David Freeman Music

Big fun...I tried to squeeze in an Ash Wednesday church gig after teaching yesterday.  Unfortunately, I-75 southbound was shut down due to an accident, so I tried some nifty rerouting that bit me in the butt.  By the time I'd started and stopped all the way down highway 41 and then weaved my way down Northside Drive, and then parked about a half a mile from the church, I was twenty minutes late.  Ouch! Showing up paid off, though.  For one thing, the piano mic was on top of the lid for the piano (difficult to hear through an inch of wood), and it wasn't turned on anyway.  I got that up and running and reset the gain on the guitar.  Whomever had set this stuff up hadn't bothered to set up a mic for me (or brought a mic stand from the other side of the room), so I considered not playing at all.  I set up my horns and played acoustically, which turned out to be just fine.  I could hear me and I could hear the piano.  After a couple of days ...

Yacht Rock just returned from the Live Loud cruise, a four day nautical jaunt between Miami and the Bahamas.  Along for the ride were Robbie Dupree ( Steal Away ), Peter Beckett and Ronn Moss of Player, and the Washee Washee lady. Wednesday:  We flew to Miami really early, landing at 10:45 AM (which means that none of us slept very much, since we met up at 6:30 AM).  As we were waiting at baggage claim, we got a message that the entire port had been closed due to the discovery of a radioactive compass.  Somebody had brought a WWII vintage compass on board the previous cruise, and as he came off the boat it set off some sort of detector.  I think that delayed us for about an hour, giving us a little time to hang out in the lobby of the Airport Marriott before transferring to the port shuttle. At the port, there was another big delay to get on the boat because the gangway needed to be reset.  More standing around. Once we got on the boat, there w...

Yacht Rock (I guess we won't really be YRR since we're not doing in YRR tunes) has a big private gig coming up for Home Depot in Las Vegas.  There's a horn section, so I was charged with writing charts.   That's how I spent my weekend--cranking out music for ten tunes.  We'll play through them tomorrow with the band, and then I'll spend some more time editing them.  Ten tunes with three horns on each one…so far I've invested about twenty hours. No gigs this weekend, save ye ol' church gig.  Considering that I spent the entire weekend parked at my computer, I don't think I sounded too bad.

Yacht Rock just got off the Sail Across the Sun Cruise, hosted by the band Train.  This was (by our count) our ninth music cruise.  You could say we're getting the hang of it. Let me begin by offering my apologies if Michael Franti pops out of your computer and starts rapping and dancing barefoot on your desk.  Franti was everywhere on the boat, dancing in the crowd, walking around George Town, playing his own gigs, and guesting on everybody else's gigs.  It was cool--I mean, the dude is an immensely optimistic, sweet guy, and I've got nothing against him, but I think there might be more than one of him because he was everywhere ! The real story of the cruise was the legend of John Oates, the little buddy half of Hall and Oates, who's pretty much every musician on the boat's hero by now.  Helped write the hits, helped play the hits, played the biggest stadiums, sang on We Are the World for god's sake, rocked the 'stache, shaved the 'stache, and n...