What's Better Than Having a Jazz Gig on a Saturday?

Having two jazz gigs on a Saturday, of course.

That's my day tomorrow, so I'll be back with more later. Come check out one (or both!) of the gigs if you're in the area.

Let's Imagine a Jazz Musician's Dream Wedding Reception Gig...

...mine would go something like this:

• The bride grows up in a house where the two most-played albums are Dave Brubeck's Time Out and Miles Davis' Kind of Blue. Not only are "generic danceable standards" unnecessary (nary a note of "Satin Doll" is played all night), but there are specific requests for multiple tunes from the above two albums, and everything else played is in a similar "cool jazz" vein.


• The food is delicious, and the musicians are allowed to partake of it.


• Not only that, but there is a generous amount of break time to consume said food while various toasts to the happy couple are being raised.


• There's one phrase that a wedding host can utter that will strike fear into the hearts of bandleaders the world over: "We have a friend who'd like to sing with the band." But even though this is scheduled to happen at this gig, it turns out that the friend in question sings very, very well.


• As is often the case at a wallpaper gig, there's not a lot of applause, but the people at least nod and smile in your general direction, and there are random compliments afterwards. Someone asks for a business card at the end.


• And to top it off, the gig is only a seven-minute drive from home.

Most veteran musicians would read the above list and say, "Yeah, Kev, in your dreams!" Which would normally be true...except that I played that exact gig last night. It joins my sister's own wedding (in which I was a groomsman and the bandleader) as the top two weddings I've ever played, and the all-jazz wedding I attended a few years ago would round out a list of the three most fun weddings I've ever been involved with in some way.

I don't know a thing about the happy couple, apart from what the toasters were saying, but I wish them all the best. Their reception certainly had a very cool soundtrack...

Blowing out half a century's worth of candles: Happy 50th birthday to James Lileks, one of my favorite writers and bloggers.

The Tour: Day One

HOT SPRINGS, ARKANSAS--Day One of the tour went well. There was a lot of rain for most of the trip (which kept me from really getting any good pictures of this place; maybe tomorrow on the way out?), but things went smoothly, and the bus is very nice--the kind that has airplane-like overhead bins, a DVD system, and enough seats that everyone in the touring group got two to him/herself.

Our gig tonight was in the Malco Theatre, a movie house-turned-performance hall in downtown Hot Springs (a short history may be found here). The venue is now the home of illusionist Maxwell Blade's magic show as well as the Hot Springs Documentary Film Institute, but the Hot Springs Jazz Society also hosts events there on occasion, including our concert tonight.

The theatre is a nice, intimate place--a little cozy for a big band, but I've certainly played on smaller stages. The band played well, and we were received warmly by the sizable audience. All in all, it was a great way to top off our first night. It's an early morning again tomorrow, as we head out at the crack o' dawn to drive to a college just south of St. Louis, so I'll call it a night here as well.

Dining tip: If you do happen to come to Hot Springs, you can't go wrong eating here.

Horn of Too-Much-Plenty?

Here's something you don't hear every day: I think I'm allergic to my own saxophone case at the moment.

I should give you some backstory: We had a gig with the evening combo last night--a private reception for someone running for city council in one of our local municipalities. The reception was held in a beautifully-renovated older house that looked brand-new; whoever was in charge of the renovation had done a bang-up job. (I could also tell, by glancing through the large picture windows out back, that they had some cool stuff; even the TV in the kids' playroom put mine to shame.)

We had been told we'd be playing in a "breezeway," which turned out to be the size of my living room. Said breezeway opened onto a porch with a spectacular view of the nearby golf course, and in the middle of that porch was a circular fire pit; seeing as how the temperature was dropping all night, that pit was in use, so the sweet smell of what I would later find out was pinyon wood was wafting through the area for the duration of our performance.

We played along a side wall of the breezeway, facing the main part of the house, and the horn section stood right in front of a woodpile. Some of us even stored our cases right next to it, but we were never in the way of our host whenever he needed to refresh the fire a bit.

I noticed as we were leaving that my clothes had the distinct aroma of firewood, so I changed right after I got home. But I was quite surprised this morning, while teaching my two lessons (yes, Kev works holidays if someone wants to learn), that the same eau de pinyon wood was also emanating from my alto case over twelve hours after the gig.

