Blogging again

After all the shoveling we've done in the last couple years, I finally feel like we have something to start blogging about.

My brother, may his wealth increase, took the band temporarilly in a slightly different direction when I was out on the ships of Princess Cruises. Now he's come around to my way of thinking about never cutting back the band except for when the gig specifically calls for it. Never, but NEVER, to GET just any gig.

So what caused this change of plans? Well, a lot of it is that we now have a very congenial group of top-tier players who rearrange their schedules so they can play with us. Monte Mann and Bruce Truitt are guitar players AND bass players, and both of them sing, which really adds a lot of flexibility to the rhythm section. Both are skilled readers too, so any chart I write they can play, and better'n I heard it in my head.

We now have developed an impressive bench. If Bruce or Monte or Leroy can't make it, we have a list of proven cats. Also Janice now has an on-call replacement, Casey Daniel, who I worked with on the Grand Princess last year.

Then there's my favorite section, the horns. Casey came to town because Tommy Poole, her husband, is getting a DMA from UT. He's a killer alto & tenor player, so we're using him about half the time. I slide down to baritone, and switch to the higher registers with Chris Kapral playing baritone when that doesn't work with Tommy's schedule. We still benefit from Jimmy Shortell, and the 'bone chair has been ably covered by a couple Master's candidates from UT.



Last Saturday night we couldn't have sounded better. Not a train wreck or even the slightest hint of mini-catstrophy. It was a wedding at the Mansion on Judge's Hill, an upscale and busy venue for wedding receptions and parties. The bride and groom were hip, going so far as to name the tables DIZZY and ELLINGTON. (The band sat at the RAT PACK table for dinner.)

The call was 8:15 downbeat with a cocktail set at 6:30, and I played that damned Steve Goodson baritone for all it was worth, with Tommy alternating 8-bar heads. It makes such a difference that the wedding party knows jazz!

After an excellent buffet dinner we resisted the temptation to nap and the folks wanted to dance and that's what we gave them--plenty to dance to.

After two sets the whole party disappeared to wish the newlyweds a fond farewell. And that was that. We were done about a half hour early. It's such a nicely paced event when the bride and groom LEAVE rather than hanging around for all three or four hours. Folks just drift back to the hall, pick up their coats and SPLIT.

So extra-credit kudos to Bruce on bass, Monte on guitar, Leroy on piano, Janice as the Canary, and the horns: Jimmy Shortell, Tommy, Javier and me on the bottom. And to my brother Jimmy for having the good sense to turn things around at exactly the right time, and the fortitude to deal with the business side while I am as busy as I am.

We expect to get more than a few gigs from this one, because the party planner at the joint was plenty impressed, and we did have a couple come down from Houston to check us out who are ready to sign.

Things are looking up.

It looks like two now additions to the ORB Bench will arrive soon: trumpeter Andre Zollinger's wife got transferred here from Las Vegas, and Kevin "Yogaboy" thinks he can make a go of it here as a guitar player/yoga teacher.

I may slip away for a week or two on a Princess or Cunard ship before the end of the summer, but I like my job just fine with Orpheus, so there's no compelling reason financially to go. Plus I want to be here in case something happens to Jan's folks in Alabama.

So that's maybe not everything, but touching the most important points. Five in the morning!

Over and Temporarilly Out

I'm leaving next Saturday for a hitch on the Grand Princess. The band will continue to work because of the diligence of my brother Jimmy, who has done so much to keep things happening while I go out to sea.

Last night we used the other band, formerly the New Flamingo Swing Orchestra twenty-odd years ago in Los Angeles, now the Original Recipe Big Band. The gig was at the aircraft museum at the Addision Airport just north of Dallas. The band was me, Thad Scott and Mark Kazanoff on tenors, Chris Kapral on bari, Andre Zollinger (who flew in from Vegas) and John Van der Gheynst on trumpets, Matt Walker on trombone, Marilyn Rucker on piano, Bruce Truitt on guitar, Mark Nelms on upright bass, and of course Jimmy on drums. My son Brendan played for Jimmy on a couple tunes he sang and sounded great. Jan's son Tristan recorded the festivities on 2 Neve pre's. I haven't heard it yet but I bet it's great.

