Thursday night I finally hit the Pleasantville jazz jam, over the river, like 20 minutes away. It was better than any jazz jam I had been to previously. Instead of only one or two decent players, I’d say there were six or seven (most of the group, really). The drummer was excellent and apparently lives in West Nyack; the bass player played electric bass, not my favorite for jazz, but soloed like a motherfucker; a handful of great trumpet players, “older” guys and probably professionals in areas other than music, reminding me of Dad… there were even –three- guitarists, and usually that means at least two of them are hacks (ha), but –all three- were, outstanding, and on average the younger guys in the group. Unbelievable. No other pianists, so I could just play whenever I wanted. I had such a fun time, just playing jazz standards with such great casual players, and was well received. I’m sure I’ll be back.
Then Friday night, Glint had a gig in Brooklyn. It was a real diamond-in-the-rough venue, “The Hook,” in the Red Hook district, on a decidedly dead/sketchy street. The stage was huge, there was a great lighting set-up… we didn’t bring out a whole lot of people, but we sounded good and made some new friends and fans. We even got to play a little longer than expected, a full hour instead of the usual there’s-bands-on-before-and-after-you 40 minutes, which was nice… and I could –hear- myself, finally! At recent shows, the monitor mixes had the keyboards pretty quiet, which was frustrating; my playing, I think, -sounds- “frustrated” when I have little or no aural confirmation of the notes I’m clearly playing. The moral of the story here is, if you want something done right, you’ve got to do it yourself… I brought an extra amp and “wired” it up so that only keyboards were coming out of it, and placed it right next to my rig, facing up at me so as not to futz with what Dylan, Jase, and Mat were hearing on stage too much. As a result, I felt a lot better about the performance in general, being able to hear a more balanced Glint on stage.
Other randomness: this venue had a creepy downstairs lounge/green room, eerily reminiscent of our beloved Worcester firehouse… Jilly showed up, not even a day finished with school for winter break, to see us… worst/cheapest dinner ever, consisting of 2-packages-for-a-dollar cookies, Lay’s mesquite barbecue potato chips, and one of those Starbucks frappucino drinks. Thank you (but not), cheap Brooklyn bodega. Dylan wouldn’t shut up about the SIX 24-ounce 99-cent Molsons he got there.
In other Glint news… the album has been sent off for duplication! YES! 1000 copies headed to our lil’ Nyack apartment… ETA: January 11th, which is also Rob’s birthday, so if they really do come on that day, I may not be at work on the 12th.
Thanks to Wikipedia I figured out the meter/time signature pattern/whatever to that Radiohead song, Pyramid Song… it reads like some kind of bizarre (and illegal, since there would be too many men on the field) soccer formation: 3-2-3-3-2-3. But even the placement of the chords isn’t consistent (read: I haven’t figured it out yet). I was mildly excited to put that one to rest, though. It would be a challenge to work up with a trio. Part of this challenge would of course be having a trio to even attempt working it up with.
Also watched a lot of movies… Mateus and I watched “Rockstar” in all its 80’s rock glory; quite in contrast to that, I watched Life is Beautiful the day after the gig and, I loved it; Saturday night consisted of an all-star movies-on-TV lineup of Home Alone, Mean Girls (yes Dylan you DID sit through the whole thing), Groundhog Day, and the end of the Matrix, really just to hear that Rage Against the Machine song over the credits.
Sunday was great. My friend Sabrina Stone (see previous entries) is a singer/songwriter from Manhattan, on break from Brandeis, where I met her, to pursue her music career. She is returning to school in the middle of January but before then wanted to jam with Dylan, myself, and a drummer friend of hers and possibly record a demo. Sunday was the day… Dylan and I hopped on down to the Upper East Side in my Volvo and worked on two of Sabrina’s tunes with the drummer Chris. It sounded… so tight! The tunes are acoustic rock in nature but the band provided a rockin’-slightly jazzy “oomph” to them. Chris was great, playing a minimalist set of bass drum, snare, hi-hat and ride cymbal (maybe not even by choice, I didn’t ask), and I got to spend the afternoon playing on a grand piano. The tunes really locked in, and later on a friend of Sabrina and her mom’s named Paul Scott Goodman, a NYC writer/composer/singer from Scotland who is interested in producing Sabrina’s demo, stopped by to hear what we’d been working on. From what I can gather, it will be up to Sabrina how she wants to proceed with the recording, either via Paul and some studio musicians or with her not-quite-professional-musician friends (Dylan, Chris, and myself), but I think the point of Paul’s visit was to see if any or all of us could possibly work with what he had in mind for her musically. So we’ll see. Anyways, I’d always thought some of Sabrina’s music would sound great with a band, and Sunday I finally got to hear it this way.
All topped off with… what else… a taco night. It has become a loose Sunday night tradition to spend the evening in with our neighbors Kevin and Rob, cook something, drink, watch the Matt Groening-Seth McFarlane TV lineup, and be morons. Adam pioneered the sangria-making initiative this time and it too was great, this time with a burgundy wine, apples, oranges, brandy, and triple sec. Another reclaimed Sunday.
