beginning of the year gig--here we go.

Yacht Rock played two gigs around New Year's, both connected to the Gator Bowl in Jacksonville.

New Year's Eve was some sort of VIP thing in a hotel ballroom.  There was a screen showing highlights from previous years on repeat. It went around five times. Interesting that Jimbo Fisher was featured as an FSU assistant coach, FSU head coach, and Texas A&M head coach. And that was the gist of the gig for me.

Mark Bencuya would want me to point out that over the years, our NYE gigs have ended earlier and earlier, and I would agree that this is overall a good thing. This night ended at 11:45 PM, when the guests were all sent outside to watch fireworks over the river.

New Year's Day was a day off. I slept late, ate overpriced french toast (and four bananas), went for a run, and worked on the Sonny Stitt transcription that I posted a couple of days ago.

After my run, I walked to a burrito place for dinner, which included (via Google maps) the directions to basically walk along what looked like an I-95 entrance ramp! I was cold and tired, so I did it.

January 2 was another gig day, this time at a pep rally before the game. Jacksonville has an amphitheater built right next to the stadium, and we set up there for a ninety minute concert for fans. I imagine that it was pretty boomy with all that concrete, but it was new and very comfortable, and...I didn't care.

Before we played, both marching bands came through and worked their constituents into a frenzy. I like the new band uniforms, IU.

And then we played...the weather was great, we played for an hour and a half, and my stuff was packed and stacked by 7:15 PM.

Time for one more run in Jacksonville! This place is DEAD at night. Also, flat. Easy running. Ate two more burritos.

I Can't Give You Anything But Love

I was at a jam session about a month and a half ago and got called up to back a singer on I Can't Give You Anything But Love, a tune I did not know, so I did my best to "ear" my way through it. Most of it is pretty obvious--it's one, two five, two five to the four chord, major two, that kind of thing. I think the only really weird thing is the second measure, which I think is often played as some kind of diminished three (in this case, Eb diminished for the alto), but Stitt is pretty clearly outlining E minor to A7(b9) in his solos.



The leader of the session reminded me of this classic recording of Sonny Stitt with the Oscar Peterson trio (with Ray Brown on bass and Ed Thigpen on drums), and I thought it a good idea to write out Stitt's solo and see what he's doing. It's a beautiful example of the bebop vocabulary. Enjoy!

Church

I've finished out the year with two more church services--Christmas Eve and yesterday's regular Sunday mass, both on flute. It was great to end it playing well on a gig that I enjoy, with just enough space for me to be creative within the written music, and plenty of challenges to my musical abilities (thinking of dynamics and intonation here!). So I'll keep at it as much as my Yacht Rock calendar allows, stretching to become a more expressive flutist and a more empathetic musician overall. See y'all in 2020!

Yacht Rock Christmas Gigs

Friday, Yacht Rock played a corporate holiday party, bracketed by bad catering and awful DJ music. We finished around 10 PM and were able to load out before the end of the party, so I guess that's good.

Saturday was the big Yacht Rock Holiday Special at The Roxy. I love playing this room.

this is a giant captain's hat cake, 20 inches in diameter, given to us because we almost sold out

Anyway, good gig. I felt pretty well prepared, and there were no disasters caused by my incompetence.

photo cred: Zach Wetzel

NYC, Bama, and Dalton Swayze

The guys in Yacht Rock Revue headed up to NYC last Wednesday for a private/corporate gig, and we managed to secure an opportunity to perform on SiriusXM that morning. The performance was at 9:20 AM, but it felt like 5 AM--our hotel was over by LaGuardia, and we had a 6:30 AM lobby call to ensure that we made it on time. Therefore, at 9:20, all the benefits of the the coffee I'd consumed had worn off, and I was falling apart.

Sirius has a cool set up with a nice sound-isolated performance room right in the lobby, and they mostly knew what instruments we were bringing, so things were mostly setup, and they had an engineer (and assistant) who knew what he was doing.

Anyway, we played three songs--What a Fool Believes, or original Step, and Last Christmas. Right off the bat, I crashed and burned in my attempt to cover the What a Fool synth part on flute--I had it together at home, but I just got a little off, completely fell apart, HAD TO FUCKING STOP PLAYING, and then recovered, and then I was mad at myself until basically yesterday, and that pretty much sucked any fun that I was going to have out of the experience. To top it off, I played glockenspiel on Step, and even though I was playing the correct notes, the bars bounced around and hit wrong notes, so I got sabotaged by this stupid thing, and so who knows what I played on the sax solo because my head was splitting open at that point, and so Last Christmas was probably fine, but I desperately wanted out of the building at that point.

I've searched the internet and not found any recordings of it, so just take my word for it. Hopefully the engineer has my microphone tucked into the mix enough that maybe it just sounds like I wandered off or something. Also, hopefully I never hear it.

(Update: I found it. It's here if you scroll down. The flute isn't really sticking out in the mix, so there's only a couple of spots where I can hear myself crash and burn, but it doesn't sound as godawful as I thought. I guess I got away with it, sort of. The end of Step has a bum saxophone note, though. I still hate myself.)

So, back to the hotel for a run (yep), a nap (nope), an aborted lunch delivery (for some reason, my phone tried to have my food delivered to Irving Plaza in Manhattan instead of out in Queens), a second lunch delivery that I cancelled ten minutes BEFORE the guy handed it to me, and then a ride back into Manhattan to set up for the corporate gig.

Tonight's adventure was in the basement of a Texas BBQ place in NYC. Right. Got it.

Excited isn't the right word for a corporate gig, but I was...keen on playing a regular gig in our regular format with the regular gear and the in-ear mix and all that, just to kind of wash the bad stuff out of my mind. There wasn't anything particularly great about this gig, but it felt normal, and that was a relief.

sittin' in the back of the bus with this dude all night

We flew home Thursday morning.

Friday, we played a show at Iron City in Birmingham, Alabama. The debut of our new lighting rig with the video board behind us. Nifty.

I was all set to walk in the rain to an Indian restaurant, but Iron City fed us, and the food was great! Roasted cauliflower, green beans, roasted potatoes, salad. Hell yeah. This really hit the spot.

They also got us a cake--"Congrats on 'sailing' out." Nicely done! This cake was really good, and probably really bad for me, but it was really good.

On to the gig, which went pretty well, even though we were a little rusty from not having played a regular ol' Yacht Rock gig in quite some time. I like the room, and I would rather play here than out in the Alabama heat during the summer...but I think we're back outside in the summer...

Saturday, we played a corporate holiday party in Dalton, Georgia. Not the most exciting gig we do, but they are very nice and very well funded, shall we say! Just like my gig last Saturday, the lights went out in the middle of a song, but the local crew guys got it back up and running pretty quickly.

The usual Roadhouse reference:

Sunday was my church gig, and my flute face was good--I got some time on the instrument Saturday before the gig, and also Sunday afternoon.

Also, I want to be sure and mention that I did get paid for last week's jazz gig--I didn't mean to imply that the guy wasn't trustworthy--I was trying to show how this random quintet came together, played a gig, and went our separate ways, and each of us just assumed that 1. we could pull it off without any kind of preparation; 2. we would be compensated for it down the line. No contracts, just good faith!


One more busy week of gigs this year (capped off with the Yacht Rock Holiday Show at The Roxy on Saturday).