Switching gears completely, my jazz group has booked it’s first gig. We’re playing Friday November 14 at the Bassline Jazz Club in Mount Vernon, starting at 9:00. The address is:
The Bassline
130 E 1st St, Mt Vernon, NY 10550
(914) 433-1052
For those of you who don’t know, we play a good variety of modern jazz, straight-ahead, hard bop, latin, and funk, from cats like Miles, Monk, Mingus, Joco, Horace Silver, Wayne Shorter, Hank Mobley, Clifford Brown, Joe Zawinul, the list goes on.
Rehearsal have gotten a bit less relaxed now, as we want to get everything tight for the show: beginnings and endings, transitions, who’s soloing when and all that. Should be no problem, but we have a half-dozen or so new tunes in addition the ones we already know well. We actually have enough material for two shows, so if the first show goes well we’ll do another.
Now we need to come up with a name for the band. The top contender right now is the Seven West Jazz Band, or some variation on that, because there are seven of us and we rehearse in Westchester, and it’s short and easy to say. There are other ideas floating around. We’ll see where it ends up.