Another Venue

Pato's is an interesting place. Right after I moved to Austin, over seven years ago, I was playing there with a pianist whose name will not be named here. On a break, she complained of an earache. I laid her down on one of the tables and candled her ears. This was back in the days when ear candles could be bought in Texas.

Since, the place burned down (no connection) and rebuild years later, a little less al fresco and a little less funky.

It's still a place searching for an identity. We tried to assist it in arriving at that identity months ago, but it's having a great deal of turnover among the employees, with the exception of the position of Kitchen Manager, which seems to belong absolutely to Patrick, my brother Jimmy's son.

Well, they got around to calling us back today, and it would appear that we've got some steady work if we want it. We took the First Available, October 9. (Sad that Janice Jean will be out of town that weekend.)

The advantages are numerous: We've been playing about 35 miles from home, 35 miles of country road populated by little more than bored cops and dumb deer. Pato's is three long blocks away from my house and a lot closer for everyone. There's a PA there. There's a stage there. We could actually develop something of a local showcase following there, in that it's the kind of a place where people come to seal their wedding plans.

The main disadvantage, other than the kind of remaining funkiness, is the bread. Short is the best way to characterize it. Less even than the other place.

I might add that of the first call players contacted for the gig on the 9th, every one of the agreed to the rather vague terms. (Except Janice, who is flying to Atlanta for her sister's birthday.) We're talking agreement without hesitation.

Great bunch of players we have here.

Clearly there is some potential. Might was well ride it as far as it goes.

Last Night at Cabo

Last night was the culmination of a lot of effort, talent and hard work by the band. We lived up to the Duke's Prime Directive--genre is irrelevant and "there are two kinds of music--good music and bad music."

We exceeded all my expectations by blending sets of swing, rock, pop, latin and all the rest with some of the strongest presentation I've ever heard.

Singled out for appreciation is every band member last night. Jimmy and Brendan played percussion. Brad Taylor sightread the bass book without raising a sweat. Leroy on keyboards and Javi on guitar were superb. Horns were John Vander Gaanst, Kent Winking, Chris Kapral and me. Rounding things out was the wonderfully musical Janice, who assisted on cowbell and background vocals (most of them quite spontaneous) in addition to her electrifying vocals. Javi and Jimmy were just overwhelming on their vocal features. "Featuring the THREE J's on vocals!!"

We're ready. We have every element nailed down. Unlike some of the bands with whom we compete, we have a significant bench we can draw players from who can read the charts and generally play the gig. See, when I was with "a prominent Austin cover band" (to take one example) we had no book. So if a guy had to take the night off, the boss would just fire him. There's even a story about how a guitar player in the that band about fifteen years ago had to attend the funeral of a family member who had died suddenly. The boss fired him. So the band left the boss without a band and went off and set up another competing band which is still gigging. They still compete with the that prominent Austin cover band.

With a book, our attitude is "Who lives close?" Nobody gets canned. No longer is attending a family funeral a dismissable offense.

Last night we started with "I Dig Rock & Roll Music," which the whole band sightread, and sightread well. It's what I like to think of as an ironic instrumental. Then Jimmy sang The Way You Look Tonight and nailed it. People in the bar were looking around at each other and smiling. Then Janice got up to sing Midnight Train to Georgia, which is a chart a traded for and will need to be rewritten to conform to reality. (This is why I HATE repeats. The road map is ambiguous.) I doubt if anyone noticed because Janice was so poised that she sold the song as her version! Then Javi sang Shake Your Tail Feather and we were off to the races. We did an instrumental on The Way We Were that I wrote last year. Janice came up and nailed Walk on By and Jazzman and Jimmy closed with Just a Gigolo/I Ain't Got Nobody.

Eclectic enough for you?

Second set: Smooth (Javi), I've Got You Under My Skin (Jimmy), Son of a Preacher Man (Yeah! Janice), Choo Choo C'Boogie (Jimmy with a whole bunch of great backing vocals), I Will Survive (Janice), Jump Jive & Wail (Jimmy), Cheek to Cheek (Jimmy doing the Sinatra chart) and Javi doing Mustang Sally.

