Great news! My rock/funk/soul band now has a name. We’re calling ourselves Left Hook. Music with a punch, ya! This actually went down a few weeks ago but I’ve been busy with other things. Right now we’re on break until the new year, as are all my other groups. With Left Hook we’re getting close to having three sets of material down, and it’s shaping up to be a really smokin’ sound. So happy to be in a group where everyone is a good musician. Now that we have a name, we’re putting together a web site, and gonna record a demo of 8 or so of our best/tightest songs in the new year. Gonna do that off the board in the rehearsal studio, and come home and fly it into ProTools to mix. Oh and I gotta write a bio too.
And to top it off we have our first gig Left Hook coming up in February at a bar in New Rochelle. More on that as the time grows nearer. For now, we have maybe 6 rehearsals and gotta add 6 or 8 more songs to round out the set. Mostly soul and Motown classics that we all know already.
In case you’re wondering, the last Beatles gig was a bit of a mixed bag, due to problems with sound and power. We set started well enough, with good energy and musicality. The place was only half full but the people were into it. Got in some new songs that sound quite good, including Taxman, Rain, Hello Goodbye and Come Together. But as we went on the volume got louder until it was hard to hear the vocals onstage thru the primitive PA. Toward the end of the first set the power went out on the stage. I guess we blew a fuse. It took a long time for the bar to fix it, and after that the vibe just wasn’t the same. We ended up skipping the Abbey Road medley, much to my disappointment. Ah well.
Between the two groups, as well as the 7 Jazz West, this means I’m now looking to buy a PA to fill a small to medium sized room: something like a pair of 12” mains at 300-500 watts each, with a premium on lightness for the schlep factor; a 12 to 16 channel mixer (we need at least five XLR ins for microphones – four singers plus a sax in the Left Hook, even more if we wanna mic the drums) with built in reverb and compression so we can get a fat vocal sound live; maybe as many as 4 monitors so ensure coverage on stage. Right now I’m leaning toward powered speakers because then we can daisy chain them together for more power if we ever need it. Also non-powered mixers seem to have more flexibility in terms of bussing. So we’ll see how that goes.
Also, 7 Jazz West has a gig coming up in a few weeks and we’re doing My Favorite Things, with our interpretation based mainly on the John Coltrane version. During the Xmas Cabaret I played my soprano sax for the first time in a long while. It has a problem with the joint between the neck and body being loose. I think it may be even be a little leaky cuz its hard to play certain notes softly. So I’m looking to get a new soprano sax too. Hello Craigslist!