Category: Music

Can’t Get No Fancy Notes on My Blue Guitar

Tonight’s gig at the street fair was rained out. Ah well. On the upside I have some unexpected free time, so here’s an update to my blog.

I picked up a new guitar not too long ago. This has been on my list for a long time but the stars never aligned. Every few month’s I’d go to the music store to see what they had but I never found one that felt right. I mainly play acoustic guitar, strictly rhythm, to accompany myself singing. I’ve written a few songs on guitar and I want to use it more in my recording.

I have a Strat that Martin lent me a long time ago but I could never really get the sound I was after. I wanted something with dual humbuckers, so I was looking at Les Pauls for a while, and finally figured I’d check out some hollowbody and semi-hollowbody guitars. I found a few new but I’m not such a good guitarist that it’s worth spending huge money, and there’s no point in getting a cheap guitar. So the strategy was to wait until the right used one went by.

This one was for sale at my rehearsal studio, in new condition and at less than half the original price, and right in my zone. It’s a hollowbody with the right pickups, an Epiphone Joe Pass signature model. It’s made in Korea, basically a knockoff of a Gibson (alot like the Chuck Berry one at the museum) that costs ten times the price, but you know, a well built instrument and a good value. It sounds great even unplugged, with excellent sustain and a smooth rich tone. The feel of the neck is great too, much more facile than any of my other guitars.

Gary was with me when I bought it and declared it an excellent jazz guitar (he’s a huge Joe Pass fan). Erik, the studio manager says there are two kinds of players who like a guitar like that: jazz guys, and punk/surf guys who crank it up and prize it for it’s nasty feedback. So perfect for me.

I came home and plugged it into my amp. Playing guitar thru an amp is the big missing piece in my sound, and it’s another thing you have to get used to. My amp is a Roland JC-120 which I use mainly as a keyboard amp since it has that built-in chorus and warm distortion, great for thickening up Fender Rhodes and organ sounds on stage. But it’s really made for guitars and pairs particularly well with a jazz guitar. Woah, totally awesome! So now I’m getting used to it and exploring the range of tones between smooth and chunky.

Next step is to hook it up to some effects. A long time ago Martin also lent me a Zoom multi-effects box, but for the life of me I can’t find it. Ah well, the main application is studio recording, and my method has always been to apply the effects in software. That’s still and option. I can come direct out of the guitar or out of the amp and it ought to sound better than before. But I’m unlikely to fire up my computer just to practice, and it’d be good to get together a bag of tones that I know and can use in various writing and arranging situations. So I might end up getting a new FX box anyway. But not until at least sometime in July.

Jazz at the Lodge and Rockin’ in the Street

Once again there’s so much going on. I bought a new guitar recently and have been getting to know it. Working on recording a new song Sun of the Son; up to the bass part now. The annual origami convention is coming up and I been working on designing new models, and I diagrammed my Flying Fish. Been jamming a ton of new work on the Global Jukebox. I got a new radiator for my Mustang, and washed and waxed it too. Been planning a trip to Europe and learning two new languages, and while I’m at researching Hungarian linguistics, mythology and ancient history. And of course my my day job: just finished a major milestone, now back in bug fixing mode. And there’s been lots and lots of rain. So there’s lots of things to write about for this blog, if I could, uh, find the time.

For tonight the topic is music. The Haven Street Jazz gig last Saturday night at the Elks Lodge in Ossining went really well. It turns out there’s a pretty cool little scene there, a concert series called Jazz at the Lodge. The guy who runs it is named John Codman, and he’s an Elk and huge jazz fan. He’s put together a room in the back with tables like a little jazz club, and has local jazz groups like ours come in and play. Up front they have a bar and food. He’s promoting it and selling tickets and making it into a thing. All in all it’s very cool and groovy and he made us feel very welcome.

The gig itself went quite well. The set list was:

Bye-Ya (T. Monk)
Buzzy Blue (J. Szinger)
Un Gato Gordo (R. Paganello)
Fever Dream (J. Militscher)
Nana’s Song G. (Bruce)
Lift Off (J. Szinger)
Close the Distance (G. Bruce)
Oleo (S. Rollins)

D-Bop (G. Bruce)
Mobility (J. Szinger)
Samba Astor (G. Bruce)
West Coast Blues (W. Montgomery)
King’s Hex (J. Szinger)
A Minor Event (G. Bruce)
All the Things You Are (J. Kern)

A couple of the songs sped up a bit, and there were a few minor clams, but overall the band was really on and having fun, and the audience was digging it. In particular I played a really good solo on West Coast Blues. I also have been woodshedding Lift Off, which is a real mofo to play at tempo (I know, I wrote it), which paid off in the melody being good and tight.

