Sunday, July 4, 2004

Really Big Band This is the short version to see if you have any interest...in your music as done by others....my 20 piece Big Band??? Knowing you hover often at Santa Fe...a place I dearly love...I had a friend who composes and arranges accept a challenge from me to do an experimental arrangement, entitled Santa Fe Suite, of two of your standards...Santa Fe and Barcelona Nights...as a big band chart. I have a "reading band" where we just get together and read a variety of literature. I wanted to experiment to see if Flamenco and/or Ottmar Liebert would work for a big band. My instrumentation is 5 saxes; 5 trombones; 5 trumpets; piano, guitar, bass, drums. I think it came out really wonderfully well. I can send you a homegrown CD of the reading for your critique and hopeful enjoyment if you wish??? How cool is that!! I would love to hear that, wouldn't you. I do hope he will let me put an mp3 of this recording in our Listening Lounge! A few years ago I thought it would be fantastic to challenge very different ensembles to cover "Barcelona Nights" and to put the results on a CD... like a Reggae band, a Polka band, a string quartet etc... I am looking forward to hearing this Big Band version!   6:35:15 PM     Dinosaur Fuzz Box This is the fuzz box Jon uses for his solo at the end of "Cave in my Heart". Jon's brother Joe makes them.   5:05:50 PM     Palmas (clapping) I used a lot of palmas on "La Semana", but on this tour we are not doing any. Robby and Ron have never done palmas and one needs three people to make them sound right - two playing the downs and one for the ups. To bring an additional three people on the tour just for palmas seemed rather frivolous to me, plus I enjoyed the challenge of re-arranging the music to fit this particular quartet! And then there is the realization that doing palmas on stage will only encourage certain members of the audience to join in and unfortunately it is usually the ones who are tipsy or devoid of any sense of rhythm who feel the biggest urge to participate!   4:27:04 PM     Last Night in Seattle... ...we started our second set at the Triple Door with Duende Del Amor which clocked in at 20 minutes. We had to cut a song towards the end of the show because we were having such a good time that almost every song "took longer" to play. Now we have a harddrive that contains the music from all four performances in Seattle, which I am looking forward to listening to once we get home. This is not like the 2 track recordings taken directly from the board which Alan makes of every show - these are multitrack recordings of every instrument/microphone before they go through the EQ and reverb/effects for the house. I hope to mix this music sometime this summer. Some of it will probably appear in our Listening Lounge and some of the tracks might go into the vault for the next Limited Edition package. Another idea that came up is to pair a CD of these live recordings with the footage from the BRAVO! concert. Maybe a double package containing a DVD from the 1999 Luna Negra XL octet at Bravo! and a CD with music from the 2004 Luna Negra quartet at the Triple Door. The Triple Door is another wonderful surprise from this tour. I love the place and look forward to playing there again.   4:02:34 PM

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