If I had known it was called the Friday Night Jazz Orchestra I would never have gone.
We renamed our little quartet Oops and the Jazz Pilgrims. I’m Oops. It’s the word I said most last night.
Decades ago my guitar playing kind of hit a plateau at “Louie Louie” and “I Saw Her Standing There.” I have hardly played guitar or drums since 2014. I walked in last night and heard Chuck Holton and Dan Newnam on piano and bass, respectively, and almost left out of respect. I was expecting Beatles and Who, not melodious Herbie Hancock. In my experience, the better the musicians the more gracious, open, and generous they are. I soon discovered that Chuck and Dan are two of the best musicians I’ve ever played with.
The drummer didn’t show up. There was no other guitar player there.
Mwaaahahaha!
We did “One After 909” five times longer than the Beatles and I sort of kept up. I’d planned to stay until 10 p.m., 45 minutes. At 2:30 a.m. I left. We did a 20-minute version of “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” and “Drive My Car,” “Nowhere Man,” “Dock of the Bay,” “I Can See Clearly Now,” and a jazzy “For What It’s Worth.”
It was all jazzy. Elvis Costello’s “Alyson” on drums and an extended drums-piano jazz duet at 2:15 a.m. for which I was too tired to know I should not attempt to accompany this great jazz musician on a jazz improv.
“I call Chuck’s playing out-of-the-box jazz… called jazz only because there’s nothing else to call it,” says my friend and singer
Alan Archibald, who encouraged me to join in last night.
Alan sang with such power he didn’t need a mic even over Chuck’s piano, the bass, and my loud drumming and Rickenbacker 350.
“We humans are ordained at our best -- whether literally or figuratively -- to find ways to be soaringly harmonic,” said Alan.
You can soar on one chord, on one note. There were moments when we soared.
May you find ways, and people, to soar with.
No comments:
Post a Comment