My next gig is with the rock band G Force, at the St Teresa’s Street Fair in the Bronx, this Thursday. For this gig our regular bass player Ken couldn’t make it, so we had to get a sub. For our last gig we were also sans Ken, so Vinny our guitarist played bass, and we brought in his friend Eddie on guitar. Vinny is a good bassist but not at Ken’s level, and Eddy is good but didn’t really know the tunes. Between having two subs and Adrian still learning the set on the drums, it was not our best gig. Which was too bad too cuz it was a nice venue, a bar on City Island with an octopus motif. One of the drunks there really loved the saxophone.

After that I had to insist we can’t do gigs anymore with two subs, at least not until Adrian can hold it together if there’s someone else who doesn’t know what’s going on. So this time we got my friend Jay from the jazz group to sit in on bass. We did a rehearsal last night and went really well. I’d never really heard Jay on electric bass doing rock, but he’s just great. And he memorized 30 songs in a week and a half. We were all very impressed. So all systems go for the Fest.

Unfortunately it’s an outdoor gig and it looks like it may be rained out. Ah well, we have two gigs coming up after that on June 28 and 29. So stay tuned for more.

Haven Street – Jazz at the Lodge

The weather has gotten really nice the last couple weeks. Most days are sunny in the mid 70’s and into the 80’s. Our flowering tree is in bloom. Still very busy, lots of things in motion. More updates soon.

Right now I’m just here to say my jazz group Haven Street has a gig coming up. Saturday June 15 at The Lodge in Ossining. 8 o’clock start time. Should be lots of fun, so come check it out.

Nice Weather If You’re a Duck

Spring progresses, the dude abides. It’s been unusually cold and rainy the last few weeks. Haven’t had 24 hours without rain since sometime last month. It’s pouring down again right now. We had one nice day last weekend and I did manage to get some yardwork in and take the Mustang for a drive. I ordered a new battery for my lawnmower and a mini chainsaw on a stick to take care of some high branches from a neighbor’s tree that’s been been growing into our yard. I also marked out the territory to expand my patio. Yesterday the guy came to hook up the transfer box for a generator to our house electric. This was the last piece of the solar power project. Glad to have that done with so we can move on to other things.

Michelle’s had a birthday. Rather than doing a big sweet sixteen party like her sister, she opted for Jeannie and I taking her for an evening out with a few friends. It’s interesting to see her interacting with her school friends. I hadn’t met them before but they seem like very nice kids, smart and sharp and fun. Plotting their takeover of the robotics team next fall. Now she’s taking her AP exams and Lizzy is already done with school and home for the summer. My how the time flies.

We had a jazz gig last weekend at the Green Growler in Croton. It’s a fun and cozy venue and the people there are into this kind of music. We had a couple guests sit in for a few standards at the end of each set. Ben on trumpet and Lisa on flute, friends of the drummer and the guitarist. Musically the band keeps getting better. I have some video clips which I’ll post soon. Gina from the rock band came out to see us, which I appreciate. She and Jeannie were talking loudly the whole time right in front of the camcorder. Ah well, we have another jazz gig coming up in a few weeks. Nice that the group is gigging out.

We had a gig with the rock band a couple weeks ago too. This was our first gig with the new drummer Adrian, and the first gig with my new keyboard. Unfortunately, it was a large place and not alot of people turned out. Also we’ve been adding more dance tunes lately and I think this place was more of a rock crowd. Gonna hafta swing back in that direction for the next batch of new songs. And since the drummer was still learning the set we had problems with tempos and with dead time between songs. On the plus side the new keyboard has lots of great sounds and I’m learning my way around it. Ah well, no time for adding new material just yet. We’ve been drilling on the fundamentals so the next show should be stronger. Coming this Saturday at Victor’s in Hawthorne, which a place we know well. Should be a good time.

Bunny Hop and Duck Walk

Happy Easter everyone! Been busy as usual. Lots going on. Busy at work writing lots and lots of code. April came and is almost gone in a flash. Spring is here.

We didn’t have much of a spring break this year, just a couple days off. Lizzy came home for a long weekend, and we all went out to Queens for Easter Sunday with the family. Mary’s were there and Denis and his whole family were in town too. Very nice time.

