I’ve been “Simpsonized”

Here’s a new one that I wasn’t expecting: Andrey had me “Simpsonized”. Who would have thought?

Next to me is our cat, Gretta.

Sorry I haven’t been blogging lately; a lot has been going on. For starters, the new CD, I Think I’ll Keep You, is out in Japan. There’s also another CD by my group Playdate that’s coming out on the Posi-tone label in the spring. And the composer Joe Phillips’s masterpiece “Vipassana” (written for 25-piece jazz orchestra!) is being released on the innova label this year as well; I feel very lucky to have been a part of that project, as Joe’s music is just perfect.

But it is a belated-New-Year’s-resolution of mine to blog more, so I PROMISE there will be more to come very soon!

Fun in Staten Island!

What was supposed to be a quiet (well, as quiet as they can be) visit with my good pal Ernie Jackson turned into a bit of an adventure in Staten Island. It all started when Ernie needed breakfast, and on the way we stopped by Mandolin Bros., that famous mecca of guitar on Forest Avenue.

Ernie started with showing me the new Veillette Baritone Twelve-String:

We then moved into the room with all of the semi-hollow guitars:

And then I fell in love with a Gibson Howard Roberts:

On the way out, Ernie introduced me to Stan, the owner and a super-nice guy. Good-bye turned into hello when Stan wanted to show me a couple of amazing guitars, and that he did!

Long story short, a fifteen-minute jaunt turned into 90, and it was worth every second! (Though I did feel badly as by the time we left, it was time for lunch…) If you are a guitarist and you haven’t been to Mandolin Bros., you are missing out. Now I just need to get some more gigs so I can afford to take home a Howard Roberts or an L-5!

am4 NYS Tour – Niagara Falls

This is what happens when one tries to book a tour while also trying to get through comprehensive exams for a Master’s Degree: the gigs are far apart and involve a lot of driving.

Somehow when booking this tour I missed the fact that the concert in Niagara Falls was in the afternoon, and so there was a lot of driving between Wednesday night and Thursday afternoon. (There was also a lot of driving the day before – again, grad school consequences!)

Nonetheless, the concert went off without a hitch, and we had a great time. My good friend Jason Beaudreau teaches at Niagara County Community College, which is where the concert took place. After the concert it was off to the hotel, and then I raced off to teach a few guitar lessons; there were some kids in town who wanted a lesson. They were really good players, and it was nice to teach a bit on the road.

By the evening we were all wiped out, but especially me as I didn’t have a nap. After dinner, the guys went out while I slept until quite late the next morning.

Breakfast involved waffles and drinkable coffee.

And then…more driving…

am4 NYS Tour – Schenectady

It was kind of a schlep, but we made it to Schenectady NY with time to stop at our hotel on the way, and then hunted down a Panera Bread Bakery-Cafe. Panera Bread has really been a lifesaver, if, for no other reason, you can get salads and soups and sandwiches that are healthy and fresh. (I burned out on Wendy’s salads while touring ages ago!)

Dinner was in the dining hall, after our soundcheck. It brought plenty of memories back from my days at Rutgers University; I found it difficult not to automatically pile four glasses of orange juice on my tray. (This, by the way, kept me from getting a cold my entire freshman year, even with my crazy schedule that only allowed for 4 hours’ sleep a night.)

By now you may or may not have heard the stories of how bands do drugs in the green room before a show. Well, you’ll be happy to know that the am4 is not that sort of band: instead, there’s some serious yoga happening.

Fraser and Jason striking a pose

Union College has an amazing new performance center that we just loved! We played one intense set of a lot of new material. Not sure if it was recorded, but I’ll find out. (I think it may have been videotaped.)

After the performance, we had to high-tail it back to the hotel which was about 90 minutes closer to Niagara Falls, the next stop on our tour. It’s a LOT of driving, to be sure, but still not as bad as the one time I had to drive with a band from McKinney TX to Nashville TN within 24 hours…that was just plain ridiculous.

am4 NYS Tour – Rochester

Jeff is the master packer of the van.

