David Freeman Music

Yacht Rock was fortunate to celebrate the Fourth of July with a gig--that week where we didn't have any gigs was tough on our bank accounts!  This show was an indoor event at a hotel in Buckhead, with two sets broken up by the fireworks show over Lenox Square Mall.  The crowd was on the small side (I think the days and days of rain made it tough), but the people who hired us were very cool, and the duck tacos were delicious! So…we loaded into the room super early (1 PM), piled our gear in the corner, and split.  Dinner was at 6:30 PM.  I left for a few hours, and then came back and spent an hour in one of the hotel rooms.  That right there is pretty sweet.  6:30 was a small mishmash of food--go for the duck taco.  At 7:45 the opening band (Moontower) finished, and we did the ol' throw and go.  The results were not so great.  All my gear had to go to the far side of the stage, and with the multiple Napoleon Dynamites for stage hands, the...

Ouch.  I was up until 4:30 AM, suppressing my David Foster-induced gag reflex in order to get Bill Champlin's tunes on paper.   You're the Inspiration , Hard Habit to Break , Look Away …no thank you.  I liked Chicago better when they had a horn section (and balls).  I was up again at 8:30. Rehearsal went pretty well.  The above mentioned sugar coated crap went fairly well.  We also reviewed stuff we'll need for next week's world tour of the northeast.  Elliot Lurie's Jimmy Loves MaryAnn bit me in the ass repeatedly.  Looks like I'll be playing that a few hundred times in the next couple of days.  After lunch and a quickie shower, I was off to my third day of recording on the Sazerac project, Greg Lee and Co.'s New Orleans inspired band.  Today was solo day, and I played some stuff on Sneakin' Sally Through the Alley and Gonna Move .  Inspired by the original, we put two sax solos right on top of each other for Sneakin' ....

So…some weirdness at the ol' AM church gig.  We did the usual opening of a couple of hymns jammed together.  That left two big songs in the book.  We played through the second, and after hearing the vibe of it, I decided to just play flute (mostly just grabbing the top part of the piano score).  For the first big song, the director brought a flutist from the choir to play…hmm.  My first choice for an instrument would've been flute, so I just kind of hung back and checked out what she was going to play to see if there was room left for me (there actually were some harmony lines to her flute part).  I got my clarinet out to try that at soundcheck.  Clarinet would be a nice blend with the flute. We went upstairs to set up and soundcheck after rehearsal, and the flutist plopped her music on my stand and literally boxed me out of playing onstage.  Uhhh, now what?  I guess I wasn't meant to play on this one!  Kind of a weird situation--I pla...

I was really jealous that the Yacht Rock Schooner got to play a Steely Dan tribute at The Strand in Marietta, a mere 10-15 minutes from my house, so it was really cool that I was invited to be in the horn section (playing bari sax).  Kudos to the band for doing such a good job, and particularly Jordan Shalhoup for dealing with the horn players (one of whom quit the gig during soundcheck!) and all the horn charts.  He also nailed all the sax solos.  Impressive work! I really enjoyed being able to lay my bari in the case after the show and walk out the stage door.  I never get out that quickly!

Yacht Rock played our monthly show at the Park Tavern last night to a nice sized crowd--not sold out or over-sold out, but a comfortable sized group.  For this one, we pulled out all of our stoner stuff, inspired by the movie Dazed and Confused .  It rocked a little more than usual, but the crowd still dug it. Mark Dannells got his old amp (the Egnater!) back together for the first time in a long time, cleared some of the pedals off his pedalboard, and played the absolute hell out of our gig.  He was on fire the whole night--great solos throughout.  I think (same as any of us), that being able to hear your instrument clearly makes a huge difference in the way one plays.  If it doesn't sound right, it's going to be a tough gig.  Anyway, Monkeyboy was super awesome last night.  Long live the Egnater! Other than that, it was business as usual on a muggy night in the tent.  See y'all at Chastain!

Long day yesterday… I started with a Yacht Rock rehearsal for tonight's Dazed and Confused show.  It's a little outside of our normal batch of tunes--more stoner rock and less polyester.  Not too bad.  There are a couple of tunes where I have nothing to play. From there, I loaded in to the Aquarium at 1 for a 2 PM rehearsal for a House Live gig.  It turned out that we really didn't need to be at the rehearsal (it was more for rehearsing the speeches and awards).  Mostly, I did this. Somewhere in the middle, we squeezed in a thirty second line check, and then we left for pizza and beer. A few hours later, Jeremy, Wayne, and I returned to play the show.  Two hours to go!  The room looked great.  A billion LEDs and other cool lighting effects lit up the ballroom.  We played thirty minutes, stopped for ten minutes, played ten minutes, stopped for twenty minutes, played thirty minutes, and then hung out for thirty minutes unti...

The David Freeman Quartet (with Tyrone Jackson, Kevin Smith, and Mark Raudabaugh) played a public jazz gig for the first time in a long time last night at Elliott Street Pub, part of a jazz series put on by Jacob Deaton called Sounds from the Underground.  It was super fun--the band went full throttle on every tune.  We managed to squeeze four tunes into our fifty minutes (or the other way around--we only got through four tunes in fifty minutes!).  Thanks to Jacob for sitting in on Guitar Song, and for Mark for accepting the gig at the last minute. The band made $10.  That's pretty funny.  If you subtract the band (and their significant others) from the crowd, I think there were five people there.  Still, super fun, and everybody played their best!