Today we went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I haven’t been there in four years and they had a special exhibit on rock’n’ roll musical instruments. Very cool. The first thing you see is Chuck Berry’s guitar from Johnny B. Goode. A couple rooms later you’re in a room with Jimmy Page’s Les Paul that he used on all the Led Zeppelin songs, Jimi Hendrix’s Flying V, and Eddie Van Halen’s original Frankenstrat. A couple rooms after that it’s Keith Emerson’s live rig with the Hammond organs complete with knives stuck in the keys, and his original monster Moog. I’d seen that rig close up once before when I saw Keith Emerson Band and you could go up to stage at intermission. It’s nice to see it even more up close and check out all the customization. Lot and lots of other famous historical instruments: Clarence Cleomon’s sax, the Born to Run semi-Telecaster, the synth and echoplex used on Fly Like and Eagle, a mellotron, the Stairway to Heaven Gibson doublenck, the Theremin from Whole Lotta Love, Ringo’s drums and George’s 12-string Rick, and on and on. So many iconic instruments I recognized. Totally amazing.

While we were there we took in a bunch of other halls of the museum, including the historical musical instruments collection, the arms and armor, the Greco Roman, Mid-Eastern and East Asian art, and even a bit of modern and classical paintings. Lots and lots of cool stuff. Good to take a break from the day-to-day and expand your consciousness and creativity a bit.

With my little rock band it’s all drama these days. After one rehearsal our new drummer decided not to join after all, and so we had to arrange another round of auditions in a hurry. We got a new new drummer now, Adrian, who seems like a nice guy and is a very good player. Which is a good thing, because we have one more rehearsal before the start of a string of ten or so gigs that run thru July. The first one is at Rudy’s in Hartsdale on Friday night, May 3. So come out if you can.

We have a few jazz gigs coming up too. The first is Saturday May 10 at the Green Growler in Croton, and it should be really good. We’ll be debuting three new originals.

A couple weeks ago I went to the music store to get new reeds, and while I was there I picked up a copy of the John Coltrane Omnibook. If you’re a sax player you know the original Charlie Parker Omnibook is an all-time classic music text; it’s a transcription of lot and lots of Charlie Parker solos. I studied in high school, it took maybe two years to work my thru from start to finish. Now they’ve expanded the series and made a bunch of books out of the solos of a bunch of great players.

Compared to Bird, Trane’s work is just astoundingly diverse in terms of mood, style and what kind of ideas he was into with harmonic development at any given time. The book is also about twice as thick as Bird’s. Still a common thread runs thru it all from his early bluesy stuff, his work with Miles, the sheets of sound era and the later, really out-there stuff.

There’s something really magical about sight reading. The first song in the book is Acknowledgment, the opening movement to A Love Supreme, which is basically a concept album built out of a 3-note riff. It’s a record I’ve listened to a million times but never tried to figure out by ear. So it was really something to read it down and let it flow thru you, straight from your eyes to your fingers without much mind in between, just being a channel. Then it comes back to you thru your ears and it hits you; you’re just floored hearing the whole thing exactly as is sounds. I never knew I could play that! You can look at it and all his secrets are right there. And then with a bit of practice you can pick them out and work them into your playing. Which is nice because as I said we have a few jazz gigs coming up, and will be heading into the studio sometime soon.

Here Comes the Sun Machine

It looks like spring is finally arriving in earnest. Everything feels warmer and coming alive. The big news here is we got solar panels installed on our new roof. The company that did the work was Apex, and I must say they did a great job. Like the roof they came and installed everything in one day. Of course before all that they spec’d the system and did the engineering and got the permits from the town and all that. A few random tasks remain. We’re adding a hookup so we can power the house off a generator more directly. Also the city needs to do an inspection and the electric company to come and install a two-way meter. Then we’ll be all set to let the sun shine in and face it with a grin.

I’ve been practicing sax more lately, trying to level up my playing. Been woodshedding alot of standards as well as our originals. Working on heads and melodies as well as being able to run the changes and put good ideas over them with fluidity. There’s just so many tunes out there, many of which I haven’t played in quite a few years. Some songs I haven’t played since college, when I played alto, so the key and the layout is all different. Been working on Take Five and A Night In Tunisia in particular.

I saw Joshua Redman at the Blue Note in NYC the other night. I never realized it before but he’s Dewey Redman’s son. Joshua is one of my favorite modern tenor players. Such a high level of virtuosity and technical facility. He has an unbelievable altissimo range, and not just for blasting out the occasional high note, but with dexterity and dynamics, like a whole third register on the horn. But you don’t even pay attention to his chops because his musical ideas are at the forefront and very compelling. The band was a quartet and the set was mostly originals and a few standards including the Dexter Gordon classic I Guess I’ll Hang My Tears Out to Dry. Excellent piano player too.