And so dear reader, barring any onshore activity that I'm called upon, I will now move over to another blog called A Grand Winter | 2005, which you can find at http://grandwinter.blogspot.com/.

If I get any band business to report in the next 4 months I'll blog on it here.

Ciao!

The Ampersand and the Ligature

Jan and I just bought the Complete New Yorker. The collection of data DVDs contains all of the pages of the New Yorker from its beginnings in 1925 to the present, or at least March of 2005. This is why I bought a computer. When I was on the road with Stan Kenton I got hooked on the New Yorker, because it was a companionable magazine for long bus rides. The articles didn't have to be about things I was interested in. The quality of the writing was so good that my interest was irrelevant. I liked that it had ts quirks--no table of contents, writers identified at the end of the articles, no jumps yet no telling how long an article might be when you were underway. Now I can look up, throught the comprehensive index, all of the articles I read on all those bus rides and thereafter. My years as a cab driver in New York City, back on the road with the Glenn Miller band and the Modernaires, the period where I learned typography in Los Angeles on a Monotype machine and handsetting. My obsessive typesetting Jones was clearly a result of the New Yorker's cool gray Caslon and its quirky headline face. When I had learned enough to go out on my own, I performed redesigns on fishing magazines so they mimicked the New Yorker in adobe Caslon and Adobe Garmond.

That whole period of my life can be summarized by two typographical flourishes (not strictly flourishes, which are sylized digbats which swoosh): the ampersand and the ligature.

Ampersand & Company was what I named my typesetting company. I like jokes that only a select few get. Ligatures, the characters ff, fl, fi, ffi and ffl being the modern set, became my passion. Some of it rubbed off on my clients, some not. The advertising guys could care about typographical standards. It was 1987 when I opened the business and desktop publishing was still a gleam in the eye of Aldus, the company which was developing Pagemaker. Lucky for me I saw it coming, and along with it a wild period of bad taste as non-typographers decided they could do typographers' work. (Curious the parallels between type and music, where anybody with a loud PA and a set of blinking lights could set up as a DJ and get the weddings we musicians played.)

Anyway, by the time Ampersand came crashing down on me I was still reading the New Yorker, and I dusted off my saxophone and started playing again. I called Doc Rutherford at Orange Coast College and found a band I could play in. Music, family, New Yorker, in no particular order are he forces grounding me. Without them I think I would sputter and fail at everything.

Which brings us to the band. We've done some pretty successful gigs lately.

We have a booking in Dallas coming up on the 19th of November (2005) where we're using an updated version of a book I wrote for wedding of friends in 1980 or 1981. The gig is a jitterbug homecoming for Dallas Baptist University, and the setting is an airplane museum in north Dallas. The contract states that there will be no rock, soul, Motown or disco, just stuff from the forties.

Here's the preliminary set list I came up with:

1 1 108 String of Pearls
1 2 107 Cheek to Cheek
1 3 105 Begin the Beguine
1 4 24 Moten Swing
1 5 110 Let s Dance
1 6 139 Witchcraft
1 7 30 Sentimental Journey
1 8 23 All of Me
1 9 57 When Lights Are Low
1 10 4 Serenade In Blue
1 11 127 Bugle Call Rag

2 1 16 Don t Be That Way
2 2 32 Candy
2 3 33 I Got It Bad
2 4 148 Minnie the Moocher
2 5 111 Stompin at the Savoy
2 6 29 Jumpin at the Woodside
2 7 144 Nice & Easy
2 8 2 Mood Indigo
2 9 128 Jump Jive & Wail
2 10 27 April in Paris
2 11 8 Marie
2 12 141 Choo Choo Caboogie

