More Groups

Spare Time

For a short time I was in a 5-piece band with Karen L, Terry G, Janet A, and Paul A.  I have few recordings and, it seems, no images.  Hey, Karen has one:

Hey.  This is before I was even in the band.  Who's the previous bass player?  Didn't know there was one.

Anyhow.  This was the first band I played in with Paul, recently deceased mando/fiddle/harp/cahone player, and all around Moscow music nut job.  And I know why.  You know, he seemed to have ADHD, and practices with him were and insane series of interruptions and bad puns.  But you could hear in his solos that he talked to God on a regular basis, and the guy had a laser-like focus on music.  If there were music going somewhere, Paul would sniff it out.  And he was the absolute best at involving and encouraging new talent.  The first time I tried out with this group he told me:

"You make us a lot better."

I will never forget that.  He just dragged everyone into the circle and made them feel good about just trying to play music.  I'm about to go pro on the whole music thing and I owe a lot of it to Paul and his early encouragement.  I never thought I'd miss him this much.  I thought he'd always be here.

Anyhow, the group had quality, powerful female vocal leads and harmonies, and, since I'd never heard any of the songs before (I'm honestly clueless about music), I made up the bass line a bit grandiose in a few cases, playing folk standards in a way that they'd never been played before.  So we were kind of unique.  That's actually not a bad way to go about playing standards -- having someone in the group that's never heard the song before make up their part.  It gives a new, fresh signature to good old tunes.

Here are the recordings I have:
Blue Moon (Not the one you think)
Wayfaring Stranger
Stand a Little Closer
Summertime

I may dig up a few more songs from this group up later.  I've only gone through about 400 of the almost 600 songs I have recorded on this device.

Oh yeah.  I should explain how I recorded all of these.  I bought a small Zoom digital recorder, as it happens, about 8 years ago:

I just happened to get recordings of my first band "We Are Not Brothers" near the end of our association, so we had our stuff down pretty good.  But for the most part I used the digital recorder to learn songs with a new group.  I would record the early practice sessions, when they were teaching me the songs, and use that to practice against.  So, for the most part, the recorded songs are just a shadow of the eventual quality of the group.

The recorder has a 32 Gig SD card which can hold about 500 hours of songs.  I've used it for ten years, never deleted a song off it, and still have used under 10% of the memory.  At this rate I could use it for . . .  90 more years.  Hmmm.

Plus the thing has five microphones in the head and can make good quality recordings, and it's directional and all, but to get a good recording you have to get the input volume set just right and all the instruments and voices just the right distance for balanced volume.  We almost never spent that much time getting it right.  Plus we would get a lot of chatter before and during songs, which I'm exceedingly grateful for.  We have a copy of the warmness of feeling necessary between musicians in a group to play well.  In fact I'm having a hard time reviewing all of these recordings because there is so much happy emotion bound up in the banter.


Allison, Jane and Kalyn
Here's a small group slapped together for, I think, arts fest at Moscow High School.  At that time it was actually a really cool week-long festival involving lots of the arts -- paint, poetry, song, you name it.  At the time, all the kids got so into it that they would all form one-off bands with crazy names and themes.  My son, Joe, was in a funny Ska band named "Oscillating Machine Designed to Rend Human Flesh", or something like that.  Lotsa horns.  They Ska-ed out.   It was pretty fun to watch.

Allison, Jane and Kalyn (pic sometime) went a more traditional route and recruited "their dads" to play the background, so Paul, Von and I (surrogate dad for Kalyn) did the instrumental background while the girls sang:

One More Dollar
You Can Have Him
Got To Sleep Little Baby
I'll Fly Away

I also have a recording of Allison and Heidi playing:
Ophelia

This was a one-time group, but once you learn the songs, and happen to be at a music party (Paul and Janet hosted one every Christmas) with 80% of the people who knew the song present, then you had to play it again.  Sometimes it's tough pulling 8 year old songs that you only played 5 times, out of your memory.