Sunday, February 22, 2009

A Day for Music…

What I really wanted to do at this point was stop singing and listen to Bowman play, but I soldiered on with a smile. Photo by Jon Montgomery
Here we are at the Artz benefit enjoying some music we could hardly hear. Photo by Jon Montgomery (He was here, too.)
… and music of all kinds. We started this Sunday morning in church singing “Aquarius/Let the Sun Shine” to balance a rash of more traditional hymns. The choir director’s ubermusical son joined us on stage.
It was strange having someone else play bass, especially since he played so much better than I do. (But then I think he is majoring in performance—maybe composition—and will probably go on to grad school.) There were times I just wanted to listen to him play rather than concentrate on what I was supposed to be doing.
He played a Peavy bass that came with the frets filed down so that it occasionally gives that fretless moan but has the pitch stability of a fretted bass. I’d like to look into that for some of my own tunes.
The choir director played a really nice piece by Sate, which apparently sounds a lot like sauté, for the postlude. The piece was very lovely in its misleading simplicity. That is, it sounded simple but wasn’t.
Afterward we practiced with a Dixieland-ish—I can’t call it a Dixieland band because we have sheet music and we all mostly play what is written—band. We will perform in church and at a religious education dinner over the next couple of weeks—but I’m not sure in which order.
Later we went to a benefit to save Artz Rib House, a South Austin landmark that has fallen on hard times recently. We took Beccano’s band, Triskelion. We arrived in time to stand in a really long line and listen to Art’s band while we waited.
After Art, we listened to a local jazz duet featuring trumpet and piano. Suna got to hear her heartthrob Slaid Cleaves do a set that ended with a yodel. We left during a set by a really hot, young local fiddler. I had had about as much fun as I could handle in a day, and the kids were looking bored.

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