3 1 7 Song of the Volga Boatman
3 2 28 Take the A Train
3 3 118 How Little We Know
3 4 112 Little Brown Jug
3 5 5 Song of India
3 6 21 I Get a Kick Out of You
3 7 20 Cherokee
3 8 20 Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered
3 9 31 Stardust
3 10 147 Front Page Rag
3 11 130 Rockin in Rhythm
3 12 58 In The Mood

4 1 35 Caravan
4 2 9 Dancing in the Dark
4 3 10 Opus One
4 4 42 Blue & Sentimental
4 5 132 Sing Sing Sing
4 6 103 Moonlight Seranade
4 7 124 I ve Got You Under My Skin
4 8 138 Well, Git It
4 9 146 Mambo #5
4 10 125 You Make Me Feel So Young

OK, so some of the tunes were from the fifties. (As I am.) I also tucked Shiny Stockings into the first set.

So here's where I'm heading with this.

The instrumentation of this band is a small step from the Original Recipe Band. Just add three horn players and there you are. Eleven players instead of eight, but the good news is it can approximate a big band with those eleven instead of a "full" big band, which has 16, 17, or 18 players.

So we're going to use the old ampersand again and say that this is the Original Recipe Big Band. Maybe somewhere down the line a Texas oil billionaire will hire both bands, which will be a good night for all of us.

Rehearsals start next week. I've spent the last five weeks or so working on the book, adding guitar parts and sometimes doing rewrites.

We have some great players lined up for the gig on the 19th. Mark Kazanoff and Thad Scott are playing tenor, Chris Kapral on bari, Andre Zollinger is flying out from Vegas to play lead trumpet, John Van der Ghynst at the hot corner, Matt Walker on trombone, Marilyn Rucker on piano and vocals, Bruce Truitt on guitar and vocals, Mark Nelms on ACOUSTIC bass, my brother Jimmy on drums and vocals. Also we'll have my son Brendan there to cover on tunes Jimmy might want to come up front and sing. I am the luckiest bandleader ever to have this much talent in the family!

Meanwhile, I've just finished reading the jazz profile of Gerry Mulligan written by Nat Hentoff and appearing in a 1958 New Yorker. Could it get any better than this?

Gigs and Hurricanes

I've been back from the Dawn Princess for almost a month now. Overall it was a positive experience, one of those things that gets a little better the further removed you become from it in time. Unlike hurricanes, which have been happening all around us since I got back from Alaska.

Our friends the Goodsons, who live on the edge of the Garden District and are the people for whom New Orleans was invented, are safely at Steve's mother's house in Alabama after a harrowing week and a half on the second floor of their place. They got out without much more than the clothes on their backs. The house is still in standing water.Now we have Rita posed to hit Galveston and over our heads in Austin some time Saturday.

I will be joining the Grand Princess on November 26 in Galveston, when she arrives from Europe. We'll be going on 7 day cruises in the Western Caribbean. I'm booked to March 25.

And so to the band . . .

Since I got back we've played three gigs, thanks to Jimmy, who's doing a fine job of keeping the gigs coming. First was a wedding in rural Wimberly, where we played an outdoor wedding. It started to rain when we were setting up, but we covered the speakers and by the time we started playing the rain had passed. This was an odd wedding in that the groom was not present. The couple had been married a couple days before "up north," as they say "down" here, and his army unit was activated. When their Texas party started the groom was having desert training in southern California. So there was no first dance, and in fact many of the celebrants cut short their time at the party due to the rain and perhaps a little but of the odd situation. I was the only horn on the gig, and it was the last for Tony Pacheco and his wife, who relocated to El Paso. Tony, who doesn't real but has a phenomenal memory, has set the stage for a couple of guys to be named later to keep thir books closed throughout the gig. This wouldn't be so bad if they had Tony's skills at remembering charts, but they don't.

The following weekend we played in Zilker Park for a relay race. Only in Austin! Last week we played a corporate event at one of the downtown hotels. We'll have the first gig with the horn section on the first of October. We need to nail down some things that musicians in their colorful way of expressing things call train wrecks.

