We had a good gig with Anesti last night at cc3's new Tuesday install, Canyon Creek Square One. We're playing very different material with Anesti than we do with Eric (or anyone else). Anesti, for one, brings lots of gear, so his guitar tone changes on every tune; his view is that if he's melody and harmony then he should bring some variation sonically to each tune. It's a cool approach, and he's a damn fine player. We're still settling on what the repertoire should be (I think we played too many rock tunes last night, but the audience seemed to enjoy it....), but this is going to be a fun gig.

The topic of the musician's union came up last night in our conversations. Without going so far as to say I am "anti-Union" (I may be, I just won't go so far as to say it), I do feel that it's goals and mandate do not represent what I am doing professionally. Anesti argued that the Union protects musicians by guaranteeing a minimum fee for our services; yet he acknowledged that a vast majority of Union musicians regularly take (and rely on) gigs that pay below that scale. The question we debated was whether the Union is failing the musicians, or whether musicians are failing the Union?

I tend to support the notion of a free market for the exchange of creative services, and as such, have found that in addition to being a drummer I am also a record company executive, booking agent, online commerce manager, etc. At times, it may be prudent to use my drumming as a "loss leader" for other things to flourish (such as with my trio with Tim and Ed). If I squarely defined myself as a drummer only, my professional mandate would not allow for that (I would place the financial compensation for my drumming above all other aims).

Yes, "Union" gigs pay better than most of the gigs I do, but I wouldn't be working at all if I relied on Union gigs to pay my bills. The amount of gigs in that category are far fewer than the number of musicians capable of playing them. Does that mean I should stop playing until those gigs become available to me? I don't think so; I find work for myself and my groups at what I deem to be a fair price for my time/effort/expertise. My career, as such, is a rather complex combination of creative services that I sell to variety of clients, not all of whom immediately associate me with "drummer". There is always someone willing to work for less than the "going rate", and that is what the Union tries to discourage (they can't possibly believe that they can eliminate it). The fact is, the Union doesn't seem to have time to spread it's message beyond symphony orchestras and musical pit bands in this city. Most of the venues I make music in would simply stop presenting live music if they had to comply with Union rates and regulations. It's as simple as that. The music business is one that requires its participants to make their own opportunities, and to be flexible and adaptive to a changing marketplace. I have my doubts as to whether Union affiliation would be an asset or a hindrance in that regard.

For those of you that visit here before the homepage, the poster for the August 6 gig is now up.

This morning I am making notes on the mixes Pacy sent to me and I'm beginning the digital "booklet" that will accompany the download of our new EP.

There's a momentum happening here. The cancellation of the tinyTour that never was has yielded another opportunity: we may do an "off-site" gig in the Guelph Jazz Festival sept 7-11. The GJF this year features the Art Ensemble of Chicago, which is just plain AWESOME. Also, Ed Z mentioned to Tim and I at our gig in May that many years ago he wanted to be AEC's Roscoe Gordon, with the exception of wearing the dress. :)

The tinyTour is no more, for now.

Scheduling and expense have dictated that the tinyTour should wait until the fall. In the meantime we'll still be hitting at The Red Guitar on August 6 and hopefully doing a Sunday @ Pepperjack's in August. Stay tuned for a tinyTour in September or October.

Meanwhile, I am definitely in the thick of my SIRCorp/Canyon Creek monopoly gigs for the summer. When HBS plays, I am soundtech + drummer + bandleader, so my night includes transporting, setting up and tearing down the PA (then unloading it back at home again), plus setting up and tearing down my drums, plus carrying enough cash to pay the guys in the band and bringing an invoice and collecting and depositing the payment from the venues. Oh yeah, and play the drums. In addition to this I am on the phone between gigs making sure there are players for each show, etc. Needless to say it's a lot of work. But, it's good work. I'm rewarding myself with a Giant Beat cymbal from PAISTE, I can't wait!

This week it's just cc3 on tues and thurs and then HBS hits at Canyon Creek/Sherway with Chris Stott on drums Saturday night (I am taking the weekend off for two very important friend and family functions).

I stumbled into booking shows for the new three-o this week. While my idea of a miniTour hasn't come to fruition, other things have presented themselves. Expect us back at Pepperjack's (Hamilton) in September and the miniTour has been re-named the "tinyTour", as it is now (if it happens) only 2 dates:

Saturday August 6 - The Red Guitar - Toronto (evening)
Sunday August 7 - TBA - Guelph (time TBA)

Ok, over the course of the day the three-o miniTour has been squashed from 3 possible dates to 2. Looks like we'll be gigging August 6 in Toronto and (possibly) August 7 in Guelph. Stay tuned....

