Cool evening, hot music

It was unseasonably cool today, only 72F for a high. We had a great turnout at the McRae Park building for the Monday evening jazz workshop. Regulars Sam (trumpet), Wes (tenor sax), Gene (drums), Christian (piano), Tim (guitar) and Ira (alto sax) were joined for the instrumental hour by the another Tim on bass, his daughter Romney on baritone sax and Todd on trumpet. Joining us later were Annie and Vicki (vocals) and Scott (guitar) and Jim (baritone sax). The main focus was again on songs to be played at the Freedom Jazz Festival on 8/1/09 (see the link over on the right).

This week I actually remembered to write down the tunes and the attendees! For the first hour we focused on instrumentals including "Four Brothers" (arranged by Christian), "In Memory of Elizabeth Reed," "Yardbird Suite" and "St. Thomas" (played at a gentle, tropical, almost Jimmy Buffet tempo). The vocalists joined in and we played "I'll Remember April," "What Is This Thing Called Love," "East of the Sun" sung by Vicki and "Feeling Good," ""The Masquerade Is Over," and "Don't Go To Strangers" sung by Annie. Jim sang "Tangerine." We also played "Straight, No Chaser" as an instrumental in the middle of all the vocals.

The cool thing was that the new participants- Tim, Romney and Todd- fit in well and sounded good. Scott, a professional jazz guitarist and former workshop regular who stopped in spontaneously, added interesting ornaments and passing chords to the half-dozen tunes he sat in on. Several of the songs got their best airing ever, including "Four Brothers," "Elizabeth Reed," and "Feeling Good" in particular.

All in all a good and fun evening. Hope to see you next week! Maybe I'll eventually manage to remember a camera and to write things down...

"Hot" jazz on 6/22/09

It was a hot Minnesota day and I had to miss the jazz workshop due to a prior commitment. From our special correspondent, Sam Fiske, on the scene at McRae Park on 6/22/09:

"Attendees: Christian Lamot, Gene Egan, Ira Adelman, Matt Riley, Wes Simmons, Vicki Earhart, Sam Fiske and Annie Favors. Plus Susan a vocalist and a trumpet/guitar guy stopped by to check us out. Hope to see them again.

Worked during the instrumental hour on expected tunes for the Freedom Jazz Fest: Four Brothers, Elizabeth Reed and St Thomas.

The gals sang several great tunes including: Since I Fell For You, Hello Young Lovers, Soon It's Gonna Rain."

A note to the readers of the blog- we could really use a steady bassist, that's been one important instrument missing from the lineup. Sam plays bass sometimes but prefers trumpet and Don has graciously filled in as needed, but we really need a steady player to make the commitment for coming each week. If you play bass or know someone who does, let them know of our need!

The Half-way Point

June 15th is the halfway point of the year, to my way of thinking, and with the solstice only a week away it's the astronomical halfway point as well. Given that summer hasn't even really started, that's a depressing thought. So enough of that!

The workshop met again on Monday 6/15/09. For the first hour the instrumentalists had a space to work on tunes for the Freedom Jazz Festival. Attendees included Wes (tenor sax), Gene (drums), Paul (guitar) and Tim (guitar). Later Craig (guitar) also joined us. We played several tunes but not very diligently, "Ornithology" being the best of the bunch. We also looked at the A section of "In Memory of Elizabeth Reed" to check out the harmony part I wrote for Wes; the end result of that it that it goes back into the hopper for further development as the harmony was technically correct but sounded wrong.

Vicki (vocals) and Annie (vocals) then joined us and a little later Norman (piano) also arrived. Vicki tried out several new-for-her songs ("I Remember You" and "The Man I Love" being two of them). Annie sang "Invitation" and several others (I really should write these thigns down). We also played "Blue Bossa."

All right, that's the report for halfway through 2009. Next workshop is 6/22/09 from 6:00-8:45.

Budget Cuts

Paul e-mailed me to say that on 6/8/09 he went to McRae Park for the Monday evening workshop only to find the building locks and dark, with a notice up that for "budgetary reasons" the building was closed 6/9-10/09. My advice would be to call the park (612-370-4909) in advance of going to workshops to make sure the building will be open. Their Web site does not seem to list events like this.