I've been writing lots. I did some rewrites on the old Flaming Swing book, which I wrote more than 20 years ago. We'll be using the book on a gig in Dallas the week before I leave. This is a gig I'm really looking forward to. Steve Johnson and Andre Zollinger have penciled themselves in, which will make for a great band. The gig is a college dance in an aircraft museum. The kids will wear period costumes, we'll wear tuxes. I'm inclined to look at this latest incarnation as The Original Recipe Big Band. Three of the sound files already on the web are from the Flamingo recording session, which Steve played on.

What I'd like to see is writing projects develop for Princess, and continued steady progress with ORB gigging. Then going out on the ships won't make any sense.

Things happening all around

I'm tired. I've been writing a show for the last three weeks for Valerie Lee Mayes, a singer who's making a comeback to her musical career in and around El Campo, Texas. This is not to diminish her skills, which are considerable. She spent years working as a duo with the man who became her husband Jef (sic) Mayes in and around a much larger Houston. Then one thing led to another, her husband became her ex-husband and she left Texas to pursue a career with Southwest Airlines based in Nashville. Now you'd think that Nashville would have welcomed this soulful singer, yet you'd be wrong. In the last 12 years she's only done a handful of gigs.

Laigh Langley put us together to see what we could do for each other. I ended up writing some new charts and adapting some existing ones for Valerie. We approached the Greek Bros. about possibly doing a gig, and the Greek was enthusiastic enough to put us on the calendar right away, sooner than Valerie or I imagined. I was thinking late summer, Valerie though Fall would work, but the Greek wants us on April 9.

So we now have, in the book and ready to go, Can't Buy Me Love, Come In from the Rain, Giving It Up for Your Love, I Can't Stop Lovin' You, I'd Like to Make It with You, 1-2-3 (Gloria Estefan), and quite a few others. Valerie is a great proponent of blue-eyed soul, if I could use a dated term. She's got a real Texas thing going, a kind of soulfulness that is unique to the Lone Star State. Think of the Ray Charles records of country music (still the most dangerous recordings ever made, IMHO, due to their genre busting), but approaching it from the other direction and you'll have Delbert McLinton, Laigh Langley and Valerie Lee.

So I can pick up some extra sleep next week. Today is Easter Sunday and we're going to rehearse later this afternoon when Valerie flies in. We'll be performing in less than two weeks, and the sheer volume of three to four hours of music is staggering.

But in the long run we'll be rewarded with gigs in El Campo (where the gumbo is hot) and elsewhere, and we're positioning ourselves for the multiple girl singer zone for more high-profile corporate gigs.

By the way, Janice is fine with this encroachment, and reminds me that her background is choir. This is a lovely attitude which finds her adding a background voice, a tambourine, and so on . . .

I might go out with Princess Cruises for a few months to build up cash. Jan's suffered enough--when they contacted me I heard them out and what I heard sounded great. Three months on, one off, jump off the merry-go-round whenever. Jimmy can run things while I'm gone. If I go. We'll see if I get the opportunity.

All-Purpose Excuse

These are confusing and exciting times for ORB. That's shorthand for The Original Recipe Band, btw. After the birthday party in Dallas, where we made more money than we ever had made in the past, I was strangely unsettled in my thinking about what constutes a fair pile of money for the evening.

I believe that we should be making lots more money. and I believe the way we might do that would be to go with a corporate show band. That would mean the specifications I got from DeWayne, the booker of the Temptations gig in Dallas last month. Parodoxically it means adding personnel and subtracting material.

First, you have to have multiple female singers. Second, a front man who is truly in front, instead of behind the drums all the time. You need to have multiple guitarists and/or keyboardists. And you might need a trumpet player added to our lineup so there is an opportunity to spread the load of the horn parts.

Now this is all well and good. We have potential, as they say in the Great American Pasttime, at every position. (Nothing more burdensome than potential.) But there are other matters too, like getting the band together for a photo shoot and video, which DeWayne said was crucial. I see the need for choreography (Rudy from HotWax perhaps?).

