Live, learn, leave
My jazz septet, 7 Jazz West is returning to The Bass Line:
9pm Friday, January 16
130 E 1st Street, Mt Vernon, NY 10550
(across from the Mt. Vernon East Metro-North parking lot)
(914) 433-1052
This septet plays a variety of modern, straight-ahead, hard bop, Latin, and funk jazz, ranging from Miles, Monk and Mingus to Jaco Pastorius, Horace Silver, Wayne Shorter, Hank Mobley, Clifford Brown, Joe Zawinul and more.
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!
My Beatles tribute band, The Day Trippers, will be playing this Saturday night, December 13, at the Lexington Grille, just over the Tappen Zee bridge in Bardonia, NY. This is our third gig and our ever-expanding repetoire is up to about 30 songs, two solid hours of material covering everything from the early Bealtemania pop to psychedelic blues and everything in between.
Show starts at 9:00. Looks like they also have good food there.
I’ve been really busy the last couple weeks with the Xmas Cabaret, a big fundraiser at Michelle’s school. Learned like 35 songs on sax and (one on) ukulele. It was a ton of fun. Last time I did one of these shows was three years ago, and I remember working my ass off because I hadn’t played a live show in years and needed to get back into playing shape on the sax, plus learning the tunes while transposing, skipping around the songs, and making my sound fit in with the group.
This time it was alot more relaxed, mainly cuz I already knew the people, and knew what to expect, and also cuz my chops are up and I can sight read and transpose and all that no sweat. Since Michelle L., the director, also runs the school choir, for this show she picked less traditional songs, by artists like Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder, Harry Connick Jr., Billy Squier, and some more mellow stuff like The Carpenters and Bing Crosby. It was the same crew, and great to see them all and perform together again. Mike L. on piano and musical director, his wife Michelle as show and vocal director, Brian and Kristen running the stage and props and sets and tech and all. Plus a dozen or so singers. The band was rounded out by George on drums and Shredder on guitar, both excellent musicians. They even let me sing the Clarence Clemons part on Santa Claus is Coming to Town. Six words, twice! They drafted Lizzy to do the sound, so she got some good experience running a mixing board.
It was a week solid of rehearsals, with performances Friday and Saturday night and matinee Sunday. And in between I taught an origami event at the Museum of Natural History in the city. I had been thinking of bagging it, but alot people signed up so I went. Even had a chance to check out the OUSA holiday tree before my class started. I’ve been donating models to them for a few years now and they have assembled quite a collection. In addition to my new stuff this year, I my stuff from previous years was well represented. The class itself went well. I was teaching models from my book Origami Animal Sculpture, starting with the Octopus since that was prominently displayed under the tree. Also got to the Common Loon and the Narwhal. Not bad for two hours. It’s funny, though, the more I teach the more I find ways to simplify the models to make them easier to get a across. I think if I had to do this book over it’d be that much more refined. Ah, well, a lesson to apply to the next one.
And, as you can imagine, tonight I’m pretty tired so I’m catching up on my rest.
Switching gears completely, my jazz group has booked it’s first gig. We’re playing Friday November 14 at the Bassline Jazz Club in Mount Vernon, starting at 9:00. The address is:
The Bassline
130 E 1st St, Mt Vernon, NY 10550
(914) 433-1052
For those of you who don’t know, we play a good variety of modern jazz, straight-ahead, hard bop, latin, and funk, from cats like Miles, Monk, Mingus, Joco, Horace Silver, Wayne Shorter, Hank Mobley, Clifford Brown, Joe Zawinul, the list goes on.
Rehearsal have gotten a bit less relaxed now, as we want to get everything tight for the show: beginnings and endings, transitions, who’s soloing when and all that. Should be no problem, but we have a half-dozen or so new tunes in addition the ones we already know well. We actually have enough material for two shows, so if the first show goes well we’ll do another.
Now we need to come up with a name for the band. The top contender right now is the Seven West Jazz Band, or some variation on that, because there are seven of us and we rehearse in Westchester, and it’s short and easy to say. There are other ideas floating around. We’ll see where it ends up.
Last night’s Day Tripper gig at the Crossroads went quite well. The Crossroads is a really nice place for bands, with a good stage and sounds system, pretty large and pretty full of people. There were two other bands opening for us, and both sounded really good. By the time we got on stage it was almost 11. We did seventeen songs, just over an hour. If we had more songs we could have gone on longer, but that was all we had.
Musically most songs were right there. Good response from the crowd, and we had new people coming in throughout the show. A couple minor issues, coming out of the bridge of Here Comes the Sun, the ending of Lady Madonna, and on the last couple songs energy level seemed to be flagging a bit. We did some of the real high screamers early in the set – Don’t Let Me Down, Band on the Run and I Want You (She’s So Heavy), but my voice stayed strong the thru the end of the set, and I felt I delivered a good performance. My voice continues getting stronger in terms of range, endurance, control and expressiveness. Woo-hoo!