In the rock world, G! Force played our last gig with our drummer Pete last Saturday night. It was our best gig yet and musically the group keeps getting better and sounding tighter. He’s a good guy and will be missed.

Luckily we auditioned a new drummer tonight. He’s even better, with a super solid sense of time and everything sounds a bit more snappy and energetic. Just lifts everybody’s playing a notch. Plus he already knows alot of the tunes. So hopefully this will work out. We have a few weeks before our next gigs, and then there’s ten shows in May, June and July. Onwards and upwards.

Why Not Zed?

It feels like spring is just around the corner. The sun is coming out now and again, and the snow piles are melting. And so I’m starting to come out of hibernation and sift thru the old to shed or refresh, with an eye to making space for brave new things to come. Since rock the band has been gigging so much I’m looking into a new keyboard, stand and some other stuff to improve my sound and make the schleppage lighter. More on that soon.

And as I continue to organize my back pages of songs and lyrics, here’s one I came across that’s fully compete but I’ll probably never use. My brother-in-law Lou is a singer-songwriter. He wrote and recorded an album of songs for children, He’s My Bear, when his kids were little. One day a while back we were talking and he had a bunch of songs for a follow up. I thought it might be fun to produce. So we made a demo of four or five songs and I began laying down the actual tracks. However life keeps you busy and we were never able to complete the project. Along the way I wrote a song for the record called Why Not Zed? It’s basically a scrambled A-B-C song, using the Canadian pronunciation of the last letter of the alphabet, as in Zed Zed Top, or Why Why Zed. It turns out a lot of Americans aren’t hip. So take off, eh!

…

Why Not Zed?

A – B – C – D
Dinosaurs and cheese
H – I – J – K
Elephants sneeze
1 – 2 – 5 – 3
Blue green red
Double-U, triple-X
Why not zed?

One half, zero
e and pi
Radical two
The golden rule and i
L – M – N – O
Toes knees head
Who what when where
Why not zed?

-jfs 1/14

Slope

2018 was a good year for music. I put out three new albums (well, two new ones and a remix/remaster of an old one) and both my live bands started gigging regularly.

This year is shaping up to be a good year too. I’ve already played six or eight gigs between my two bands. Now I’m getting going on putting together new material for the next round of studio projects.

With the jazz group Haven Street it’s time to start thinking about the next recording. We’ve grown alot musically in the last year, both in terms our writing and our playing. We’ve been working on depth, range and dynamics in our improvisation, and on group improvisation ideas. And the writing provides vehicles for different kinds of playing.

Our first album, which we were mixing a year ago, had nine songs: four by me, four by Gary, and one by Jay. We now have nine new songs, three by me, three by Gary, two by Jay and one by Rich. This probably more than enough but it’s a nice number, and it’s good to have a depth of material going into the studio.

The most recent song is one of mine, tentatively titled A Lazy Lady. It’s a languid, melodic slow swing groove with lots of major seventh chords and shifting modalities. We don’t have another tune that sounds like it, so it’s a worthy contribution to the set. I actually wrote it around Xmastime but we didn’t get into rehearsing until recently cuz we were focused on a series of gigs and wanted to sharpen the material we had. Once we did, the band instantly got into it and started contributing ideas, and pretty soon it was clear that the song would be a winner.

For a while I had been pushing for the group to do Sun of the Son, a song I originally wrote for Event Horizon back in the ’80’s. It has a lot of meter changes and a heavy synth-laden fusion sound. Rich in particular though it was too prog-y for our group and would take too much time to really learn well and make our own. So I started in on making a new demo for it, making it more latin and less electronic, and re-imagining the middle section. Now that I have another new song the group digs the urgency has gone away, but the track has kinda taken on a life of it’s own. It’s gonna be much more than a basic demo, more like a full arrangement. I’m not sure what to do with it; might end up putting it on my next album.

In the rock world we continue gigging with the G-Force band. With the group lineup stabilized we’re adding new songs every show. We’ve probably added a dozen since the New Year. My favorites among last few (because I’m singing lead) include It’s Only Love by Bryan Adams and Tina Turner, I’m No Angel by Gregg Allman, and Rio by Duran Duran (which has a nice sax solo too.) We’re learning a bunch of new dance stuff too. On the other hand, we still have maybe five of the top ten most overplayed bar band songs in our set, and no matter how many new songs we add, there’s a steady thread of songs of that kind.

