ateolf | Memphis Free Jazz Initiative

Last night was the accidental debut of Memphis Free Jazz Initiative! It was a very fun and pretty weird show. I think I mentioned the story of how it all came about, but I'll touch on it again. It all happened (at least this free jazz thing coming together) because of a misunderstanding! But I ran with it and put together an awesome ensemble! So I played drums for the first time in forever so I got up to the Hi Tone early to set my drums up. I lug all the stuff in by myself and am wondering where to set up when I get in as one of the other bands had already set up and taken up the whole stage area (with drums and other stuff). After I'd gotten everything loaded in and started to assemble them, the drummer whose drums were onstage offered to let everyone else use his drums. So I took him up on the offer and just stashed my kit back in the staging room (as much as I've played the Hi Tone's small room, I'd never been back there before!). It's always weird playing someone else's instrument, but it's always especially weird when it's drums, but it was a good kit and even though his drums were positioned/angled very differently from how I would have done it, I made it work and it wasn't as weird as I thought it might be at first. The atmosphere felt pretty weird at first. The other two bands playing brought a bit of a fratty vibe so then there's us doing a weird free jazz thing. But everyone was nice (it took a while before I got to talk to anyone so it felt weird for a bit). Anyway, after they all sound checked, my crew had arrived and we sound checked and things seemed to be sounding good. I got to get a feel for the drums and we got the accordion mic'd and the cello di'd. I thought our set went very well, especially considering we'd never played together at all before! I haven't played drums at all in years so I'm very much out of practice and out of shape on them, but I still had enough to get by and just made sure to rein it in and not get myself into anything I couldn't pull off. So yeah, it was me on drums, Jack on bass, Kole on accordion, and Otávio on cello. There were parts where the accordion and cello were locked in to something and it sounded awesome. I listened back to a bit of the recording and, well, unsurprisingly the drums were pretty loud and dominate everything and the accordion and cello through the pa were less loud than desirable, but that shit's hard to control on a small pa in a small room and considering everything, it was pretty good. I made sure to back off the drums a whole bunch and leave a bunch of space for the others (around my outbursts). About two-thirds of the way through, I noticed the crash cymbal was very broken and I hadn't notice that before so I had a bit of a panicky freak-out worried that I'd broken his cymbal! (Luckily I found out afterwards that it was already like that! I don't know why it took me so long to notice!) We got a warm reception in spite of us being very out-of-place in the whole thing. Also because of that, we played to a larger crowd than we would have otherwise! The rest of the show was a bit...well, the guy who set it up's brother who came up from New Orleans, his band was a bit Barenaked Ladies-ish so, yeah. Piano pop where he's pseudo-rapping trying-to-be-clever fratboy lyrics. It wasn't good but he was nice. The last band was also not good, less bad but just a little bit. They were guitar pop. They had a real commercial alternative sound with a "twist" of funk (yes, that's intentionally unappealing-sounding). Everyone else in my band had left before the end so I had to pack up all my drums (that I didn't use) by myself. I guess I could use the exercise?

That's it for all that. Now here's the recording of my solo electronic set from the night before: