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.