In fact we’re getting good enough now that I feel we need to work on taking it to the next level. Really tighten and polish the arrangements and vocal harmonies, string together the songs in threes or fours without a pause, work on our between-song banter, and generally keep the flow of the show going. As a singer I know the songs well enough now to focus more on performing them at an emotional rather than technical level. Plus we need to learn a bunch more songs. We seem to be learning about 8 to 10 per show, so for the next one we want to get up to the 25 to 30 range.
So I guess we’ll see when the next gig comes up and take it from there. Meanwhile the Crossroads also has jazz, so we may get a gig there with our jazz group.
Everything looks bright and shiny on the band front these days. First, the Day Trippers have gig coming up (see my previous post) and we’ve been learning a bunch of new material, including Rain, Lady Madonna, Hello Goodbye, Dear Prudence, I Want You (She’s So Heavy), Here Comes the Sun and a few others. Hope we have time for all of them. I played an Abbey Road medley – from She Came in Through the Bathroom Window on – for the guys in the band. While they all agreed it sounded great and was a great idea, they also thought it was too much material to learn for this show, so it’s on the slate for the next one.
Second, my jazz project may actually be getting some gigs. Our drummer and leader Mike is booking us into a place called The Baseline in Mount Vernon. After a year of rehearsing we’ve gotten to the point where we sound pretty damn good, and I feel like people are missing out not hearing us. Personally I feel like my sax playing has gotten back to the point where it’s as good as or better than it’s ever been, and that’s saying something looking back at the days of Event Horizon. My tone is really great, and my sense of time has improved, and I can even slalom those bebop changes. But now I’m much more relaxed, focused on melody and phrasing and dynamics and expressiveness. On songs we’ve done a few times I know I can forget about the chords and just blow, and really tell the story. Now the challenge moves on to having something fresh to say each time. On top of that it’s a really good group and all the players are really strong. I particularly dig Rich, Mike and Ken on piano, bass and drums. So I hope this gig comes through. I’ll let you know when we have a date set.
Third, the rock band has reformed and it looks extremely promising. Two weeks ago I brought in young Wolfgang Skywalker on bass to meet Gus and Jefferson. Gus is our drummer, and he’s pretty tough on bass players he can’t groove with. But he fell right in love with Youngblood within sixteen bars of the first song. Even without a guitar it was an excellent rehearsal. The whole things sounded more solid and energetic. One of the songs we were considering dropping was Long Train Running, but with the new bassist the song had a whole lot more energy and was suddenly a keeper. And the group is moving in much more of a funk and soul direction, which I really like. At the end of the session we decided to add another James Brown song and another Sly Stone number. Also Youngblood amazed us all even more revealing he’d only been playing bass for two years (switched from cello) and is taking lessons with John Pattitucchi.
The next week were joined by Gary Guitar. He fit in really well. Like Gus and myself he’s a seasoned pro and knows tons of songs. He favors a clear jazzy tone that fits right in with the direction of the group. So now all we need to do is learn a bunch of songs and think of a name for the group and then we can start booking gigs. I’m expecting we’ll be ready around the new year.
Only thing I’ve been neglecting is my home recording situation. Well not exactly neglecting. I’m working on a new song, To Be a Rock, and it’s been slow going. I haven’t had a really big block of free time in a while, so it’s bit by bit. I had put down a scratch piano and drum track to lay out the time, chords and structure. Then I got to work on the bass line. The song begins with a bass solo, which is fairly hard to play, at least for me, so I had to practice it a while, and it took me several attempts at recording it to really nail it. So that’s in the can now, and it’s time work on the other parts. Listening back, neither the drums nor the piano sound very good to me, so I’m looking at having to tear them down and basically start over. Ah well. Should be worth it in the end.
My Beatles tribute band, the Day Trippers, will playing Saturday night, October 25 a place called Crossroads in New Jersey. It looks like a pretty cool place. Recently had Stanley Jordan on the bill. The address is:
Crossroads
78 North Ave Garwood, NJ 07027
(908) 232-5666
Oddly, they’re in the middle of a block. Also, our guitarist John put up a facebook page for the band, featuring some photos and videos of our earlier gig:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Day-Trippers-Beatles-Tribute-Band/721842167880962?ref=hl
So come on out and have a good time. Hope to see y’all there.
I went to two rock and roll concerts this week. I can’t remember the last time that happened. One was for Alan Holdsworth, angular post-fusion jazz. Power trio format. Went with my origami friend Marc. The show was at a really cool club in Times Square called the Iridium. Good food even. Great stuff but the kind of music where most of the audience left their wives at home.