The new three-o (tim, ed and myself) are hopefully booking some shows in the beginning of August. If it all falls into place, we'd do August 5-6-7 in three cities in Southern Ontario. Tentative scheduled so far is August 6 in Toronto at a new venue called The Red Guitar. I will confirm this soon, and then officially post it on the website.

Our new 5-song release will come out in July as a free download at cc.com, and then soon to follow available at iTunes. I'm still working on a title and cover art, I hope to have that soon.

My Canyon Creek sched this week:

Tonight! cc3 debuts @ Canyon Creek Square One! 7pm-10pm
Thursday: HBS w/ Lester McLean @ Canyon Creek Burlington 7pm-11pm
Saturday: HBS /Todd Harris @ Canyon Creel Sherway 7pm-11pm

Kevin's gig tonight was fun. Probably the loosest of the gigs this band has done so far. Everyone played well, and I think it was perhaps the most appreciate crowd we've had yet, but the gig just felt a bit sloppy. I am not sure where this band is headed next: it's 10 pieces and no one is really making any money. Kevin has built up alot of goodwill amongst the musicians in Toronto, and he's rightfully cashing in some of it with this project, but it can only last for so long before everyone's schedules start to conflict to the point of disintegrating the band. The music is excellent, as are the players and everyone's intentions; the band needs some sort of patron saint to drop an extra $1000 in the cashbox everytime we play. Then we could all go home renumerated and Kevin's music would make it out to the world.

Tomorrow is the Waterfront Festival in Port Credit with HBS. I'm on a kick right now to expand the current repertoire of HBS and clean up some rather ugly versions of tunes we do now. I'm getting some resistance and I find that disheartening. My reasons for pushing for these renovations is that the work we are getting demands it. We're often doing 4 set gigs and we find ourselves at the end of repertoire before the end of the 4th set. Furthermore, there are some tunes that our versions have become so idiosyncratic (different lyrics, goofy arrangements, etc.) that the audience isn't digging them. When the audience wants to sing along, we better be doing the song the way they know it. Anyway, I was hoping for a more positive reaction to my suggestions.... let's just hope it's only 3 sets tomorrow. :)

Busy night tonight:

It began around 3:30, when I delivered a bouquet of gerber daisies to my grade 12 students @ ESA in celebration of their final performance tonight. I chose the complimentary "Happy Retirement" card for the bouquet. My work @ ESA is something I don't really blog much about, but it's a big thing for me, and I really dig working with such talented young people.

From there I delivered Hot Buttered Soul's PA system to Canyon Creek: Square One location for the HBS gig tonight that Chris Stott was subbing in on for me. Then I headed down to Burlington, and had some extra time so I stopped in to visit my brother and his family for a bit before hitting @ Canyon Creek: Burlington with a special cc3 of myself, Kevin Cooke on bass and David Patterson on guitar. It was cold tonight on the patio, and the general mood somewhat subdued. David is such an excellent player, so smooth, he really makes it seem effortless. Kevin is an interesting contrast to that. He's like a big kid, blowing HUGE solos on his 6-string bass, and then grooving and accompanying in a somewhat scattered fashion. Just when I thought he wasn't listening to me and it wasn't "there", I realize he's right there with me, but kind of reversed (like on cop shows when they look through the two way mirror into the interrogation room). At any rate, I think we made some nice music. I'm looking forward to playing with both of these gentlemen Saturday night in Kevin's big blues band @ Clinton's.

On the negative side of things: a bird shit on my drums while I was playing tonight. Everyone's a critic.

After packing up and getting paid and paying out at Burlington I headed back to Square One where HBS was just finishing up. They sounded good, but it was still weird for me. Like watching someone dance with your wife. :)

We packed up and got paid there, and then Stott started busting my balls about how they didn't get a meal for free at the gig. I know he was kidding but I think my bandleader nerves were a bit frayed by that point: I suggested he go join the Musician's Union if he wants dinner. :)

It's a touchy subject. Back in the "old days" free booze and food was a given when playing restaurant gig. These days, it's not so cut and dried, and to be honest, from my position as a bandleader/booker, I'm not really interested in negotiating for food and drink. I think "soft" beverages should always be free (and they almost uniformly are), but the booze and the food are where these restaurants make their profits, and live music is almost always paid for out of profits; it's not a line item in their budget.