The news at 11

I missed putting up a post about the first Monday evening workshop on 6/1/09. This was the last night to rehearse songs for the gig on Saturday 6/6/09 (more on that below). In attendance were Annie and Vicki (vocals), Sam (trumpet), Christian (piano), Don (bass), Jim (baritone sax), Wes (tenor sax), Gene (drums), Martin (percussion), Matt (flute) and Tim (guitar). We did run-throughs of "Four Brothers" featuring four part harmony arranged by Christian, "St. Thomas," "In Memory of Elizabeth Reed" in about its 10th iteration arranged by Tim (someday he'll get it right), "Feeling Good," "At Last," "I'll Remember April," and several others that, five days later, I can't recall.

On Saturday 6/6/09 the workshop played at the McRae Park Fun Day from 12:30PM-2:00PM. This is usually an outdoor event, but due to the cold temperatures and rain things were moved indoors. This was good as cold wet weather makes if hard to play an instrument with any facility, and for the bassist and guitarist, holding an electrified instrument while getting rained on and standing in water leaves much to be desired. Musicians playing at the gig were all of the above plus Dick (vocals). We played "Four Brothers," "Yardbird Suite," "Feeling Good," "Corcovado," "At Last," "Day by Day," "I'll Remember April," "Centerpiece," "St. Thomas," "Gentle Rain," and probably a half dozen other songs that aren't coming back to me as I type this. The gig was fun and went pretty well.

The workshop will now be meeting on Monday evenings from 6:00PM-8:45PM throughout the summer. The next one is 6/8/09. If you're interested in playing jazz, come on down and give it a whirl.

How Many of You Are There in the Quartet?

An Excerpt from the Unfinished Memoirs of Paul Desmond, Recounting His Years With the Dave Brubeck Quartet- which has nothing to do with the Workshop but which I found uproariously funny. So here it is (I think this was published as liner notes for an album):


Dawn. A station wagon pulls up to the office of an obscure motel in New Jersey. Three men enter - pasty-faced, grim-eyed, silent (for those are their names). Perfect opening shot, before credits, for a really lousy bank-robbery movie? Wrong. The Dave Brubeck Quartet, some years ago, starting our day's work.

Today we have a contract (an offer we should have refused) for two concerts at the Orange County State Fair in Middletown . 2 p.m.. and 8 p.m. Brubeck likes to get to the job early.

So we pull up behind this hay truck around noon, finally locating the guy who had signed the contract. Stout, red-necked, gruff and harried (from the old New Jersey law firm of the same name), and clearly more comfortable judging cattle than booking jazz groups, he peers into the station wagon, which contains four musicians, bass, drums, and assorted baggage, and for the first and only time in our seventeen years of wandering around the world, we get this question: "Where's the piano?"

So, leaving Brubeck to cope with the situation, we head into town for sandwiches and browsing. Since the sandwiches take more time than the browsing, I pick up a copy of the Middletown Record and things become a bit more clear. "Teenager's Day at the Orange County State Fair", says the headline across the two center pages (heavy move, in that the paper only has four pages). Those poor folk, especially the cattle-judge type (who has probably lumbered into heading the entertainment committee), thought we were this red-hot teenage attraction, which, Lord knows we've never been. Our basic audience begins with creaking elderly types of twenty-three and above.

Nevertheless, here we are, splashed all over this ad, along with the other attractions of the day- judo exhibition, fire-fighting demonstration, Wild West show, and Animaloraa (which may have been merely misspelled). And right at the top, first two columns on the left, is the this picture of Brubeck's teeth and much of his face, along with the following text, which I'm paraphrasing only slightly. "Hear the music teenagers everywhere thrill to", it began. "Hear the music that rocked Newport Rhode Island (an unfortunate reference in that only a few weeks earlier the Newport Jazz Festival had undergone its first riot). "Hear Dave Brubeck sing and play his famous hits, including 'Jazz Goes to College', 'Jazz in Europe ', and 'Tangerine'.

So, now realizing - in Brubeck's piquant ranch phrase - which way the hole slopes, we head back to the fairgrounds where the scene is roughly as follows: there is a smallish, almost transistorized, oval race track. (I'm not exactly sure how long a furlong is, but it seems not too many of them are actually present.) On one side of the oval is the grandstand, built to accommodate 2,000 or so, occupied at the moment by eight or nine elderly folk who clearly paid their money to sit in the shade and fan themselves, as opposed to any burning desire to hear the music their teenage grandchildren everywhere thrill to.