The other was Robert Plant, where the audience included a pretty high chick quotient. I brought Jeannie, party in celebration of our upcoming anniversary. We figgered the closest we’d ever get to seeing Led Zeppelin. This was at the Capital Theater in Port Chester, which is has become one of my favorite venues to see a show. It was set up with an open floor area with a bar at the back. We ended up hanging out mostly at the bar. Plant played a lot of new stuff which he described as “country and eastern” and it was good stuff in a sort of Texas-blues-meets-Kashmir kind of way, and Robert still can sing. The first Zeppelin song he did was Thank You, which was the song Jeannie and I danced to at our wedding. So by the end we were slow dancing in the theater and kissing blissfully; it was a very tender moment. Standing next to us were two really tall blond ladies – maybe over six feet tall. Good looking, one of them was a dead ringer for Erik’s wife Jen, and the other looked like she could be her sister. They were quite friendly, chatting, buying me drinks, and one of them kinda hanging off me once she was tipsy a little bit later on, despite the fact I was obviously already with someone. Maybe they were after me cuz I was the only guy around taller than them, I dunno. Jeannie dubbed them “team blonde”. The tipsy one indicated Jeannie and asked “is that your girlfriend?” I told her “that’s my wife.” A minute later I turned around and they were gone.
So Gus and I have decided to reboot the rock band. After jamming together since June, the summer came and went and we didn’t have any more than a few songs really tight and weren’t ready to start playing out. Our bass player wasn’t really cutting it, and our guitarist was not willing to learn new material and was just kind of a dickhead in so many ways it made you wonder how he was able to function in the world of adults. The kicker for me came when we couldn’t even make Roadhouse Blues sound good last rehearsal. I was thinking “I’ve known high school kids better than these guys!” So we had to let them go. Later I found out the bass player was coming back from a long period of not playing due to a hand condition, and I felt bad about that, but I was glad to be rid of the guitarist.
That left me, and Gus the drummer and Jefferson the singer. So we’ve been looking for new musicians. I got lucky cuz there’s been a guitar player Gary who’s been sitting in with the jazz group the last few weeks. He’s an excellent player, you could tell from the first note, great sound and phrasing. And I was telling him about my learning Van Halen on the piano and he had a few things to say about Eddie (“He’s the real deal”), so I had a hunch he was also a rocker. At the end of the jazz jam I made my pitch for him to join the rock group. “Yeah I do all that stuff. I’m your man”, he said.
Then I got a referral from a friend for a bassist looking to join a group. He was pretty enthusiastic about both the cover band and the possibility of a group based on my originals so I invited him over to jam and see what happened. It turned out he’s a high school kid! Just a couple years older than my kids. My mind was truly blown.
But man, he sure could play. Particularly into Joco, James Brown, and all kinds of funk and jazz. His knowledge of classic rock is kind of limited but he’s a quick study. He was also able to grok my originals, which are too hard for a lot of people. Still, I’m not sure I want to take him on. Yeah there’s a chance he might flake, or his parents wouldn’t let him continue with the group down the line, or it might be hard to work at a bar with him in the group. No matter what he’s not that experienced. But you gotta figure a kid who’s that good has the capacity to focus and would pretty much have is act together. Also, I was playing in bands working in bars when I was just seventeen, and never had any problems if I didn’t try and order a drink. No, the reason is this:
When I lived in California I was in horn-section funk band called The Hip Pocket. It was one of the better bands I’ve even been. Played a lot of great gigs. There were 4 guys in the horn section and 10 in the whole group. It was also a 50-50 split of black guys and white guys. The bass player was this dude Dmitry, who was the second best player I’ve ever played with. (The best was Jim Wynne, master of two-handed tap who had a whole technique he developed after borrowing a Chapman Stick for a few months but had to give it back. We were in several bands together including Automatic Man and The Purple Connection. After he left my group Event Horizon he went on the play in Gamalon.) Anyway Dmitri was from Odessa, in the Ukraine, where he’d been classically trained on symphonic bass. But he loved funk. And in a year of playing with him I never heard a single clam. Such a solid groove. Then one day he told us he was leaving the group cuz he’d been accepted into Berklee School of Music. We all wished him the best, then we tried to find a replacement and when we couldn’t find anyone as solid the band had to break up.
I told this story to the kid I was auditioning and he said “that’s my plan!”. Oy!
The good news, however is Ken, the bassist from my jazz group and The Day Trippers, has changed his status from “maybe” to “very interested”. The reason being one of his other bands seems to have folded. He didn’t want to commit cuz he was already in two other groups. If we get both Gary and Ken I feel we’ll have a really solid group that could do some serious damage!
In other news, The Day Trippers next gig has been confirmed for the last weekend in October for some bar in New Jersey. I’ve requested we do an Abbey Road medley. I’ll let you know as details emerge.
In other news Lizzy is learning De-Lovely for her performance group, so I dusted off my Cole Porter songbook to try and learn it on piano.