Here's a quickie post: This is my transcription of an Instagram post by saxophonist Ryan Devlin, and it looks like a chorus of rhythm changes, maybe in a hotel room. Excellent bop vocabulary!
Thursday, April 15, 2021
Tuesday, April 13, 2021
March
March was pretty quiet. I played a couple of weddings, made a few videos. It feels like things are moving in the right direction, though.
On the first Saturday of March, I played a wedding reception at the Atlanta History Center. It was kind of a pick up jazz sextet with a vocalist, playing standards in really distant keys to accommodate her range. In spite of that (and being unfamiliar with most of the musicians), the fun of winging it made the night fairly enjoyable.
I wore a mask for this (pretty much the only way I was willing to play indoors with a hundred and fifty strangers!). Having to open the flap to insert the mouthpiece was a little bit of a hassle, but it was so much fun to play a gig!
After about an hour and a half, we handed the room off to the DJ and split. Home by 10 PM. Love it!
A few weeks later, I was invited to play in a jazz duo in Decatur for a wedding--this one was for the ceremony and the cocktail hour.
Similarly, this one came together at the last minute, and I was paired with a musician that I'd never met. Our only specific request was to play Etta James' At Last as the bridesmaids came in, and then to accompany two vocalists who would sing At Last as the bride came in. It seemed so easy!
The coordinator came by at one point to say that it was almost time; maybe she told us to go (she spoke to the pianist, not me). Anyway, we started into At Last as an instrumental. I played the melody all the way through; no bridesmaids. I soloed over the form; no bridesmaids. I soloed over the form again, then played the melody again; still no bridesmaids. Piano solo! Still no bridesmaids. One of the vocalists arrived, and inexplicably, started singing! He sang a few lines, then stopped, so I took up the melody again. People are looking at us like we're crazy. I finished the melody, and the vocalist started AGAIN and then bailed out AGAIN! We finished out the form of the song for him. Finally, the bridesmaids began to enter, so we played the whole song a few more times, and the vocalist tried to jump in a few more times, and we were able to safely land the thing (somebody in the crowd actually said "One more time!" after we stopped!). Soooooo, then we started it all up AGAIN for the bride; I played the string part of the intro, the vocalists started singing...and no bride! (the pianist turned to me and said "Maybe she got cold feet!") All the way through the song with the doors to the room closed; we went into a solo, and finally the doors opened, bride entered, we handed the song back to the vocalists...whew!
After the ceremony, we made our way downstairs to the lobby for an hour of cocktail jazz while the upstairs room was converted for the reception. Our duo was parked right next to the bar in a marble lobby; needless to say, it was a pretty raucous, with everybody in the room shouting over the duo and each other, and the two us trying to play loud enough to hear ourselves. Nobody wins! It was nice to play some tunes with another human, though. Home by 9 PM!
That's it for gigs. I do miss the unscripted chaos!
In other news, I've continued to put out short music video projects.
Change of Scene was a song written by Greg Lee, and recorded by the Yacht Rock Revue for our most recent album. This video demonstrated the sax section thing that I wrote.
Friday, February 26, 2021
February Stuff
Things are very slow right now in the local music biz, so I haven't much to report. A few livestream concerts have been broadcast--the Yacht Rock Valentine's Day Prom, and also the performance of Hot Dads in Tight Jeans, which you can watch on Facebook and YouTube.
Monday, January 25, 2021
January Happenings
Sunday, December 27, 2020
December Gigs
It's been the slowest, weirdest December in my lifetime. Oddly enough, though, I did get several calls for gigs, but almost all of them sounded like bad ideas--a jazz duo (yes!), but in somebody's living room with twenty-five people in attendance (hell no!). Who's taking a gig like that right now, but also, who's putting together parties like that right now? I declined all of those, reminding myself that it would not be worth it to possibly infect anyone in my family for $200.
Last Sunday afternoon, I did take an outdoor jazz gig in College Park that was a lot of fun. Louis Heriveaux, Tommy Sauter, and Ben Johnson joined me for a neighborhood Christmas party in somebody's yard. Great fun with a few old friends! Louis wanted to know if I still hated Christmas tunes--it made me think about it, and I guess my problem is that on these gigs, people want you to politely play everything on Charlie Brown Christmas. I, on the other hand, am usually so excited to be playing a jazz gig that I want to play every tune like it's Coltrane's Live at the Village Vanguard!
Anyway, 54 degrees was a little chilly, but I am still happy to play some tunes with my friends.
