jazzers meeting by chance

a week ago i went to see my friend J (JtJP) play a gig over in ravenscourt park,

playing with J that night were - R, student of mine, lovely singer, F a wonderful drummer who i've played with once, when i played one of those sunday jazz gigs in camden... and the guitarist who i've met but can't remember his name, lovely player, and a bass player...

on my way out there, i got off the tube and was walking up the road when a man asked me if i knew where the polish centre was...

i told him i didn't but that i had googlemaps on my phone and that i might be able to help...

a short while later i had directed him back down the road he had been walking along, and i made my way up that road towards the gig, where i met lovely D, (who sold me the moog all that time ago and who drums in many of the improvisations)... the gig was wonderful... all of them were marvellous, i had a rocking time watching them play...

also the pub saw fit to show Top Gun projected massively behind the band from film4... it started pretty much as they started and it finished almost exactly when they finished...

me & D drunkenly shambled back down that road to the tube and were waiting for a train when the man who i'd directed to the polish centre earlier came onto the platform...

it turns out he's a sax player, he was going to see a bigband, run by a man who fixes and sells saxophones, in fact at least one of the SJP's have got a sax from that man...

so we chatted awhile, talked about the musicians life... sax players... music...

got on the train when it came and before we knew it me & D were getting off and he was staying on...

so that was that... he goes by the name of BP... and it was nice bumping into him x

gigged

so my new box has lost it's gig virginity,

went over to hammersmithwork to see G and we ran through the set, me teaching him 2 of mine and him teching me 2 of his...

one of mine being brand new and beautiful... (i think)...

a whole heap of acoustic guitars and vocals on the night, plus us, doing our strangely terrifying thing, a great little band called the mayfly trio, got chatting to them and found them somewhat similar to semble, that great and beautiful now defunk 3 piece from kingston... the mayfly fol not similar musically, but socially i think...

lovely D from hammersmithwork came with his S, along with JTJP... nice to be supported, and to meet S after hearing about her so much from D...

and now i'm simply knackered, still with no money but we do have gas now...

x

yr3wk9 beatnik trio & gig news

and i'm playing a gig @ the cobden club on wednesday, wednesday the 20th of august, going to be me & gareth mitchell, he of the many improvisations he's done with me...

still in a gasless universe over here so we popped over to floopy's to cook & bathe, play chess, cards, smoke, listen to tunes,

an idea for a song came to me while shaving... might come out on wednesday night...

x

internet cafe

so here i am in this internet cafe just across from turnpike lane station, uploading the improvisation i recorded yesterday afternoon...

life is proving a touch difficult recently what with the moving, the not sleeping enough, the not having balthazara yet and the continued nonsense from the old housemates about taking her... i find i'm a little more fragile than usual which is not surprising i guess, i might get myself some arnica, carry it around like a i used to...

this week i did two gigs on wednesday and thursday nights, wednesday night was in the poshest flat i've ever seen in my life, over in holland park and it paid pretty well, it was with G & T, G who is one of my search&reflect apprentices and T who me & dinah met while out celebrating G's new baby girl...

we played three sets of 45 minutes each, the same amount of time i used to do with that piano gig back in the summer but much easier because i had bass and sax with me... we also had the maddest cabbie soming back to north london that i've ever had, he deserved more than a sentence so i'll devote a bit more to him in another post...

thursday night T's band played at the 12 bar with a promoter we've played with before who always - without fail - cuts our set short, it's because we don't bring any audience, every time we do a gig for him we say we're never going to play for him again but we've played 3 times for him...

this time we played 4 out of our 10 tunes and he came up and said one more, we played two more, while packing up i asked T if we could never play another gig with him, the promoter was walking behind me as i said it and he definately heard..

i hope we don't do anymore gigs with him but you never know...

ok enough blogging, i'm going to read from the proust book i'm reading until it's uploaded... x

post gig blues

woke up today with a puffy eye, the same one (the right) that was funny a few weeks ago...