We drove in from a delightful time in Ithaca, only to land in Super-Jazz-Mecca in Rochester NY! Filled with more vinyl than I’ve ever seen in one place on the East Coast, The Bop Shop is equal parts fun, treasure, and adventure. Tom Kohn and his compatriots are of the highest quality and can show you the way, be it jazz, blues, folk – lots of goodness. We had lots of fun looking at all of the CDs and LPs in the store.

Fraser checking out some of the tunes at the Bop Shop

One of the perks that comes with playing at the Bop Shop Atrium is the hospitality. Donna and Robert Iannapollo, jazz fans and all-around incredible people, prepared the most delicious gourmet spread for us (Donna is a professional chef) which included:

Parsnip/Carrot Soup with homemade parsnip chips and chives

Smoked Salmon Risotto with fresh dill

Green Tea Mousse with Sake-marinated dried cherries

After that, it was back to the Bop Shop to play our gig for a small but enthusiastic crowd who you just knew were big supporters of the jazz community in Rochester. The concert was recorded, and we had a great time. We even sold our first concert t-shirt on the road!

It was an early-morning wake-up call the next morning for a clinic/concert at Penfield High School, where Music Director Jim Doser is doing an incredible job with these kids. Our first stop was his Music Business class, where the group of 24 students had done research on all of us and came prepared with fifteen questions, all of which were so thought-provoking that we were only able to get through ten of them in 45 minutes!

After that, we gave a concert in the school’s gym, which was really fun. (Have we ever played in a gymnasium before? I think this was a first.) The entire music department showed up, and were an attentive and polite crowd. We had a blast.

Then, it was off to Schenectady…

Touring New York State with the am4 – Ithaca

Greetings from Ithaca, NY! Today is day two of the am4’s tour of New York State, made possible by the New York State Music Fund.

After getting up at 5:30 a.m. yesterday, I picked up the members of the band and drove for about 5 hours (give or take, with traffic) to Ithaca, NY, a gorgeous little town in upstate New York. We gave a performance to the students in Miles Brown’s jazz improv class at Cornell University, then discussed the compositional process and played a few tunes with the class. Miles is an old friend of ours from New York City who is currently getting his doctorate at Eastman College of Music as well as running the entire jazz department at Cornell (!) so it was great to see him after so many years.

It’s funny to think about how we’re all getting older. When we were playing together, Jeff, Jason, and I realized that we hadn’t played a gig with Fraser since 2005, which was when our last tour happened. So much has gone on between then and now for me (losing my dad to pancreatic cancer, going to grad school, leaving the jazz-turned-pop-insanity-girl group I played in for so many years and sacrificed so much for) that it’s worth mentioning. Kind of crazy how life works.

We had the night off last night, so we went back to our hotel, relaxed for a while, and then went out for a beer before heading over to the famous Moosewood Restaurant for an incredible meal.

Jason and I both love the Moosewood cookbooks – we each have several of them in our homes – so it was exciting for us to find the restaurant where it all began!

Colleen was our server. She was energetic and sweet, and loved her job. It’s always nice to meet someone who loves what she does and gives it 150%. The world would be such a different place if everyone could find that!

So, we had an incredible meal, and an equally enjoyable experience at Moosewood Restaurant. Jeff and Jason ordered the stuffed peppers; Fraser and I had the spinach lasagna. Everything was fresh and healthy, which was great because it is SO easy to eat lousy, greasy food on the road!

This morning I met up with Brian Dozoretz for breakfast. He’s the guy who recorded the second am4 CD, and now lives in Ithaca and teaches at Ithaca College. Brian is another person I haven’t seen in several years, probably since we did that last am4 recording in December 2005!

