Well if you're sure...
They had 2 drummers, piano, bass, 3 singers, me on tenor, another tenor sax, an alto, trombone, guitar and (of all things) a harmonica player. The other tenor guy took control of the night and songs were selected by general consensus, but as I cannot sight read and don't know many standards by heart yet I just had to nod and smile a lot of the time. I can remember we played A Train, Blue Monk and perhaps about 8 others but my memory's not that great. I can't remember what the blues number was but I can remember it was in G (my G, that's a good tip to remember that crucial difference, there's no way on Earth I could transpose on the fly
).
The other tenor player was very good, his playing was effortless and he kept everyone together. The pianist was very pretty and had the longest legs and shortest skirt I've seen in a while. She lacked a little confidence so played quiet and took no risks, but actually she was OK. I would be happy to offer her some one-to-one lessons in improvisational technique
There were two drummers who took it in turns - an old guy who was way too loud (bull in a china shop stuff) and a teenager who had also come for the first time who was OK. The bass player was very good, knew what he was doing and played very tight (thank god for decent bass players) and the guitarist was good too. The alto was a beginner and she didn't really do much, I think she was a bit overwhelmed. Two of the singers were very good and the third was OK but less so than the others. The older lady I mentioned had been a professional singer all her life and it showed. The trombone player was OK and the harmonica player was a harmonica player.
It was all a bit shambolic but we worked out an order for playing the head, singing the head and soloing a chorus each and then worked through the numbers. Basically I just kept my head down and played the occasional fill until it was my spot to solo, regretting very much my lack of sight reading skills or knowledge of standards. I was really pleased with the solos though - no major booboos and some nice bits, in fact I think I surprised them all. When everyone turns to look at you, you know you've either just done something horrendously wrong or it's going well. Fingers crossed it was the latter
However I can now see that I'm going to have a big hill to climb to get good at sight reading and to be really tight with timing. My god - there's a world of difference when you're in a woodwind section and they've all come in exactly on time and you're playing it how you play it to the Aebersold backings
This is going to be my biggest hurdle - improvisation comes very naturally to me as I've been doing it for so many years on guitar, but boy do I need to work on sight reading and on
really knowing standards accurately, not sloppily like currently.
All in all the experience has done me a lot of good. More confidence, an understanding of what I need to work on (sight reading and accuracy) and I actually met some human beings in West Sussex!
The jazz kit arrived today and it's transformed me, although the goatee beard is a bit itchy. I'm practicing calling people "cat" and mentioning the word "swinging" as in "this cat's really swinging, d'you dig?". Strangely though, people seem to be crossing the road and walking away fast when I approach them with this line, am I doing something wrong? One more thing, do I wait until I'm famous to develop a drug dependency, or should I start now?
Oh and Gary it
actually was the blues scale. I know - a miracle!
