In Reno

We drove up to Reno yesterday and rehearsed last night for about 3+ hours with the Reno Jazz Orchestra. There were a few surprises and tricky parts. One cool thing is that it looks like I'll be doing Caravan after all--Wayne Wallace knew that I had written words to it in Spanish and the orchestra told him they wanted to play it as an instrumental, so he asked them to let me sing it. I didn't know this in advance, so it was a good thing I brought all my lyrics. The standard key's a bit low for me, but oh well. Gives me room to go up. We'll also insert a chant for Elegua into one of the tunes--Carolyn Brandy will start that off, I'll just follow. Orlando Torriente is really great both as a vocalist and a percussionist. There's much I could learn from him.

On the drive up, I was in the car with Wayne and Murray Low. The conversation was so great. I wish I could spend all my time talking about music with these guys. Murray had some CD of a band doing crazy odd meter stuff that sounds really organic, not forced. It was pretty out there, with a cool spoken word/rap/singer guy on it.

Wayne told a story about Sarah Vaughn and Ella Fitzgerald (he's played with both--amazing!). Apparently on a gig the two had together, in their later years, Sarah's manager told her before the concert, "Whatever you do, just don't scat." So then Sarah gets up and during the concert she's feeling pretty good and she thinks "what the hell" and starts scatting. And she looks over at Ella, who has a gleam in her eye, and when Sarah finishes it's Ella's turn and she just blows her out of the water with her scatting. And afterwards the manager said, "I told you not to try to scat in a concert with Ella. She's the best!"

We stopped at Starbucks, corporate behemoth be damned. They didn't have any of those cool Hear Music compilations, but there was the John Legend album, produced by Kanye West, which I bought. We proceeded to listen to it, and as I said afterwards, "Listening to pop music with you guys is just no fun!" I had to agree, however--the hip-hop production of this guy, who I really like as a singer/pianist, just completely obscures his strengths. And a lot of the lyrics are trite, as Wayne said. But the songs we did like, Ordinary People and something toward the end of the record recorded with his family, were much more interesting lyrically and musically.

After the rehearsal last night we went to eat and there were more stories--Lena Horne's dirty song lyrics!--and more jokes. We were up quite late talking about the state of jazz, the art of card-counting, mind-altering experiences, bad gigs and sundry other topics.

Now I've got to practice a bit before tonight's gig!