The Jazzschool with Stephanie

The gig yesterday afternoon went quite well. I only sang two songs, but I love them both. The band was really great. I enjoyed talking to Mary Fettig, who was the first woman to join the Stan Kenton band. She told me what it was like to tour Brazil with Flora Purim and Airto almost 20 years ago. She had her son (Scott Thompson, an awesome bassist who played with us yesterday) and was still breastfeeding him, but the tour was really tricky because nothing ever happened on schedule. She'd be checked out from the room, no place to clean up her baby's dirty diaper, and the rest of the band would have disappeared. She quit the band during that tour (though she finished the tour--and rejoined later). She said, by comparison, when she had joined the Stan Kenton band some years before, everything went like clockwork--you had half an hour to get on the bus in the morning, and then you drove all day to the next town, had a gig, stayed the night, rinse and repeat.

It was marvelous to play with her and trade fours on the tag of Ave Rara, my new favorite song. She knows perfectly how to shine as a soloist but also make horn and/or flute complement a voice without covering it or conflicting with it.

After the gig I talked with Phil Thompson, and we shared war stories from producing our CDs. "When I was in the studio, it was so stressful--you can feel the money just being spent by the minute," he said. "Yeah, I remember I was chatting and I looked up and the horn section was recording some parts to one of my tunes and I was like 'wait, this song doesn't have horns!' But it was too late--there goes $500." He laughed. "Do you want to do another?" I asked. He smiled sheepishly and said he did. "It's addictive," I said. He complimented me on my CD, said he liked it because it has an organic feel to it, it's real. I said that that was my most important criterion in making it, that it be soulful above all else.