Anyway, some places we play are very generous, and we appreciate it (note to working musicians: if you get dinner and drinks SERVED to you, TIP THE SERVER based on the retail value of what you're eating or drinking). But, it's certainly not a deal-breaker for me if they don't want to feed the band. Alot of people disagree with me on this, and insist on maintaining that it's just a common courtesy. My opinion is that I'd rather not be in a situation where my clients are "doing me favours" (which is how some venues view feeding the band). They get a great service at a fair price (not cheap, but fair), and let's leave it at that. I've operated on this principle in my dealings with the Canyon Creek organization and my invoices to them have increased substantially every year.

Anyway, now I'm home with some inexplicable extra energy. So y'all got a late-night blog. Tomorrow is a day off, with shopping and socializing scheduled. Saturday is Kevin Cooke @ Clinton's, then Sunday HBS plays the Waterfront Festival in Port Credit from 1pm-5pm.

Here's the official plug for my gig with Kevin Cooke Band this Saturday night:


==================================
Mark your calendar: Sat. June 18th

THE KEVIN COOKE BAND

"All the horns & twice the percussion!"

LIVE AT CLINTON'S TAVERN
693 Bloor Street West
at the Christie Subway Station


map to venue


Featuring the 10 (possibly 11 or 12) piece band
for a paltry $5.00 cover

Show starts at 9:30pm
Come for dinner -- stay for the show!

Bring your friends out to see the amazing
ELECTRIC HOCKEYSTICK!

I played a dance class this morning, and will head out @ 3:30 to view my students' dress rehearsal for their final show @ ESA (I'll miss the show due to a cc3 gig). In between I've been doing some admin and realizing that times are pretty good in my career-world. I went to the mailbox to find three cheques from various clients. All three of these cheques, for various reasons, arrived with an absolute minimum of hassle on my part and the work I did to receive them was very pleasurable and creative. My email Inbox contained an offer this afternoon to teach and play at the Toronto Dance Theatre Summer School, which I am not sure I can do (the offer while well-intended, may be too late for me to fit into my schedule) but have nothing but fond memories of doing it last year. I've got a healthy calendar of live gigs for the next three months and at some point in that period will be releasing the new collection of music by myself, Tim, and Ed. Will this last? I don't know, it never has before, but I should start trusting that it will return when it does go away, and maybe bank a bit of $$$ while I've got it. (Which may mean not buying a full set of PAISTE re-issue Giant Beats, which even at my endorsee price could be quite pricey, but they're SOOOO nice.)

My only problem these days is that I can't figure out how my friend Ed Pas blogs so freaking much!, and it's interesting!

Pacy and I had a mixing session @ HILO yesterday. Wow, the stuff sounds INCREDIBLE. All credit goes to Pacy's fine facility and his ability. Thanks to him, we've ended doing a lot of mix "moves" one normally doesn't see on a so-called-jazz recording. The result is going to be a collection of pieces with lots of sonic depth (beyond the performance itself), we've done a few "headphone mix" type of things in terms of sonic spatiality. I can't wait to finish. Probably at least another two weeks before we can get done (not that there is that much left to do, but more because of scheduling to get into the studio together).

Anyway, I think this new band is something special, and once you hear the recordings, hopefully you'll agree.

The MHSB shows are off to a good start. I caught all my cues, and managed to play some interesting music in the process. I'm still working out some technical issues with Reason. With each different patch I use the volume goes up and down, so depending on what I'm playing with it (i.e. synth and drumset, or synth and Tibetan cymbals, etc.) the Reason sounds are sometimes too quiet.

I experienced a "first" tonight: my chair collapsed underneath me. All comments about my weight aside, I was using my "C" drum stool (as in "A" being the best), or the third of the three stools I own. During the first show I thought my stool was just really squeaky, and then in the second show, after it collapsed (thankfully I wasn't playing at the time, but it still made a HUGE noise), those sounds revealed themselves to be metal fatigue. I ended up sitting on my amp for the rest of the show. I'll have to take stool A or B in tomorrow.

My set-up for this gig is kinda cool, a synth keyboard on the left, a 3 pc (snare, kick, floor tom) kit in the middle, and then hand drums and various percussion to the right along with the iBook, all in somewhat of a semi-circle. The cymbal array is quite a mixture: left to right, 13" Signature medium hihats, 18" Innovations crash-ride, 14" Sound Formula crystal crash, 20" Visions Novo China, 6" FO 602 Bell, and a gorgeous 22" (I think) Peace Gong. All PAISTE (of course), all exquisite.

