Watershed

No newsletter last week because I was out of town for four days. With some chagrin— I missed playing for that long but honestly giving my hands a break for a few days was probably helpful, the hiatus did me good. I didn’t lose any strength and the little aches from playing so much healed up.

But when I got back I had twenty songs to learn for a show with a flute/piano/bass trio at a little wine bar up in Taos.

Mistakes were made, faces were not melted, but all in all I am very happy with how we sounded and how we were received by both the crowd (it was a small venue but it was full all night) and the owners, who liked what they heard. Throughout the night I could see people in the audience interrupting their conversations when something we played caught their ears, like “oooh, that was a nice little lick, what is that band doing right now?”

AND ALSO damn. The last time I played jazz on an acoustic upright bass for an audience was probably summer 1996. Almost THIRTY years ago. Damn.

A lot of the songs were new to me. Black Diamond by Rahsaan Roland Kirk kinda kicked my ass. The form of the tune is pretty simple but stringing together all those augmented chords in the B section messed with my head. Samba de Orfeu likewise, I had to simplify the chord progression to really get my head around it. I’m still struggling with decent intonation on Footprints, as I noted here a couple weeks ago.

On the other hand, I had never played Cannonball Adderley’s tune Miss Jackie’s Delight, which is a delightful little bass feature.

And I really liked the deep groove on Yusef Lateef’s tune Nubian Lady. I don’t get to play the lowest note on the bass that often for very long and it just growls.

Some time ago I think I posted a take on Straight No Chaser as a bass feature. At the start of our second set the piano player wasn’t on stage so I called that tune and the flute player and I did a lovely little short unrehearsed impromptu take on it to much delight both onstage and off.

So— success! I never make my move too soon, but this was the right place and the right time to get up in front of an audience with a challenging set list and play some sophisticated jazz music.