The issue here is that, of all the things I'm allergic to, trees, weeds and grasses top the list. I actually found myself sneezing quite a bit during both lessons. So if I'm really temporarily allergic to my horn case today, it's a good thing it's a holiday. I guess I'll air out the case for the rest of the day and limit any further playing to the tenor.

Another blessing of technology: Your iPod can save your life! Or at least it did for this soldier.

Funnies of the day: Murphy's Lesser-Known Laws, by Neal Boortz. (And let's not forget Murphy's Law of Auto Mechanics, as conjured up by my ownself.)

A Quick Wednesday Nooner

Get your mind out of the gutter; this isn't what you think it is. I had the chance to play on the Wednesday noon recital hour at the college today, backing up Susan, one of our alumni vocalists (who's now at UNT), along with Kris, our new drumset prof Gene, and a jazz piano grad student from UNT. It was in THE ARTS Gallery on campus, a cool-looking, interesting-sounding cube of a room with hardwood floors.

We only had one rehearsal--last night--but everything came off pretty well. Though there had been some notation issues with the charts last night, the arrangements were very cool and featured some interesting stuff with my tenor being either in unison or harmony with the female voice. Since it's required attendance for the students in lessons, we had an enthusiastic, partisan crowd. I wasn't overly happy with my solo on "Afro Blue" (both because I still need to work to get my improv on Bb instruments to match the level of what I can do in Eb, and because I decided at the last minute not to take a second chorus since the form is weird), but the rest of it was better. At least I think I learned some things from it, which is what it's all about, after all. The best moment of the day came during "The Dry Cleaner from Des Moines" when Kris threw the bass line from "The Chicken" into his solo.

At any rate, it's always good to play with musicians of the caliber of the ones we had today, in front of the "home crowd." There are still a few issues I have with my own playing (nothing like Dingus posted about recently, but some things I will definitely be working on this summer), but the people really liked it, and that's important too, especially when the music is on a really high level like this was.

Speaking of high levels, I'm back to Denton tonight to see the Two and Three O'Clock play the Syndicate (the subject of my next post, no doubt).

BLOW OUT THE CANDLES: Happy Birthday to Jervis, past national president of Sinfonia, current historian of the DFWAAA, and one of the fraternity's true national treasures. There may be one more candle on that cake, but you're still NOT OLD (sorry, inside DFWAAA joke there).

QUOTE OF THE DAY: "And the winner of our beauty pageant is....Miss Dakota!"--Me, to Kris, after the tune where the rhythm section had to repeat a section because they missed the coda the first time (Miss Dakota? Get it? Man, the TD/D guys are gonna foil me for that one..)

Roastin' the Pig (Part IV)

Played the pig roast gig again tonight....first time they've done this in the spring. As always, it was really good pig (plus the casserole with like 18 different beans in it, and the righteous cobbler with the locally-made cinnamon ice cream...mmmmm!), but one of the highlights is getting to see the house of the people who bought the roast (at an auction). This one was an old Victorian near downtown Plano, and the "before and after" pictures were amazing....two years ago, the back porch was literally falling off and the place was actually condemned, and now it's like walking through a museum! Kudos to the owners for a beautiful restoration (I've always liked architecture, ya know...might've gone into that if my HS teachers hadn't made me hate math so much). And as always, the music went over really well, We had tickets to next week's concert to hand out, and maybe we'll see some of those folks there.

Yoda and Luke Play Bebop

Unlike last week, I actually got to do the Starbucks gig tonight..."15th Street Jazz" was back in full force, but I was kinda sorta the guest artist, just sitting in with my jazz protege Chris and his buds (as I told one of my friends that was there, it was kind of a "Yoda and Luke get together and jam" situation). Lotsa fun, and definitely not something we would've imagined three years ago when I started teaching him. I've often had people talk about forming bands and getting gigs before even getting out of high school, and these guys went and did it. It's certainly something I'll encourage the rest of the "Renegade Improv" gang to do in the next couple years.

But it's always great to mix good friends with good music, and to do so in front of an overflow crowd, get a little green and coffee on the house...so tonight goes in the books as a success.

The Gig That Wasn't

I was supposed to have a gig at Starbucks tonight, filling in with "15th Street Jazz"...but when we got there, we found they had double-booked the evening, and another band was already there and set up (evidently, if we'd gotten set up first, we would've played and they would've been left doing what we did...chilling on the patio, drinking the free coffee we got as a consolation prize). Everybody took it in stride, but I really, really wanted to play...just another part of the ongoing learning process, I guess.