Killer baris

There was an open Monday night in the Cellar schedule and Coat Cooke asked me if I wanted to put something together for July 10th. Ken Hoffman, my roommate from Banff, was planning to be in town. My original idea was to get trombonist Robin Jessome over from Victoria and we could revisit the ad hoc trio that did the surround sound recording. However, Robin and his wife Natalie are vacationing back home in Nova Scotia for the summer, so I called Chad Makela so as to have a three baritone sax group, with doubles on bass clarinet.

I also decided to work out some structures for each of the improvisations, particularly for the sake of Ken who's a great player, but not really experienced with free improv. I knew Chad would like it that way, too.

We set a rehearsal for the day previous to the gig and I brought about a dozen sketches of what I wanted to do. Ken and Chad hit it off immediately and the rehearsal went well, punctuated by honking and howling of Italian soccer fans celebrating the World Cup victory. I made a quick executive decision to forget about the bass clarinets. Ken hadn't brought his from Edmonton, so rather than search around for one to borrow, I thought we should just simplify.

The following night we showed up at the Cellar, and much to my chagrin, Raymon Torchinsky had brought his own bass clarinet for Ken to play. Unfortunately Chad and I hadn't brought ours. Raymon has been a great supporter of the series on behalf of the Cellar and has recorded most of the Monday night shows so far.

The gig was very lightly attended, the smallest crowd that I've played to there, but it was just 8 days since the jazz festival (burnout still a factor) and a lovely summer evening. That's pretty well impossible to compete against in this city.

Nevertheless, I thought the music went really well on the night. For the most part, my structured improvisations worked out. Chad and Ken and I had fun, and the audience enjoyed it. We each have our on disctinctive style on bari, and they complimented each other. Chad thinks that with some steady rehearsal, a really nice group could grow out of this, and I agree.

During the second set, Coat joined us for a couple of numbers, and that was really a blast. I'd asked Chris Kelly and Shane Krause to come by, but they couldn't. Six baris would have killed. Too bad Danny Kane isn't into this sort of thing any more - seven baris at once would probably have broken some sort of municipal bylaw.

Here's a shot of the four of us. I'll be picking up the rough mix from Raymon this coming week, so I'm very hopeful that the recording sounds as good as I expect it to be. My personal feeling is that some really fine music has been created during the Monday night run starting last year with the long engagement of the Coat Cooke Trio. Raymon has learned the house recording system and worked hard to get good raw recordings, then do rough mixes. Time may well prove that this has been a very important series of gigs, and to document it as well as he has is a real plus. I think there could be a number of great live cds coming out of this. There should be some distribution for them.

In the past week, we just finished our initial mixdown of the ion Zoo gig in February with Lisa Miller on piano. We did the mix at Chris Gestrin's place and were very happy with the sound on the night. Our next step is to have a group listening session and figure out just what we are going to do with it. This is one that may be releaseable as a cd. It's certainly good enough for festival submissions for the coming year.

Also on my calendar this week is a jaunt down to Seattle to play in the Paul Rucker Large Ensemble. Any time I get the call from Paul, I'm there.