Avant Garden, Houston 12/28/11

I'm always looking for venues to play down in H-town when I'm down there visiting relatives for the holidays, and when I saw my friend and mentor (whether she knows it or not!) Susan Alcorn was playing at Avant Garden, I looked into the place. An old two-story on Westheimer, Avant Garden houses a small bar with a huge patio and has a new and improvised music show on Wednesdays, in addition to other cool activities. The kind of place I wish I had in my neighborhood.

So I packed up mom (who just turned 90 a week before), my bro and my rig and headed out. Got there way too early, but Robert, who organizes the event was there. There had been some overbooking, with another band added to the bill, but ok by me because I would be the second set as planned. It was a bit cold inside, so mom stayed out in the car until I played. Seth Paynter was the first act. Looping sounds from a contact mike (scratching, breathing), he also played EWI (electronic wind instrument) and did a nice improv on sax. His pedal board resembled a guitarist rig, with a couple of Moog boxes I could have had real fun with. As I entered the bar at the beginning of his set I was struck by the silence. The small bar was full of patrons but you could hear a pin drop, everyone was focused on what was happening on stage. I knew then this would be a special night. Seth played for half an hour. Then I did my thing. Mom and bro got a table up front and I gave him a crash course on operating my camera, pix below. Also below, some edits from the performance. The recording got a bit saturated on the loud bits so I had edit those out, unfortunately. Nothing new here, but I decided to pull out the motif Hymn, which is a good show ender when there is a quiet attentive audience like this. Everything worked well, with a minimum of mistakes, and I think the setting had a lot to do with that. The audience was very kind and appreciative after the set.

Thanks to Robert Pearson, Susan Alcorn, Mariana, Mom and Duane.

Open Street/Roland AC-22

Yesterday I went to the Open Streets event in FW with the Tele and BL rig, and the new Roland AC-33 amp (more on that later). I was directed to an establishment with power at the start of the route, but seeing little foot traffic, decided to go up Broadway and set up across the street from the cathedral-esque Baptist church. This would be a good test of the amp with battery power in an outdoor public sitch. Played for about half an hour to bicyclers, cops, strollers, kiddies, skateboarders and a few zombies happened by. A beautiful day for such an event. I'm not sure how well the amp projected out into the street (it's only 20 watts on battery power), but I'm sure I didn't bust any eardrums. After that, packed up and strolled to the opposite end of the route on Jennings where Tammy Gomez was doing her poetry/dance/art thing in front of the Rainbow Lounge. She graciously implored me to set up and plug in from the Lounge. What a difference. The extra 10W in power was ample to blanket the surrounding street with my sounds. I jammed with Tammy for a while and packed and moved on, fearing sunburn. Headed back to the car. Only saw another small band of yutes jamming acoustic on the route, I expected to see more music types.

Overall I'm pleased with the AC33's performance, although it did distort a bit on the peaks coming out of the loop pedal. The amp has an onboard looper and some nice chorus and reverb effects (it's actually an "acoustic" amp). I'm hoping to rewire the Behringer foot pedal son Eric gave me to utilize these functions in the future. The big advantage here is it's very lightweight, supposed to be 10lbs but it feels closer to 5. Beats lugging that Carvin around if I don't need the 100 watts, which I usually don't. Or I'll use it in conjunction with the Carvin for stereo sound.

BL at the Hip 8/14/11

Last Sunday night at Hip Pocket was pretty cool, and I use that term figuratively. My acoustic stuff before the play, heavy on instrumentals and original stuff, seemed to go over well. I'm still a bit cumbersome with the refurbbed 12 string, with the action and frets slightly higher, I really seem to mess it up on the intricate stuff. Maybe just need to practice more.

During the play I changed over to my Breaking Light setup. The set went extremely well, less abstraction and more groove based noodling, if that's a good thing. I'm usually too engrossed in what I'm doing to notice the audience, but I did glance up a few times and catch people actually listening, tapping feet, and one gal was...dancing? She later performed a lap dance for her boyfriend (or whatever), right there in front of Hip Pocket and everyone. I chalk it up to the beer more than the music. But an interesting and fun night, nonetheless.

The BL set was almost 2 hours long, but edited the best bits and joined into one 37 minute long mega-track. Here:

HPT081411
HPT081411 by Breaking Light

SDQ @ Hip Pocket/Silent Words in Wing Dust

Never mind the heat at Hip Pocket Theater last night, it was downright pleasant (in a Texas way) after the sun went down. Another triumphal jam for Strung Drawn and Quartered last night. We ended up improvising so much, we didn't even complete the set list (we didn't get to Link Wray's Rumble, which was probably for the best). SDQ's sound is evolving, bringing in more use of loops and octave pedals. The second set after the play felt and sounded better, I think.

Darrin's clip here is a little oversaturated, but I include it here for reference. My clip is shorter, with the same reaggae-ish section, and tweeked in Logic.

Darrin's clip
01-reggae jam thing - Strung Drawn & Quartered by darrinkobetich

Kavin's clip


On an unrelated note, I put out a new Bandcamp release. I had several tracks gathered that I wanted to tweek and remix into one mega-track. Ended up just using three, but they seem to make sense in merging them.

So here:


The title is from something daughter Brit wrote, and photo art by William Shannonhouse.