Directly across the track from them is our bandstand - a wooden platform, about ten feet high and immense. Evidently no piano has been located in Orange County , since the only props on stage are a vintage electric organ and one mike. Behind us is a fair-sized tent containing about two hundred people, in which a horse show for young teenagers is currently in progress - scheduled, we soon discover, to continue throughout our concert. This is hazardous mainly because their sound system is vastly superior to ours.

So we begin our desperation opener, "St. Louis Blues." Brubeck, who has never spent more than ten minutes of his life at an electric organ, much less the one he is now at, is producing sounds like an early Atwater-Kent Synthesizer. (Later he makes a few major breakthroughs, like locating the volume control pedal and figuring out how to wiggle his right hand, achieving a tremolo effect similar to Jimmy Smith with a terminal hangover, but doesn't help much.) Eugene Wright, our noble bass player, and me take turns schlepping the mike back and forth between us and playing grouchy, doomed choruses, but the only sound we can hear comes from our friendly neighborhood horse show.

"LOPE," it roars. "CANTER...TROT....AND THE WINNER IN THE TWELVE-YEAR OLD CLASS IS...JACQUELINE HIGGS!"

As always in difficult situations such as these, we turn to our main man, primo virtuoso of the group, the Maria Callas of the drums, Joe Morello, who has rescued us from disaster from Grand Forks to Rajkot , India .

"You got it," we said, "stretch out," which ordinarily is like issuing an air travel card to a hijacker. And, to his external credit, Morello outdoes himself. All cymbals sizzling, all feet working. (Morello has several. Not many people know this.) Now he's into triplets around the tom-toms, which has shifted foundations from the Odeon Hammersmith to Free Trade Hall and turned Buddy Rich greener than usual with envy.

The horse show is suddenly silent. Fanning in the stands has subsided slightly.

Suddenly a figure emerges from the horse tent, hurtles to the side of the stage, and yells at Brubeck, "For Chrissakes, could you tell the drummer not to play so loud? He's terrifying the horses."

Never a group to accept defeat gracelessly, we play a sort of Muzak for a suitable period and split.

When we return at eight, all is different. A piano has been found, the stands are packed with our geriatric following of twenty-five and above, and we play a fairly respectable concert.

Even so, we're upstaged by the grand finale of the fair - the fire-fighting demonstration. A group of local residents has been bandaged and made up to appear as if they've just leapt from the Hindenburg and their last rites are imminent. But instead of remaining discreetly behind the scenes until their big moment, they mingle casually with friends and neighbors in the audience during the evening, sipping beer, munching popcorn, casting an eerie, Fellini-like quality over the gathering, and considerably diminishing the impact of their ultimate appearance.

After their pageant come the main events of the fair, which have clearly been planned for months: a flaming auto wreck, followed by a flaming plane wreck, each to be dealt with instantly and efficiently by the Middletown Fire Dept. At one end of the oval is a precariously balanced car; a the other end, a truly impressive skeletal mock-up of a single-engine plane, tail up. Midway, at ground zero, is the Middletown Fire Truck, bristling with ladders and hoses and overflowing volunteers.

A hush falls over the stands. At a signal given by the fire chief, the car is ignited. The truck reaches it in two or three seconds, by which time the fire is roughly equivalent to that created by dropping a cigarette on the backseat for two or three seconds. It is extinguished by many men with several hoses.

A murmur falls over the stands. The fire chief, painfully aware that his moment of the year is at hand, signals for the plane to be ignited, also instructing the truck to take it easy, so that the fire should be blazing briskly when it arrives. The truck starts, at about the pace of a cab looking for a fare. The plane goes WHOOSH!, like a flashbulb, and by the time the leisurely truck arrives, has shrunk to a lovely camp-fire, just large enough for roasting marshmallows.

Later, four pasty-faced, grim-eyed men pile into a station wagon and drive away. It may not be bank robbery, but it's a living.

Happy Memorial Day

There was no workshop today due to the Memorial Day holiday. The next workshop meeting is Monday 6/1/09 from 6:00PM to 8:45 PM.