David Freeman Music

This weekend was all about the movies. Thursday morning , we (Yacht Rock) had our first U2 rehearsal.  We're playing (under the name Uno Dos Tres Catorce ) a couple of shows in March.  It's a pretty easy set for me--I'm mostly percussion, and a few little keyboard parts to help out Bencuya.  The bulk of the music is guitar with delay! In going back and studying the stuff, I was really impressed by how much The Joshua Tree  impacted me.  I wouldn't have said I was a huge U2 fan, but checking out that album made me realize how deep I really was into it in the late 80s.  Very powerful stuff, now and then.   Thursday afternoon , I got an email from Ben Lovett asking if I would like to be part of a movie.  He's doing the score for an independent feature film called The Proxy , and they were looking for a street musician to play bass clarinet (huh?).  I said yes, I 'd do it.  A lady from the movie emailed saying she'd be in touch with more...

Tuesday morning, I got up on very little sleep and made the trek down to the radio station to play with the Main Street Exiles .  We were promoting Fake Fest at Park Tavern this Saturday ( The REMakes , Ill-Eagles, Main St. Exiles , and The Mighty Dan Halen ).  We played Miss You .  It went pretty well.  I didn't play the solo exactly right, but I got most of it.  Here's the video: You can't see me (except for a slice of the back of my head), but I'm there. I guess we should have checked the gain on the sax mic BEFORE we started--geez, it was loud.  The first two notes startled me.  I kind of tiptoed through the rest of it because of the volume in the headphones (and it sounds like it).  Too bad, because that's a solo that needs to be a little more crazy than I could make it. Here's a live version from December 1, 2010 at Smith's Olde Bar.  The sax solo is at 3:11.  I screwed up differently on this one!   09 Miss You (...

I haven't been doing much--I had the weekend off. Thursday night was our 10 High gig.  It went pretty well.  Nick was on vacation and Cobb was on hiatus for the month, so we played the super safe set list for Kevin and Ganesh.  Kind of a drag--I wish the Schooner guys would pick up a few more of our tunes so they could sub in with us on some of our current stuff--but it made for an easy night. It was a pretty crappy crowd.  Not a whole lot of people, and almost no turn over, so we didn't make much money out of it.  Bummer. Dannells was on fire in the first set--he could do no wrong.  In the second set, he cooled significantly.  I played pretty well, especially in the first set with Dannells breathing down my neck.  I felt like I had to rise to the challenge. Friday, I cleaned gutters.  Tell me why I need gutters?  Houses in Florida don't have gutters.  They don't need gutters.  I don't need gutters.  They catch mor...

Yacht Rock played a private gig for IHG (InterContinental Hotels Group).  Some kind of private party at the InterContinental.  I have no idea what they were celebrating.  Maybe they were celebrating the really crappy labyrinth of a load in?  I was quickly reminded of why I usually avoid the freight elevator here. Nick called Mark Dannells right before soundcheck to get his ETA.  Dannells did not know we had a gig.  He went from underwear to the stage in forty-five minutes.  Oops. The gig was pretty good.  Full production was provided for the nice big stage.  I think we all played well, though nobody in the crowd seemed that interested in hearing us.  The room thinned out really quickly, and  we took on the energy and enthusiasm of a good rehearsal.  Not much of a party.  On break, we talked to a bunch of people who loved us, but I think they all stayed out in the prefunction area.  Greg and I took a photo and did ...

I got paid (in theory) big money this weekend for all my cartage .  Not really, but it was a weekend of many, many horns (and my "bag o' crap" percussion). Friday:  I had two gigs.  The first was a quick quartet gig downtown at Ventanas, so I hired Louis Heriveaux, Kevin Smith, and Marlon Patton .  Awesome gig!  Those guys make my stuff sound like we play together all the time.  It was very relaxed, but focused at the same time. I was particularly impressed with Marlon.  I do way more trio gigs than quartets, so I really noticed his input the most.  He was super creative and read everything down without any problems.  Could he be the Mark Cobb of my jazz world?  I'm thinkin' yes.  Listen to his stuff.  Fantastic. The jazz gig was two horns--tenor and soprano. The second gig was Beatles ( Please Pleaserock Me ) vs. Rolling Stones ( Main Street Exiles ) at Smith's.  I played on both.  The Stones went first. ...

My Life practice rig! This past Wednesday, we ( Yacht Rock / Please Pleaserock Me ) had a big rehearsal--5 Beatles tunes ( I Want to Hold Your Hand, Back in the USSR, Ob-La-Di- Ob-La-Da, Taxman,  and Revolution ) and 2 Yacht Rock tunes ( My Life by Billy Joel and Thunder Island by Jay Ferguson).  The Beatles stuff was easy--I make charts and play them, plus it's lots of tambourine and clapping.  I was really pumped about playing My Life --not only is it a big song for me personally, but once I started listening to it, it sounded like piano PLUS rhodes (and synth on the main riff).  So…Bencuya plays piano, but I double him on the rhodes, which turned out to be a terrific challenge.  I have to BE Bencuya for a couple of minutes there. Pete's facial castanets for Thunder Island Anyway, I practiced it like crazy.  We played a couple of times at rehearsal.  I was fine. We weren't going to play it last night at the 10 High gig because Mark Cob...

I did my two church gigs. The first church gig was a circus.  The usual sound guy was not there, and we had all kinds of trouble with the headphone mix (except for me, of course, because I do not wear them).  Static, instruments disappearing, screaming acoustic guitar.  All there. We were asked to stay and play half of the next service, which featured the adult choir, the children's choir, and the "orchestra" (which was really the church's community band).  It was chaos.  We had so many tunes stuck in the music books, and some were for the second service and some were for the first, and nobody was sure what belonged to what.  We rehearsed everything (but without the adult choir, children's choir, or "orchestra") that morning, but not in any kind of order--more of "Hey, can we play through this one?" kind of thing. My second church gig began a half hour after the Super Bowl.  From my position, I counted sixty-eight people in attendance.  T...