Tomorrow is a matinee with MHSB and then an evening hit with Hot Buttered Soul.

Just checking in while I have a few hours between gigs. I played two dance classes this morning and the studio had to have been at least 30Celsius; way too hot for the work we were doing. Anyway, I complain about winter so I can't really start complaining about warm weather now, can I?

We had a great gig last night at Canyon Creek. The re-constituted full-time cc3 of myself, mp and eric boucher is coming up with some great stuff,and getting to play outside allows us a bit more room volume-wise. Mainly, I get to use sticks, as opposed to brushes, blasticks and my hands. Ironically, the most "noticed" (in that post-set listeners mentioned it) part of my playing last night was when I put my sticks down and accompanied mike's bass solo with handclaps. Anyway, it's going to be a great summer making music with this band.

But, next week it's a substitute trio of myself, david patterson and kevin cooke. Then the following week, Hot Buttered Soul takes over the Canyon Creek patio. So, cc3 re-convenes on June 30. Also, the "other" cc3 of myself, mp and anesti karantakis starts up in two weeks on Tuesday nights @ Canyon Creek Square One.

I'm trying to focus on my gigs with the Martha Hicks ballet school this weekend. I'm playing improvised interludes between their dances, it's a fun gig, lots of experimentation, and the people are all very cool and oh so nice. However, today has been bogged down with my duties as bandleader&booker, as I find myself short of a singer on a bunch of HBS dates. Rather than panic, I'm going to hope. And beg. And maybe have to pay more than I want to get a substitute singer. :)

On Monday I'm mixing @ HILO with Pacy Shulman. I'm excited, this is going to be a great suite of tunes. I'm thinking about making it a freebie here at the website, in exchange for a little data-mining: To access the entire "album" one has to sign up to my email list. Sounds fair? I hope so. You can always email back and be taken off the list, but I'd like to try this approach.

I'm hoping to announce a gig for the band soon. With any luck it will be in the first week of August at a new venue in Toronto, stay tuned...

I am staring in the face of a very busy week! In addition to 10 dance classes this week @ ESA, I'm doing a cc3 hit on Thursday and an HBS on Saturday (which I have to rent the PA system for...). Squeezing in around this are 6 shows for the Martha Hicks School of Ballet. The MHSB gig is one I have done for a few years now, and it's great fun and a great group of people to work with. Essentially, I perform musical interludes in between dance pieces in their show. The shows are thematic (this year is a "colour" theme) so my interludes "set up" the next piece and its theme. Sounds simple, right? Well, there are 9 shows in total (Nick Coulter is subbing for me on shows 1,4&5), 50 pieces (about 20 in each individual show), and different running orders for each show. It gets crazy from an organizational standpoint.

My hope was to utilize the drumKAT this year in the show, but alas, I am still struggling to find a way to make this device useful for me and my work. I spent Friday afternoon at Evan Ritchie's studio, and he generously and patiently helped me program some "kits" (trigger setups for the KAT to talk to sound source, in this case a rented Kurzweil device). I decided to can the idea when we were basically taking an hour to finish the first kit, and it still wasn't what I wanted. And I had 20 more kits to create! The interface for the KAT is cumbersome and to actually use it as a performance tool require so much prep-time that I lose interest in playing music on it by the time it's ready!

I decided to just use my crappy Yamaha Portasound keyboard as a MIDI controller for my iBook (running Reason), as I did a few months back on that Melissa Rebronja gig. I spent about half an hour creating a bunch of Reason setups (basically just picking patches for the internal sampler), which will all sit on the iBook desktop and I can simply open these files and the new sound will appear, no need to scroll through menus and find the right patch. With the keyboard I can just improvise and play what I hear in the moment, as opposed to pre-determining which notes will be played by the KAT pads.

The KAT itself is an awesome tool, if you take the time to program it. Perhaps if the work I had provided a large pre-production budget, I could allocate time and money to getting the KAT set up, but that magic gig hasn't come yet.

GIG REPORT:

Here's a clip of my song "megtwo" from my gig on Friday night. This is a cool trio, and the more I think about it, our demo will probably become an actual release (download or CD, or both, stay tuned...). Anyway, let the music from the gig speak for itself, click here to watch a clip.

Mixing sessions @ HILO are probably delayed until next week. I'll report track-by-track once we're into mixing.

Otherwise, this week is dance classes and a cc3 hit @ Canyon Creek Burlington w/eric boucher and mike pelletier. Next week is wild, with dance classes, a 6-show theatre gig and a cc3 gig and a Hot Buttered Soul... yikes!