i think it's the stress of putting that gig on last night and i'm just thankful it didn't arrive before the gig...

i was hoping to include in this post the video of last week's improvisation which i performed at the gig but google video made it inexplicably low quality, so i'm uploading it again in a slightly different version to see if that will make any difference...

i'm a little low today, post gig, an emotional business, even though the gig was a success i feel,

so the gig itself:

well, the projector and the space echo arrived in the afternoon (courtesy of E) and we rigged them up, producerG brought his collection of various bits and pieces, i just had my two mics with me along with gordy's laptop which the film was coming from...

the space echo's tape broke a couple of hours before the gig, and even though a replacement tape was included with it i had no idea how to deal with it so sacked it... T from the brian jacket letdown was one of the 1st to come and he offered to nip home and fetch his LM9 (i think) delay... which he did and which proved to be equally broken...

so the heaven's had decided i wasn't to have delay for the improvisation, i suspected that had we access to a 3rd delay unit it too would be found to be broken when placed on top of the piano...

the time of the gig rolled around and by then i'd got dressed up in the suit, dinah had cut my hair and the mexican moustache had been redefined... (uncle filmo, resident at the landlord's, said i looked like a wee hard man)...

and it went well, i'd guessed that we'd have 15 people in the audience and we had around 17 in the end,

the acoustic set was the scariest, including the 2 tunes that i'd finished that day, the weekly improvisation and the open letter to grace which is mostly improvised lyrically...

it went well, and having done the scariest bit 1st i was in a good space for the rest of the gig,

producerG had cooked up a lovely tomato & lentil soup which we ate before the film, both being well received...

then the electric set, 5 tunes with both producerG and myself,

i hardly spoke in between tunes, we pushed on through the set and it felt great, producerG recorded it and i'll be able to listen to the recordings once i get hold of them tomorrow, which always casts a slightly different weather over one's impressions but right now i feel good about it...

i've been over there today to pick up my bicycle and i had a good play on the piano, sharing the last of the soup with M (landlord) & H,

even though i'm a little low my impressions of last night, of the whole experience, are good...

x

BANNER SCROLL DOWN gig on sunday 3'rd december BANNER SCROLL DOWN

editing well

so today was all about the editing of the film and now, at the point where i'm about to go to bed...

i've got the thames footage to about 2/3rds of the length of the film... just at the brink of the improvisation section...

so today i completed the intro, the 1st 2 sections & the middle breathing section...

i need to work out how to achieve the last improvisation section but the way i now have of working will stand me in good stead tomorrow night when i come back to this...

in other news i went down to producerG's music forum where we performed 3 of the tunes from the electric set, interesting comments from listeners (including mars),

i also spoke to E from hammersmith (who i'll be seeing tomorrow) and he told me he has a projector that i can borrow, which is a huge weight off my mind...

and finally i've made a little progress in both of the songs i'm writing this week...

so it's going well, deadline central...

x

schedule

so i've got this gig on sunday @ which i'm doing 2 sets and showing my film...

one of those sets is ready..

for the other i'm writing a couple of songs this week...

and the film is far from finished...

which means i've got quite a tight schedule to get everything done... the 1st item on the schedule is getting the voice for the film recorded today... so i've recorded the sung part, i'm now getting together the script for the whole thing...

ready to record in about an hour, maybe sooner...

then @ 6 i'm strapping my keyboard onto my already not right back and heading down to a rehearsal with T's band, tomorrow i'm working all day, followed by a rehearsal for the electric set @ producerG's,

wednesday i'm back on the film treadmill, editing together the video from the shape of the voice (that i'm recording shortly)... then off out wednesday night to play @ producerG's music forum @ londonbridgework, a chance to run through one or two tunes from the electric set...

working on thursday and friday morning, back to the film on friday afternoon, by which time i should have got hold of the projector for the film...

at some point within all this i'm writing the songs i need to write...

hectic but good...

do come to the gig if you can,

x