With Friends Like These...

...I can put on a good gig on the fly.

That's a roundabout way of saying that things went well last night. What I didn't tell anyone when I was announcing tunes (granted, the announcements were pretty brief because of the raspy-voice thing) was that the band we assembled didn't even have a chance to rehearse a single measure before we started the gig.

But that's the beauty of jazz. Since so much of it is improvised, all you really need is a group of players who are well-versed in soloing and style and listen with "big ears." That way, no matter what tunes you put in front of them (OK, within reason--maybe not "Giant Steps" at half note equals 200), it will sound pretty good. Indeed, we pulled it off, and it seemed to go over well with the audience, which was a mixture of the venue's regulars and the people that we invited. We've been asked back for both another public gig as well as a private holiday party, and I also gave a card out to a guy looking for a band for a wedding. Not bad for a group that didn't exist except on paper (or would that be in cyberspace?) before last night.

At any rate, it looks like the start of a long relationship, and hopefully it will lead to other stuff, not only for this band, but TD/D (and I can certainly envision plenty of cross-pollination, as it were, between the two groups).

I have other tales to tell, and I've read plenty of things in the news I'd like to talk about...but tonight, I just need to get well. I cancelled my speaking engagement with my fraternity chapter in Denton to save what's left of my voice (announcing the gig was not kind to me last night) and hope to get some extra sleep tonight to kick-start the process of getting well. I was out of cough drops and Nyquil all weekend, but that has also been rectified, so hopefully, the road to recovery starts tonight.

Oh, and I did want to mention how relieved I was to find out that nobody I knew was directly affected by the tornado that hit Evansville, Indiana early this morning. My fraternity has its headquarters there, but the path of destruction was well to the east, and even the staffers who lived near the damaged areas were spared.