These are recordings I made with a quintet (drums, bass, guitar, piano, sax) this evening. They were recorded through the built-in mic on my laptop, so the audio quality kind of sucks and my sax was a little too loud for it to deal with, so my tone is kind of distorted. In reality, my tone is a little brighter and livlier than on this recording. I think the mic must have cut out a lot of the high partials, since it sounds pretty dead.
The guitarist and I are both very, very into Wayne Shorter, so we recorded "Footprints" and "Witch Hunt," then we also recorded "You Don't Know What Love Is."
I want to first make some excuses. This is the second time we've played together since we all left for college in various cities and states last September. The drummer, for purposes of noise and space, was only allowed to have a snare, a high hat, a crash and a ride. He's great, it's the drums. The piano player is actually an alto saxophonist (a really, really good one) that we talked into playing piano with us. He's a close friend of mine, and hopefully I'll get to post some clips soon that feature his playing as well.
A little about each track:
Footprints (take 1): I liked a lot of what happened on this take, even though all of us kind of dropped the ball a lot throughout.
Footprints (Take 2): We screwed up a little less, and I was feeling pretty free on this one. I like Anthony's (guitarist's) solo a lot.
Witch Hunt: We took the intro a little faster than I'm used to, so it's a little sloppy. This is a tune I definitely want to spend a lot more time with. If you've never played over it, I would highly reccommend it. It's a lot of fun. I'm still trying to figure out what to do with the last eight bars, so if any of you have any ideas, let me know. As you can probably hear, I mostly just went free and ignored the changes in that section.
You Don't Know What Love Is: This is a little embarassing, but I'm going to put it up here in the interest of honesty. Anthony wanted me to play the B section, which I thought I knew. When it actually came time to play it, though, I realized that I didn't, and it's painfully obvious in the recording. The changes are fun, though, and the melody is about as pretty as they come.
I've been listening to LOTS of Ornette, Dolphy and Shorter lately, if you couldn't tell.
Please listen and let me know what you think!
Click here to listen.
Also, I have intonation issues throughout. I stupidly practiced clarinet before going over to play with this group, so I was pretty tired.