We’ll be back in Ithaca on Friday, but today it’s off to Rochester, to play at the Bop Shop. This is a gig I booked well over a year ago, and have been looking forward to since then. Tom Kohn, the owner of Bop Shop, is a great guy, and I’m looking forward to meeting him in person after speaking to him for the last 13 months on the phone!

OK, the guys are back from their breakfast so I guess it’s bye bye for now as we have to get in the van and drive!

I must say, being on the road with Jeff, Jason, and Fraser is SO easy. We all get along great, have similar ideas about touring, and no one is on the prowl for vices (drugs, chicks) so we’re in good shape.

What?! A Night Off?!?!

Those of you who know me know that I am a workaholic. It’s not something I’m proud of; it’s just something I’ve always done. (I will admit that I am reading The Four-Hour Work Week to break out of this after many years of workaholism.

Today I was granted something I haven’t had in AGES: a night off! Basically, I was supposed to teach and then the student got sick and didn’t show up for the lesson. I was also supposed to go to a show and my friend and I couldn’t figure out if a) it was going to start anywhere close to on time and b) how late we would be out, which is a big deal right now since I’m training for the NYC Marathon and have to actually take care of myself. (what a concept!)

So, here I was with a “night off”. Whoa! What to do?

Well, my husband Andrey is in crunch mode with his newspaper. What’s worse is that his computer “blue-screened” and so he’s down in the basement of the building we live in working on the landlord’s spare PC. (Efforts to persuade Andrey to buy a Mac have been met with hostility. Mac-people vs. PC-people are almost as divided as Yankees and Red Sox fans, I’ve found. So I let it go.)

So, Andrey’s been in the basement all day. Since he doesn’t like the way I cook, he always insists that he cook the meals. Around 7:30, however, he came upstairs and went for his favorite snack – a head of cabbage – when he was supposed to be starting dinner.

Then we ordered pizza.

So, what did I do with my night off? I sent off some elaborate email to my email list, and now I’m blogging. And I worked on business stuff for my tour of New York State in November. I caught up on some listening (I have a pile of CDs to go through!) and returned some emails. After all this, I’ll send off press for the New York State tour.

I guess maybe it wasn’t a night off, then! But it was a night at home. Those are few and far between so they are nice when they show up.

A Gig With A View

The view from the gig

Today was an unusual gig of sorts, if only because it is a direct result of the “gentrification” of my neighborhood.

A while back I was approached to play a reception on the rooftop of a new luxury condominium building.

This was no ordinary luxury condominium, however; this was a building that was once an icon of my neighborhood, a building which, when altered, was mourned.

Before development

Locals cursed the developers, as they have for years now. We’ve all bemoaned the loss of the quiet neighborhood where everyone knows each other and says hello.

There are a lot of people moving in who use the area as an overpriced (although still cheaper than Manhattan) place to crash, then they’re on the way back into the city; they have nothing to do with us and we have nothing to do with them. More and more of them arrive home late – and drunk – on the weekends, and stumble – loudly – down my block at 3 a.m., a most disturbing trend that won’t quit. They are the reason we now have a grocery store, but it’s a high-end gourmet operation; we have a Duane Reade pharmacy now, but what will happen to the mom-and-pop store around the corner?

So it was a bit of a surprise that I got called to do the gig. All this time, I’ve felt like gentrification was what was happening all around me, and I had nothing to do with it. (Up until now, I had only been affected directly by – and thus annoyed by – the street parking situation.) Taking the gig felt a little like sleeping with the enemy, actually; I didn’t really tell too many of my neighbors that I was doing it. Wasn’t sure what they’d say, to be honest; knowing them, though, they’d probably be happy that someone got some work out of all the development mishegas.

Truth be told, the people I met were really nice, and they were very good to us. The gig was a lot of fun; I played a bunch of jazz standards for 2 1/2 hours with the great bassist Sean Conly and the great drummer Vinnie Sperrazza. They liked us so much that they would like to have us back for other events.

