The Karl Denson Trio

Sacramento is not a hip place. It's a nice place- it has big trees, fancy houses, wide streets. The Governator keeps it safe and clean. But it's not generally the place to find cool new music. So I was pleasantly surprised last Wednesday when I went to see The Karl Denson Trio at Harlow's in Sacramento. It's been a long time since I've seen good jazz live.

The trio was made up of a drummer, sax/flute player, and keyboard player. They produced a huge sound for only three people. The keyboard player played two keyboards at once: he played the bass melodies on a Nord with his left hand, and funky gospel-y organ with his right. The driving melodies and harmonies were super tight, and the sax player and keyboard player had perfected a mysterious system for building up melodies while improvising over the course of the song. Sometimes the sax player would play the flute, and I've never seen flute played in such a bad-ass way. He literally had to wipe his face with a towel in between flute solos. Jason (the bass player in our band) said that he hoped one day to achieve the musical level of the keyboard player's left hand.

The Karl Denson trio had the whole crowd dancing on the floor. And these were mostly middle aged white guys in their "going out" tech teeshirts.

I think my favorite song was Lunar Orbit (it had a killer face-mopping flute solo), which is also the title track of their new album.

Grant got the memo

On Thursday we all had to dress up for the company photo. As you can see form this picture, Grant, the company mascot, got the memo.

How many engineers does it take to arrange a group photo? All of them. First everyone suggests all possible ideas for lighting, arrangement of people, location. Then everyone argues about the order in which to try all specified permutations, then the camera is accidentally set on 'auto' and takes 40 pictures of everyone arguing. 45 minutes later we had 100 photos of the team, the probability of having taken a good photo finally approaching 1.

the beach in late november

Yesterday Skip and I went on a long hike down the Pacific coast trail starting from Muir Beach, which is a little bit north of San Francisco. The day was perfect: 65 degrees, sunny, breezy but not too windy, and the views were spectacular. It's been 65-70 degrees and sunny for the last few months. Why have I not been living in California my entire life? Seattle had a good music scene, but you lose the whole winter to gray and drizzly gloom. And everyone in the office buildings have those (ironically depressing) bright anti-seasonal-depression lights in their offices.

Anyway, the beach was beautiful, and it felt great to hike for a few hours. Afterwards we went to San Francisco and hung out in little italy where we had some fantastic Italian food for dinner and hit up the City Lights bookstore. I managed to only buy two books. I need to work down my stack of books to read before I let myself get any more books. I'm currently working my way through all of Phillip Roth and Ian McEwan, who are quickly becoming two of my favorite authors. Ian McEwan in particular is a master storyteller.

Happy Rocksgiving

While millions of Americans braved the ever deteriorating airlines to visit loved ones, and hundreds of Davisites headed east to Lake Tahoe, this year I was lazy and stayed home. We made a huge thanksgiving dinner, and then rocked out in the garage.

This was the first year I had ever attempted to make a turkey. Last year we celebrated with friends who made a mountain of steamed dumplings, and the year before with friends who welded together a roasting spit from an old motor and bicycle chain, then roasted an entire lamb ("lambsgiving").

Roasting a turkey for the first time worked out well, thanks to the internet. We looked up turkey roasting guides and videos on youtube and managed to average together the sometimes conflicting information into a coherent recipe. We also made potatoes, greenbeans, stuffing, and Jason brought over salads.

So we put the turkey in the oven, and then headed to the garage for some music. It turns out that our average extended jam session length is about the same amount of time you're supposed to wait between basting the turkey. Skip was on the drums, I was on the vibes, and Jason was on the bass, achieving a nice balance. We wrote a few songs, ate a massive amount of food, and then passed out. Good times.

I'm an internet subgroup!

riot prrl

binary solo! (flight of the conchords)

I can't possibly do this band justice with description, so I'll just post links.

The humans are dead

Business time

Angry dance

How to be in a band

I've been in rock bands on and off for the past 10 years. They were all fun, and all dysfunctional, but in predictable ways. Looking back on these bands, I've noticed some patterns and some lessons I wish I had learned earlier:

1. Decide early whether this band is a collective or all about one person.
There are benefits to both types of band. If one person is running the show, the burden of writing songs, booking gigs, footing the bill, and doing marketing is mostly on that person. The rest of you just have to show up and play. Or if it's your show, you get complete creative control. If it's not your show, sometimes you do have to put up with hearing the lead person talk excessively about how awesome they are, and about their various relationship problems (which usually end up inspiring the songs). Sometimes you have to put up with getting your opinions carelessly vetoed. But you get to be in a band for relatively little cost in terms of time and money.
In a collective, everyone gets a say, and everyone is treated equally. Generally you all split the costs, and do the songwriting and marketing work together. This is more free and equal, but the downside is that everything takes longer. Writing songs as a group that actually congeal as distinguishable songs (and not 20 minute jam sessions) takes a long time. Also, you are constantly negotiating and compromising. And if your collective is comprised mostly of hippies (as collectives tend to be), the process of making any decisions (where should we play out? what kind of music should we make?) will take forever because no one wants to be the leader.

2. Create bands with people who are at your skill level.
You don't all have to be musical super geniuses, but being at the same level will allow to write songs you know the rest of the group can play, allow you to improvise more easily, and will allow you to avoid fights. If one member of the group is much more technically advanced than the rest, there will be an inevitable fight about this person being an uninvolved snob. If one member of the group is technically less advanced, there will be an inevitable fight about this person not improving. It's much easier to avoid this situation altogether.

3. Expect to argue about the band name for about 6 months.
Choosing a band name is hard. Finding a name that everyone doesn't hate is harder. But hold out hope, and avoid compromising on a mediocre name that nobody likes but nobody particularly dislikes.

4. Don't burn out
When preparing for a gig, it's easy to want to practice many times a week, for hours each time, but in doing this you hit diminishing returns too quickly. It's fun to sit and noodle for hours when you are writing songs, but when you're rehearsing a set list, it's better to limit practices to roughly twice the length of the set list. I personally don't find it useful to practice more than twice a week, and would find once a week ideal. I also don't like to have a practice the day before a show. Also, it's important to give yourself time to continue to play and create music on your own, so you can keep the creative juices flowing, and make sure you get some musical cross-pollination.