Great Review in Cadence Magazine!

Got a nice surprise this morning when tearsheets arrived from the November 2005 Cadence Magazine with the following review of Jazzmérica, which they termed "Latin Jazz [that] provides something different, something new, and a lively session with a contemporary nature":

“Alexa Weber Morales sings with a dynamic force. … Morales straddles the fence between established musical tradition and improvisation. She overdubs her own voice to provide backup singers and invites a multitude of percussion artists for a stirring arrangement of ‘All Blues.’ She sings ‘Autumn Leaves’ in French with a lovely ballad accompaniment. She delivers Clare Fischer’s ‘Morning’ brightly in Spanish with a cha-cha texture that puts a smile on your face. The lyrics are her own. …While her eclectic mixture of musical arrangements done in several languages appeals to a broad audience, it also proves that she’s proficient in each. Morales sells her ballads with deep affection, rides her street sambas joyfully, and digs into Jazz and Blues with heartfelt emotion.”

Playing with the (naked?) Funkanauts

So this is kind of funny. I'm doing a gig on Sunday, November 6 at La Peña Cultural Center in Berkeley, and it's a fundraiser for an elementary school in Oakland. It looks like we'll play one long set first and then this band, the Funkanauts, will play. I was curious as to what to expect, so I checked them out the other day on the web and this is what I found. I guess I don't have much to add--the picture says it all! Should be an interesting evening...

Les Paul Interview

Great stuff as usual in the Sept/Oct issue of Performing Songwriter. Here's guitarist Les Paul, 90 years old (!) and still gigging, still inventing in his garage. Here are highlights:

On performance:

Starting out as a country player and growing up playing to an audience, and realizing, when you make a record, what sells and what doesn't sell--I learned to give the people what they want. Stan Kenton and I used to have conversations about this. Stan would say, "I'm going to educate the people to good music. That's my goal in life." It was the opposite of my goal. My goal is not to teach anybody anything. Mine is to give them what they wish to hear, and something they can understand without having a book or having to study picking technique. I always wanted to entertain the people. They paid to get in. Give them their money's worth.

On technique:

The key to it is to say something with your instrument, so it's like a conversation. You're getting a message across. If the fellow you're speaking to is very intelligent, you can get more technical. But if he's not particularly intellectual, you realize this, and you don't try to educate the man, but you try to talk to him on his terms.

On simplicity:

Count Basie, the longer he was alive, the less notes he could play because of his illness. The less notes he played, the more he thought about playing the right note. The last time he performed, at the Grammy Awards, I was there. He was in a wheelchair, and we helped him up onto the ramp and got him to the piano. He put his left hand up, and he counted the band off, and they're playing like crazy. All of a sudden they break, and he hits one note. And I thought, "God almighty, that's the best note I ever heard."

Post-gig Calm

I often can't sleep after gigs. This weekend I watched The Motorcycle Diaries until 4 in the morning after I'd had a gig Thursday night in Benicia and Friday night in Oakland. As I'm up my mind is flooded with ideas. I think I might have had some cool ones in the wee hours. Question is, do I have time to implement them?

Thursday's gig wasn't as smooth as it had been with the same exact band and the same venue back in August, when I sold 4 CDs and the crowd was loving it. This time the groove was elusive, and the booker (nice guy though he is) was sitting in the corner staring at us. Then a man took a bunch of pictures of me as I danced/sang and at the end I learned he was a newspaper reviewer. In my head I'm thinking oh crap but as I spoke to him he said he thought I was wonderful, asked to buy my CD and complained that people had talked during the performance!

I also seemed to lack a real connection with the audience, and they didn't laugh at my jokes--at least not very audibly ;-). The last two songs I did feel some of my emotion kick in, and earlier I had gotten the audience to sing along to one bit. So I just trouped along and did the best I could. It's probably more in my head than not.

Friday I left work early, got home and took a 45 minute nap, had a coffee and went to my Oakland gig. It went well, and it was great to play with Jeff Chambers and Michael Spiro and David Flores again, as well as for the first time (on my gig) with Stephanie Ozer on piano. I sold 2 CDs and gave autographs, and one guy told me he was a producer looking to record people like me in Mexico. You meet people like that on occasion, and 90% of the time they're just jiving you--who knows. Again, the audience connection was kind of elusive to me. I don't know, perhaps it was me? But I just tried to feel the emotion of the moment and communicate it, and I think I did that well.

Great Advice on Practicing

I just got the JazzTimes Jazz Education Guide, and there's a great section in it with advice from all sorts of musicians on practicing. For the most part, it's clear that some incredible discipline is at work. However, there's such an amazing variety of techniques. Here are some highlights:

1. To swing to a metronome while playing scales, set the metronome to 60 and then imagine it's clicking two and four. (Several musicians mentioned this one. Haven't tried it yet. I've often used the beats on my Yamaha practice keyboard -- bossa, swing, jazz waltz, etc. -- and some suggested using drum machines, but you have to be careful you don't let the drum machine do all the work for you. That's an advantage of the metronome technique.)

2. Practice internally, "listening" to all the parts in your head before you begin to play or sing.

3. Practice in the car while running errands. Breathing exercises at stop lights, or drumming contrasting rhythms on the steering wheel while driving.

4. Practice s-l-o-w-l-y to gain muscle memory. I have to remember this. I try to practice too quickly (especially piano--for some reason I'm more patient with voice).

5. Practice in 20- to 30-minute chunks. "When somebody comes to me and says they just put in three to four hours on their horn, I really doubt that most of that was productive time because we simply don't have the ability to concentrate for that long to make it truly effective," says trombonist Harry Watters in the article.

6. Transpose pieces into all 12 keys (or at least several different ones) to really learn licks and fingerings.

7. Record practice sessions. Well, I basically never do this. But I did see a lot of improvement when I started listening to my solos at Grace Cathedral on the Internet after every Sunday night service, and later, in the process of recording my album. It was a whole new level of listening to my voice and approaching certain sounds I wanted to achieve.

There's lots more but that's all I've got time to cover today.