There’s been lots and lots of rain the last couple weeks. I finished part two of project dirt on Saturday. Too wet to do much else. I’m up to 12 wheelbarrow loads. Looks like maybe three or four to finish off.
Jeannie and went upstate on Sunday to visit Martin and the family. Once we got there the weather turned unusually cold and there was even a snow flurry.
Martin’s boys Charlie and Matthew are now playing sax, mainly an alto which they share. It turns out they’re pretty good, particularly Charlie, who is a couple years older and has been playing longer. Martin has been giving them lesson and plays a (very nice Selmer Mark VI) tenor. There’s alot of duets with a Bb and Eb horn. So I gave them my old (cheap Chinese, but still decent and playable) soprano sax so the boys could play together. I brought up my (ancient classic Conn) bari sax, which used to belong to Martin, so we could play as a quartet and have some fun. I wrote out a couple John Coltrane blues charts, Blue Trane and Equinox, as double duets so we could all jam together.
That night Martin, Jeannie and I went to see a concert in The Egg, a strange theater in the downtown Albany capital complex. It was Steve Hackett, the guitarist from the classic lineup of Genesis in the 1970’s. I had heard that Genesis was touring this year and was thinking of going to see them. Genesis of course was one of the great prog rock bands of all time, and I was a big fan as a teenager. But their last really good album was Abacab in 1981 or so. So I didn’t really want to see them play songs like Invisible Touch, and figured there’s no way they’d do something like Supper’s Ready, so I passed on it.
Then Martin told me Steve Hackett is touring this year and the tour is called Genesis Revisited. I think Genesis was Martin’s favorite prog band of that era and he got particularly into the 12-string guitar and Hackett’s whole bag, just as mine was Emerson Lake and Palmer and I got heavy into synthesizers and Keith Emerson’s thing.
And it turned out the be a great show. The Egg is a unique venue, all modernist curved concrete and vertical hardwoods, very sci-fi, with outstanding acoustics. The fist set was drawn from Hacket’s solo work, and reminded me of guys like Alan Holdsworth and Jeff Beck. His sound is actually very diverse and often quite subtle. The second set he basically recreated the classic Genesis live album Seconds Out, which was all their best stuff from that era. The musicianship was outstanding and the band knew every part. They augmented the usual five-piece lineup with a sax player, who was excellent.
I’d always wondered how they got their sound live, so some things were a revelation. One is the bass player had a doubleneck combo bass and 12-string guitar. I’d seen Geddy play one on Xanadu, but the Genesis sound leaned on it pretty heavily. The other was Taurus pedals. This was a funny little foot-operated analog bass synthesizer by Moog in the 1970’s, played like the pedals of an organ. They appeared to be the genuine article (the Mellotrons were all recreated using samplers) and it must have been hooked up some very powerful subwoofers. The tone was huge and so low as to be on the edge of subsonic. Sometimes it didn’t even sound like tones in the chord, just massive low frequency energy. Definitely something you can’t get from listening to a record.
Today it finally got of to seventy degrees in the afternoon, once the rain stopped.