Wednesday Rehearsal


Rode the Mariachi Bullitt, loaded with my guitar and a bag, to Atlas for a workout and then to Jon’s studio for a rehearsal with the quintet. Band sounded great, a very nice step forward from the last tour. Now that everyone knows the music well, we can work on improving the arrangements and that’s what we did.

Rode home in the afternoon and did a phone interview with the Easthampton Press for our concert at the Westhampton PAC in May.

The dates for Autumn in Germany are firm now – all solo:

Oct 03 – München, Germany – Carl Orff Saal
Oct 04 – Leipzig, Germany – Spiegelpalast
Oct 06 – Berlin, Germany – Kleine Arena Tempodrom
Oct 07 – Hamburg, Germany – Stage Club
Oct 08 – Hanover, Germany – Markuskirche
Oct 09 – Köln, Germany – Kulturkirche

Go here to see links to the venues. There will be three to four shows in Italy and Austria before Jon and I roll into Munich.

Current reading: The Janissary Tree by Jason Goodwin. After reading about Inspector Shan in Tibet (here, here, here and here) and Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep in Bangkok (here), I am now reading about the eunuch Yashim Togalu investigating crime in Istanbul in 1836. Lovely, to be entertained while learning something about foreign places. At one point Yashim makes a paste out of walnuts and garlic that he puts on fish. I want to try that with tofu or grilled chicken.

If you have to push helmets for bicyclists… at least do it like this. :-)

Please remember to add friends@ottmarliebert.com to your email-address book as I will be sending out a new password for May this week. Wouldn’t want to lose the password in your spam filter.

Autumn – Solo

Oct 03 – München, Germany – Carl Orff Saal
Oct 04 – Leipzig, Germany – Spiegelpalast
Oct 06 – Berlin, Germany – Kleine Arena Tempodrom
Oct 07 – Hamburg, Germany – Stage Club
Oct 08 – Hanover, Germany – Markuskirche
Oct 09 – Köln, Germany – Kulturkirche

Go here to see links to the venues. There will be three to four shows in Italy and Austria before Jon and I roll into Munich.

Six Degrees of Grillo

After hearing the duet between Stephen Duros and Jason McGuire, I googled Jason McGuire and found a whole bunch of YouTube videos featuring him. Some of the videos showed performances of a group that included Jose Blanco. Ring a bell?

Jose “El Grillo” Blanco sang our Spanish version of “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)” on the album The Hours Between Night + Day. Did I tell you the story about those lyrics? Well, we contacted Sony Mexico about a Spanish version of Marvin Gaye’s lyrics, assuming that somebody must already covered that great song. We didn’t get a definite answer until the day Grillo arrived at the studio in Santa Barbara – no, there is no Spanish version, none.

In the evening I welcomed Grillo to the studio, showed him around and gave him the news. I also gave him a printout of the original English lyrics, a copy of the music we had recorded, a bottle of vino tinto, a pad of paper and a pen and asked him to write the Spanish version.

The next morning Grillo arrived with Spanish lyrics and sang what you hear on the album.

I always felt the song should have been serviced to latin radio, but Sony/Epic did not agree with me. It received some airplay from radio stations that listened to the album, but it could have been much more. Anyway, I still enjoy our version a lot.

So, sixteen years later Stevo records a piece with Jason, who peforms with Grillo.

Music

Here is an example of the music available at Ottmar-Friends:

That’s a recording we made at our first rehearsal with new drummer Michael Chavez. Subscribers get to download a high quality 320kbps mp3 version. I started out thinking I would offer one or two tracks per month, but we are already up to 11 downloads in two month. They are mostly 320kbps mp3s, but there is also a 24 bit 96kHz aiff file for audiophiles.

Monday I presented to the subscribers a new mix I am working on, a unreleased and unnamed bossa recorded during the sessions for The Hours Between Night + Day in the Spring of 1993. It’s a lovely bossa with a nice koto solo by Osamu Kitajima, but a CD can only handle about 74 minutes of music and The Hours Between Night + Day was packed full and tight.