In other news, the Ladies of Soul (Keisha and Kourtney Jackson) put out a livestream concert on Christmas Eve. The backing band was Mark Bencuya, Mark Dannells, Greg Lee, and Zack Albetta, and I wrote and recorded horn arrangements for everything. Big fun for me, and our audio/video ninja Zach Wetzel was able to blend everything together perfectly. Check it out here.
Leading up to the broadcast, I also made some short videos to highlight my parts. Check these out!
One more good thing: I got a call from Steve Augeri (formerly of Journey!) to play on his quarantine project. This song, called If You Want, needed one of those heroic 80s tenor sax solos in the vein of Tim Cappello or Clarence Clemons. Steve sent me the song, I recorded a couple of passes at home, we talked on the phone, I recorded a couple more, and it was done! Recording from home rocks.
Tuesday, December 15, 2020
Georgia on my Mind
Saturday afternoon, I began making a video as part of the #GeorgiaOnMyMind campaign to encourage voting in Georgia's upcoming election for the Senate. I wrote the arrangement in an hour or two. My game plan:
1. Feature the different saxophones at different times. The alto has the melody in the first eight measures; the bari has it on the bridge; and the tenor has it for the last eight.
2. Have some sort of big band soli thing where all the voices move with the melody. This is the second eight measures.
3. Lots of rhythm in the supporting voices! I didn't want it to die with a bunch of whole notes under the lead line.
Here's page one of my chart.
On to recording it! One of my quarantine projects has been to try and transition my recording software from Garageband to Logic. I have enough knowledge to know what I'm trying to accomplish, but finding the corresponding button to push in Logic sometimes takes a while.
The other hurdle on this particular night was transposition. Reading concert pitch charts on Eb alto and Eb bari sax? Difficult, but not impossible. Reading concert pitch charts on tenor? Not too bad. Reading concert pitch charts in bass clef and transposing them to each saxophone? Ahh! Ya got me. I had to put the horn down and rewrite my chart in treble clef in order to save my brain.
At the same time that I recorded the audio, I also set up the camera and recorded video.
Anyway, editing took some time; some wrong notes from the whole transposition thing, some sloppy entrances from sight-reading, some "wait, which part am I recording right now?" things. Then I listened and tried to balance everybody's volume, and then listened to it without headphones and balanced it again, and so on.
Next up, I edited the video, trimming off the beginning and end where I am pushing the record button--stuff like that. From there, I dumped it into iMovie (and tried to remember from the last time I used it) how the work flow goes. Getting four shots in one movie was tricky--I put the first video in a quarter of the screen, saved it as a completed project, imported it back into iMovie, added another shot in another corner, saved it as a completed project, imported it...you see what I mean. Plus I experimented with trying to highlight each of the solos while they were happening, and that didn't work, so I had to scrap all that and begin a new edit.
Once I had the four stitched together, I added the recorded audio, as well as the beginning and ending slides. And hello 5 AM! It's finished!
Here's what I did:
The Yacht Rock Revue also recorded a version for this. Check it out, too! I played organ for most of it, and then stood up and blew a little saxophone at the end.
Tuesday, November 24, 2020
There Is No Substitute
The latest 2020 Yacht Rock gig was at the Porsche Experience down by the Atlanta airport, playing three songs for...something...for Porsche. At this point, I don't remember. I think it was something about maybe trying to get people to come check it out, so they used local bands to highlight it.
Sunday, November 1, 2020
Status Update
Sooooo...this shit continues with no end in sight.
There hasn't been much to write about over the past month or two. Outside of a few potential gigs that never materialized, my performances have been limited to recording a few "livestream" concerts with the Yacht Rock Revue. No one seems to mind that they're not actually live, and it allows our team to edit everything into a better performance. From our side of the production, it's definitely strange; the feeling is much closer to a rehearsal than a show, and it's difficult to overcome the reality that we're playing to an empty room. We're doing it, though. It's all we've got at the moment.
A few weeks ago, we played a corporate convention in Oklahoma City, and it too was a livestream. It was set up more or less as a television show, with several "sets" in different ballrooms.
On the first night, we set up our gear, sound checked, ate, and waited on a rehearsal that never happened.
Sunday, September 20, 2020
Down in Castle Rock
I played pretty well. The gig was only ninety minutes long, which limited the damage I could do.
I still haven't figured out how anyone plays saxophone in Denver. I brought a few different strengths of reeds to help with the altitude, but I ended up using the same reeds I've been on at home. My horns felt super dead, though. It was fine through a microphone, but bleah...nothing vibrated. There was just about no feedback through the horn.