Third set: Do the Hustle (lots of backing vocals spontaneously erupting), Peg (YEAH! This is not what you'd expect but it sure worked!), then Janice with her Aretha 1-2 punch--Natural Woman and Respect, Javi doing What's Goin' On?, Jimmy doing Louis on What a Wonderful World (a less jarring transition than you might think), Janice doing my Dad's chart of All of Me, and Javi closing the evening with Jimi Hendrix's Let Me Stand Next to your Fire. Or so we though , , ,

We got extended into another hour by management, took a break and came back with Soul Man, Saturday in the Park, Soul Bossa Nova, Skin Tight, Pick Up the Pieces, Heat Wave, Domino, and Brown Eyed Girl of all things.

By the time we rolled into the driveway at home it was 3:15 in the morning. If there was a place open where I could break out my horn and play I would have.

Javier's dad has offered to do some booking. I want to take October to put together all the stuff needed to do that. He's a great guy and his interest in Javi's career is so touching. Javi's entourage is the backbone of our success and he assures me that, once we start playing in Austin instead of 35 miles up a winding mountain road we can count on a "Cruz table" twice as numerous. Javi's dad also runs PA for one of the local bands and knows his stuff in that department. He's got enough PA to cover a convention center.

The forces are now aligned.

My weakness is well-known

I have a tendency to sit in front of my computer a few hours every day, writing charts in Finale.

Finale is not just a program, it's a compositional (or arrangernal) environment. It's a lot like the other applicatation I tend to lose myself in, Photoshop--VAST. There are lots of things I'll never learn to do in both programs. There are users I meet, expert users in each program, who do pretty much what I do. When we get together I can learn a lot of tips about tools and techniques. And inevitably the reverse happens too and they learn from me.

A word about how Finale and I started. Marjorie Baer, without whom I'd just be another broke sax player, bumped into me at an alumni function and the next thing I knew I was writing reviews for Macworld magazine. And the reason they had a need was that David Pogue, whom I greatly admire, had been hired by the company making Finale to write documents for an upcoming release. In Macworld's eyes this compromised the Pogue impartiality, therefore making a non-staff opening for a freelance user. My first assignment was Finale, featuring David Pogue's wonderful documentation. The sample copy arrived a few days later and I hustled up to learn the program. A few days later I got a call to write arrangements for a singer who had recorded an album without them. She was going to Denver to perform for the Pope. No kidding.

I took the job and started taking stuff off the CD.

This was 1993, and incredible 11 years ago. I was running Finale on a 512KE Macintosh, which was the lower limit of horsepower required ti use Finale (not to mention Photoshop!).

But it was a great experience and it resulted in a pretty good review, one still in use by Finale's current owners in their marketing package.

My Finale style has changed over the years, and Finale has caused me to question a lot of the assumptions I'd had about how charts ought to be layed out, something I'd been pondering since I sat at my father's side in the sixties and learned copying. I hardly ever write repeat signs any more. DS al Coda? Not on one of my charts! These devices were, after all, not used because they made charts easier to perform. Far from it. They're designed to make the copying and reproduction easier. Ask any player if they'd prefer a two-page chart they could stare at with repeat signs and Codas and so on, or one that started at the upper left-hand corner and proceeded to the end without regard to page count. The latter wins every time.

I get calm when I do Finale. I try things and see how they sound. I do a lot of take-downs, sliding back and forth between my Finale system and my iPod. (Thank you Steve Jobs! I mean it!)

Finale also makes it possible for the charts when finished (a very relative concept--almost all the ORB charts had antecedents on both the Goose Gumbo and Dino books) for be stored as PDF files and exchanged without much bother. There's a guy in Ohio and another in Washington state with whom I swap charts. Also a guy in California.

I can write a chart a day, maybe 4 in a week. Add that to the chart swapping and you see that the problem is the book grows, well, apace. And I have a tedancy to withdraw from the human race in order to write. This I learned from my father, who wrote music without a piano, at the kitchen table, with all 5 of us kids running around like idiots. This was a very long time ago, and he eventually bought a Wurlitzer electric piano with a headphone jack and moved his musical stuff into the garage, then to an office on the other side of town.

So the good news is we have new charts. And so the bad news is we have new charts. Not enough rehearsal time to cover them, not enough gigs to play them in , , ,

But . . . We do have a whole evening's worth (4 sets!) of Sinatra and Swing, before we even get into the rock and funk. Our Tower of Power charts now number just under 20, so we can do 2+ sets of JUST Tower of Power.

Big, deep, cleansing breath and get on with it.

We're adding:

Always Look on the Bright Side of Life

Higher & Higher

At Last

Rock Steady

Squib Cakes

25 or 6 to 4

At This Moment

Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?