I will admit, though: it was weird being on the roof of an old icon with a makeover.

Play, Play, Play! (and then ramble on because I’m so tired)

It was a good day yesterday as it involved lots of playing.

Around noon, I took a Metro-North train upstate to play a session with the bassist Harvie S and the drummer Terry Silverlight. It was a great time! Harvie videotaped us playing the Duke Ellington composition “Take the Coltrane” and then posted it on YouTube. It’s my first video on YouTube, so that was fun.

Harvie S and me

Later in the evening I played a loud, raucous gig at Brooklyn’s Tea Lounge with my group Deathblow, and it was so much fun! Briggan Krauss held down the saxophone chair in Michaël Attias’s absence, joined by Sean Conly on bass and Satoshi Takeishi on drums. Two photographers (Peter Gannushkin and John Rogers) showed up to document the first set; I’ll add a link when there is one to add. The audience really seemed to be enjoying themselves, which made me happy. Some old friends showed up, and that’s always a nice surprise, and I met some new people, too.

So, that being said, today I am TIRED. I have to finish booking this tour of New York State that’s happening the second week of November and I feel like I’m SUPER behind. Thankfully I only have one, maybe two more nights to book, but then there’s the logistics and such. Music school NEVER prepared me for this, that’s for sure…I need an intern or an assistant or something! Or maybe just better time management skills. Or more coffee. Mmm, coffee…

And I was supposed to run today, but I’m so exhausted, I couldn’t do it. So I’ll run tomorrow. Fifty-one days until the NYC Marathon. A half-marathon feels normal now; it’s getting to those 26.2 miles (running 18 miles is the next step in this whole thing) that scares me to death. Is this normal?

The Mighty Have Fallen

And we waited...and waited...

Can someone PLEASE explain to me why, with flood and tornado warnings in the vicinity, and predicted thunderstorms for days now, the people at Lincoln Center decided that they would have the hubris and defiance against nature to present an outdoor concert that involved two hundred electric guitarists (yes, that’s right – TWO HUNDRED ELECTRIC GUITARISTS) when a perfectly suitable indoor space was available?

All week, 200 guitarists and 16 bassists have been rehearsing a world premiere of the piece “A Crimson Grail”, written by the renowned composer Rhys Chatham. We rehearsed in a beautiful Catholic Church two blocks from Damrosch Park (the outdoor location for Lincoln Center’s Out-of-Doors Festival), a church that was scheduled to be our “rain date” location.

We arrived at the church today to find out – surprisingly – that the people from Lincoln Center were planning on – and were very confident about – an outdoor performance. So we schlepped all of our gear to the park, set up, sound checked, rehearsed, and it was fantastic. Then we all went to dinner, and it poured. And kept pouring. Thunder and lightning was in abundance as well. And while they had covered our amps with plastic tarps “just in case”, they did not unplug our amps, nor did they move the power strips from the ground. What a recipe for disaster!

So what came next? A concert in the rain that included organum (13th century singing that sounds like heavy metal with voices) and a modern techno/minimalist piece that included “two of my least favorite things: cheap 80s techno and smooth jazz guitar solos” (a quote that was overheard by my husband, and summed up the hour-long piece completely). In fact, they made us – and the audience – wait for two and a half hours before apologizing profusely and promising a “rain check” (no pun intended) on “A Crimson Grail”.

Clearly the audience was there to see us, and Lincoln Center did not come through. When asked about it, I overheard one of the people in charge say that the church would have only held a tenth of the outdoor crowd. OK, fine, a tenth would have made it to hear the piece; but the piece would have been played. All of our hard work would have come to fruition. And a large group of people would have been very happy to have heard it.

I guess I’m missing the point – or maybe I’m not – but the fact remains that NO ONE got to hear the piece, and that is a tragedy in and of itself. Guitarists came from as far as Wisconsin to perform in this…and it didn’t happen? Shameful.