Playing the blues @ 3 Quarks Daily with Out of Control

I’ve got a new post at 3 Quarks Daily:

On the Road with The Out of Control Rhythm and Blues Band, https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2023/11/on-the-road-with-the-out-of-control-rhythm-and-blues-band.html

It’s an expansion of a post from about two weeks ago: On the road and Out of Control [It’s the blues]. I'm the trumpet player at the lower left in the video above.

Both posts are built on incidents which I recount in varying levels of detail.

One incident that didn’t make the cut happened when we held auditions for a new guitarist. We put an advertisement in the local entertainment weekly, The Metroland, and prepared audition tapes for those who wanted to tryout. I think we had, say, three tunes on the tape, different kinds of tunes. They had to learn them for the audition. Beyond that, we wanted to see how they soloed.

I forget how many dudes tried out, but one guy didn’t take us seriously. He showed up with beautiful equipment, twin cream-colored Marshall amplifiers, with gold plated fittings on the amps and his guitar. But he hadn’t looked at the audition tape. He just wanted to jam a blues in E. I forget whether we indulged him, but he didn’t get the gig. If we’d had a lever that opened a whole in the floor and sent him packing, we’d have pulled it quick.

A somewhat different incident happened while we were performing at The Blockhouse Beef and Brew in Schenectady, which was a hangout for a gang of biker Vietnam veterans. The place didn’t have a stage; we just set up on the floor in a corner. We were playing some tune, I forget which, and I was playing the trumpet, I think on some back-up figures (as opposed to a solo). Suddenly I felt someone stroking my inner thigh. I looked down and saw a woman kneeling in front of me, stroking my thigh. As I looked up I saw her boyfriend standing behind her. “Danger Will Robinson! This does not compute!” I had no idea what was going on, but it seemed like there was some potential for harm. Fortunately nothing was going on. Just some chick who wanted to stroke my thigh.

Go figure.

Finally, here’s an incident I published in my book, Beethoven’s Anvil (pp. 93-94):

A number of years ago I was playing trumpet with a rhythm and blues band in a bar in downtown Albany, New York. It was two in the morning and we were exhausted at the end of a five-hour gig. My chops were shot.

We decided to play one more tune, “Stormy Monday.” Normally I didn’t solo on that tune; however, it is a slow blues, and I dearly love a slow blues. So despite my exhaustion, I decided to take a chorus—one cycle through the tune. I started playing simple figures in the lower-middle register and then elaborated on those figures and moved to the upper register. I hit my climax at the penultimate bar of the chorus, as anticipated, and was ready to stop playing. But, the rhythm section wasn’t playing concluding riffs; they clearly expected me to play another chorus. If I’d had any sense I'd have ignored them and stopped. My lips were crying out in pain; if I played much more my lip muscles would surely fail.

I didn’t like the idea of following a good chorus with a mediocre one. I couldn't remain in the trumpet’s difficult upper register, nor could I drop back to the middle register and then build back up—the two most obvious options for constructing another chorus. In a split-split second I decided “oh, what the hell” and did a Sonny Rollins, dropping to the middle register, growling and flutter tonguing to make the nastiest, bluesiest sound I could. Another power had entered my playing. Captain cat went on the prowl and the music went into overdrive. Solid.

As the band stood around after the gig, several people came up to me and chatted, touching me on the forearm on their way out. But it wasn’t me they wanted to touch. It was the power that emerged during that second chorus.

Perhaps I’ll gather some more anecdotes and spin another post out of them.