She Caught the Katy

And yes, we will be I think the only band playing the intro to Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?. Because the book is the star. (Not taking away from the star material in the band and the band's bench . . . }

Advanced Logo-ology

Actual Proof

Happy dancers going at a Sinatra tune at Cabo Loco.

Gigmasters

So far so good.

We signed up with gigmasters.com on Saturday afternoon. Two days later we've popped up in a couple hundred searches, had about 50 viewings of our page inside the Gigmasters wall, and had one request for a bid. Pretty impressive for a hundred bucks a year.

The gig is a Tuesday afternoon in Carrollton, north of Dallas. I shouldn't imagine having a hard time booking musicians for that one, but just in case we have enough in the bid to charter a bus there and back. Slick.

And even if it doesn't pan out, it's (as Leroy said in Home Depot) a harbinger of things to come.

You bet.

Another interesting evening

We played last night up at Cabo Loco.

But first, to Gigmasters. I'm a little optimistic about Gigmasters, which charges a hundred bucks to list the band and present us in the form of a fairly useful web page to Texas and the world. I'm pretty impressed with the utility of it all. Tune list, sound files, photos, and a little narrative about the band. The prospective client does a search under genre criteria and location. We apprear to be, by virtue of joining Gigmasters, the #1 swing band in Austin, or at least the #1 swing band from Austin listed under Gigmasters. I agree. We're the #4 funk band in San Antonio, the #2 soul band in Dallas . . . . you get the idea.

What I know is this: getting gigs is just like fishing. You throw out the net, you wet your line, you make your fly dance across the water. It's also as frustrating as fishing, when you come up skunked after a long day of doing everything right. And it's as exciting as fishing when you have one on the line and slowly, skillfully draw it in.

It looks like we're getting listed on searches some 80 times in the course of a day. Of those 80, about a third clicks further into our page from the search. From there we'll need to get some of the stuff together to make us look presentable, like some pro staged photos and candids, a short video clip, and more sound files. So far we haven't heard from any prospective clients (due largely to the absense of a photo, I suspect, and a couple more factors). Everything we add will raise the ratio of lookers to deals made, though. Not bad for a hundred bucks. I'll be really surprised if we don't land at least 6 gigs in the ensuing year with Gigmasters.

Now about last night:

It looks like the model of The Book Is the Star is holding. Half the horn section was sightreading, without breaking a sweat. Rick White played trumpet and Jon Blondell was the trombone player. Rick did a great job. The legendary Jon Blondell, who worked with Willie Nelson and Delbert McClinton, who played the 'bone solo on a million selling record called The Wrong Way. (I actually wrote a chart of this tune, expecting that sooner or later Jon would be playing a gig with us. Haven't passed it out yet though.)

That's the horns.

Jimmy's back and it sure makes a difference. We did Sinatra, including Cheek to Cheek. We cooked through the funk and soul.

Janice grows more comfortable with the band. She sang her ass off on the tunes she did before plus Walk on By and (is there any band with the cojones to attempt that tune in town? OK there's Hot Wax, but show me a NON-Motown band.) Midnight Train to Georgia. She also took up cowbell last night and made a big difference. Yeah Janice!

Monte Mann was subbing on bass and did a splendid job, again proving positive result of the Central Assumption. Monte is also a great guitar player and singer, and first on my list if Javi gets hung up for a gig or two, He stepped up to the mic for Lady Madonna--great!

Returning veterans were Javi and Leroy. So we had 3 subs. If nothing else we are getting the deepest bench this side of the New York Yankees.

Every gig gets a little better. We don't have very far to go to where we can compete with any band in town in every department save sheer volume. (That's another thing I noticed last night. We play soft very well! Jimmy was singing the Temptations' chart of Rainy Night in Georgia, and when we got to the part where the vocal comes in we got soft! THERE'S an area where we can distance ourselves from the competition.)

So there you have it.

We are going to do some excerpt recording for a demo CD that will be nothing but snippets. Most people have short attention spans about music, judging it in a couple seconds by the groove or some vague remembrance of the sixties, or seventies, or whenever and how the sound reconnects their feelings with that era. So we're going to take a scattershot approach and record about 20 excepts, none of them exceeding 20 seconds. I wrote a script to tie the excerpts all together. Jimmy's doing the voice over.

Onward and upward with the arts.