The last gig we played in Connecticut. The we had to wait to set up because the dinner crowd was really going on long, but they fed us and food was great. (Dragon Roll Burrtio!) It was first bar we’ve played in a while without TVs on in the room. There were plenty of people enjoying the music. It’s amazing how a dancing crowd can really make it fun. On the other hand, the set up and tear-down all the time is getting to be a drag, as I’m still getting over problems with my feet. Ah well, hopefully with the spring coming it’ll get easier.

Last weekend I was feeling particularly bad and spent most of my time hanging around the house listening to music. Explored a lot of long-forgotten 80’s prog-jazz crossover stuff on spotify. We also got a new King Crimson DVD from the same tour we saw last year, with the seven headed monster configuration of the band including Mel Collins on winds, Jakko on vocals, Fripp, Tony Levin, and three drummers. They played at least one song from each of their first seven albums, including lots of mellotron stuff, as well as updated arrangements from the later parts of their career. All in all an amazing job of unifying an incredibly diverse set of material. There were a few songs I didn’t know that well so I went back and found the original tracks. That got me thinking about lyrics.

In addition to planning the next jazz album I’ve been thinking about my next studio solo album for Buzzy Tonic. I have a the first three or four songs ready to go, and now I might be adding a crypto-jazz instrumental as well. We’ll see. Anyway that’s probably enough for one side.

I always have a big backlog of partially written musical ideas that can be developed. I was surprised to discover I also have a pretty big backlog of potential lyrics. I thought it was mostly random fragments, but I went thru and with just a little organizing I found I have enough stuff for maybe ten or fifteen songs. Of course not all are equally good, most are incomplete, and none have a musical idea to go with them. So it’ll take some work, but it’s great to find this cache of material and It’ll alot of fun go thru it and see if I can get some songs happening.

BTW here’s a lyric I came up with at a recent Haven Street gig for Jay’s song Slope. I normally don’t care for vocalese (listen to pretty much anyone who’s not Ella Fitzgerald and you’ll know why) so I have no plans to ever record it, but it just came to me while we were playing and now it’s stuck in my head every time we do the song. Enjoy!

…

Slope

Just when you think that life’s looking up
And you might drink from that flowing cup
Then comes the day when it all turns around
And then you think that life’s looking down

Climbin’ up that slope
Slidin’ down that slope

Just when you think that life’s looking up
And then you think that life’s looking down

Slidin’ down that slope
Climbin’ up that slope

And you might drink from that flowing cup
Then comes the day when it all turns around

Holdin’ on to hope
Ridin’ on up and down that slope

– jfs 1/19

Double Shot

Winter grinds on. We are in the midst of an epic cold snap. High today is 6 degrees F. Lizzy is back in Buffalo enjoying sub-zero temperatures and lake effect blizzards. More on all that later.

Last weekend we had two excellent gigs back to back, one with the jazz group and one with the rock group.

First, Friday night was the the jazz group Haven Street at the Bean Runner Cafe in Peekskill. This turned out to be a great venue. It had a very San Francisco vibe, with good food, coffee, beer and wine, and a sunny, unpretentious and casually put together decor. There a stage with a PA and the owner was also the sound man, made the band sound great. The room in front of the stage was set up like a night club, with two rows of tables going back, and waiter service so the people there were able to stay in their seats and listen to the music. We had a full crowd, and everyone seemed to dig it. My friend Joe from work and his wife Liz came out. Joe and I always talk about music.

I’m still touched at how an audience will applaud after every solo. And I’m kinda of amazed how, even with a really out-there song like King’s Hex, the audience is right there with us. The band’s playing was tight and solid, good grooves and tempos and dynamics. We all had several really good solos, free and spontaneous and musically happening. We played two sets, about two and half hours. By the end of the second set, after we’d played all our originals and were going out with a couple standards, I felt my energy and imagination flagging. I find when I play in front of an audience I’m a little less inclined to take risks, and sometimes end up falling back and wishing I had a larger vocabulary of canned patterns, but ah well. They don’t know about all the things I might have played. All in all a great gig, and they invited us back. The next jazz gig is this Friday at Silvana’s in Harlem at 6:00, happy hour.