On the upside there is no need for more than 40 charts in separate books.

The bottom line is that, while a party gig in Dallas can land $3000-$5000, which is more than we made that night, a corporate gig with a semi-eleaborate dance show can land $10,000-$25,000. Big difference.

And there's no reason to jettison what we've done thus far. We can still play a wedding with 9 pieces, a club with 6—using the same charts.

Meanwhile Bobby Bellemans has offered to GIVE me his booking agency. I wasn't a firstborn for nothing and my initial reaction was that he was overvaluing the product, which may be the case. I've set up a database and I'm going to take it a gig at a time and see where it leads. So far I'm doing a solo piano gig for St. Patrick's day. Ten percent of not very much is even less.

We rehearse this evening at 6, with the singers and the rhythm section. We need to decide what to do down at the Greek Bros. in El Campo on the 9th of April. That's the other direction the gods of the gigs are leading us. I'd work there for a bowl of gumbo, but don't tell the Greek that. It's going to be quite an evening: bringing Valerie back before her home town crowd and all. I want to pick our numbers based on the widest range possible. They get enough cowboy music down there, and I know there's a Sinatra element in that house. And a rock crowd too.

Onward and upward with the musical arts.

Lots of water under the bridge

I've been buried in work, and now it looks from the calendar like I'll not be working agian til the summer, yet so it goes in a musican's life.

Jan, my spouse, has been confident enough in what's happening that she calls the band "my retirement fund." She's making sure I keep things on an even keel.

In the beginning of February I've managed to work a gig with the Pictures in Bay City. Bay City gives new meaning to the term "middle of nowhere," which accounts somewhat for Jimmy Shortell getting lost trying to find our way to the interstate after the gig. On the way to Bay City we stopped for a bowl of gumbo at the Greek Brothers restuarant in El Campo. GRET food, and a band bus parked out front for Cooder somebody (an interesting double meaning for Floridians). We were mightily impressed.

After we had managed to find our way home, Laigh Langley informed me that he'd never actually BEEN to the Greek Bros, but had played lots of gigs in and around El Campo and was aware of their reputation as a music venue. He set up an email meeting with a friend of his who was known and beloved at the Greeks': Valerie, who used to be married to Jef of Jef and the Kickers. Turns out Valerie would like to have a band back her up down at that place, and we'd like to be that band. So we worked out some possibles with the owner, George, and we'll soon talk money. This could be a bog boost for the band--a club with a great reputation (and great food) as an antidote for the rather tepid pickings at Cabo Loco.

Then Jimmy and I did a Gigmasters quartet gig with Morris and Mark Nelms. Fenno brothers + Nelms brothers. Did a hotel semi-banquet for an exhibiting company at the Texas Music Educators convention in San Antonio. I knew that Bob Reynolds was down there in his capacity as a band director, so I asked him if he'd like to sit in on a few, Well, we truned into Stitt and Ammons, which ain't so bad. We were playing for band directors, which meant we didn't have to explain what we were doing. The rhythm section was superb start to finish. Both Jimmy and Morris sang, It was my favorite two hours this year. So far,

Then to Cabo Loco with a short band, made shorter by Janice who called at 9:15 to say she was sick. Lucky for us we had a sub bass player, Tony, who brought along his singer wife Vicky, who proceeded to knock 'em dead.

Monday, Valentines Day, I played a corporate gig with the Temptations in Dallas. It never gets any better than playing the Temps, but this one was great because the PA didn't fry and everything sounded GOOD!

Then the big one . . . Back to Dallas for a birthday party on Saturday with our band, playing very tall cotton. Money wise it was the best yet, and the suggested tunes were all fine, although I had to write three charts which will be useful on other gigs. The gig was at Smith & Wollinsky's Restaurant on the Dallas Tollway and we were more than well received by the partyers, the staff and the management. We're on a roll now.

Oh, I ran into the booker for the Temptations on Valentines. He said he was setting up the Texas office of an agency and he needed bands.

We will oblige.