Then Saturday night the rock band, G-Force had our debut gig with our new drummer Pete at Fogherty’s in Bronxville, right up the street from my house. Vinny came and helped load the gear before the gig, which was super helpful. When we got there the setup was a little weird cuz the stage is really small and three of us were out in front, but there was also heavy traffic from the waitstaff right there. The drummer was in a corner and couldn’t see half the band. But once we started playing everything was okay. Pete’s drumming lifts the whole band up a level and everything is much more solid and groovin’. He also sings, so we learned a few few songs for this gig including the Grand Funk Railroad classic Some Kind of Wonderful with Pete on lead. I can hardly wait to get him to harmonies on some other songs; having three voices really will take it to the next level. Onward and upward!

Shiny New Year

Ok so, the new year is off to a roaring start.

Two weeks ago we had just returned to work for new year. Coldness and darkness and all that. That weekend Jeannie was putting away the Christmas decorations in the closet under the stairs, a.k.a. the wizard room. Forgetting where she was, she stood up too fast and bumped her head pretty hard on the low ceiling. The next day Jeannie was driving to work and has a headache and started feeling dizzy. It turned out she had a concussion, which took the better part of a week to get over.

Right around that time the pain in my ankle went from kinda bad to really bad, and it was clear that I’d have to seriously and assiduously stay off my feet for a little while.

That same day we got the news Jeannie’s Aunt Mary died. She was 87 years old. A dear sweet lady. I still remember visiting her house in New Jersey way back when I first moved to NYC. I just saw her at Christmas and she seemed to being doing pretty well. The end was pretty fast.

So bang 1-2-3. At least Lizzy was home and was able to give us rides to the doctors and the funeral home. I was able to work from home until I started feeling better, and we got thru all that. I finally went into the office today. It was good to see everyone again.

We managed to get the Honda fixed somewhere in there. The dealer in White Plains where I bought the car was completely useless, lying to us about the scheduling and the work they intended to perform, recommending thousands of dollars in unnecessary repairs, and not addressing the issue we brought it in for in the first place. After multiple visits we had the give up on them. We took it another Honda dealer in Yonkers, and they were no better. We finally took it to the local garage near Jeannie’s work and they fixed it up for a reasonable price. Never got the firmware in the car’s computer updated, but it seems that was probably unnecessary anyway. Yeesh done with the dealers.

…

On a more upbeat note, the first gig of the new year was with my jazz group Haven Street at the Green Growler in Croton, and it went really well. We played two sets, 10 songs and then 6, with a total of 12 originals and 4 standards. Of the originals, 6 were on our record and 6 are new, destined for record #2. I think the newer songs are all really interesting and some of them really challenging to play, and all offer something new and different compositionally and tonally to solo on, so we’re not just repeating ourselves. The group is at a level where we pretty consistently get into a zone of really good listening/interactivity/spontaneity. A friend of the drummer sat in on trumpet on the standards, and he was quite good, tone phrasing riffs and chops.

Green Growler is a fun and cozy venue. It’s not exactly strictly a bar. They have hundreds of kinds of beer in cans and bottles that you can buy and carry out. It’s right by the Croton train station so there’s alot of walk-in traffic and the bar itself is like a counter. They also have a bunch of beers on tap and you can come in with a jug and have it filled. Then there’s a lounge area across from the bar, where the band plays, and in addition to some chairs and tables they have couches and board games, so it’s a pretty cool hang. They mostly have jazz and alternative music. It’s not very large but the room was full for the first set and still half full at the end, and the people really dug it. There was even dancing, and a guy drawing us the whole show. He showed me the drawings, pretty cool. Captured alot of the improvisational energy.

Our next gig is this Friday at the Bean Runner Cafe in Peekskill. Should be even better.

…

On the rock’n’roll front, we had to kick out our old drummer. We all felt really bad about it, but we had gone as far as we could with him. Andy was a really great guy, very dedicated and eager to help in every way. Unfortunately he was just not an experienced player. The rest of the group has several decades each of experience in working bands, and Andy had been playing about a year and was still getting the basics together.

So Gina had a friend Pete, who is a former wedding band drummer and has a great sense of time and groove. As soon as he entered it lifted the whole sound of the band. Pete sings too, so now we can do three-part harmonies.

We had a gig last weekend, which we had to cancel due to the threat of a snowstorm. Our guitarist Vinny works as a supervisor of a snowplow crew in the Bronx, so he got called in. As it turned out the storm was mostly just rain. Still it’s just as well. No one would’ve come out on a nasty stormy night. And having another week to get the set together with Pete is good thing. To top it off I wouldn’t’ve been able to hump the PA gear coming off and ankle injury.

So we have our debut gig with the new lineup this Saturday at P. J. Fogherty’s in Bronxville. Conveniently just five minutes from my house.