Sunday Jazz

My parents in one of their early jazz bands, circa 1956. That's BT2 on the left, Elsa in the middle, and Bruce DeMoll on the right.

I spend many of my Sunday afternoons playing jazz at The Hotel Blennerhassett in Parkersburg, West Virginia as part of a group known casually as The Blennerhassett Trio. That's Bruce DeMoll on piano, Chet Backus on drums and me, Bill of the Birds, on bass guitar.

We play jazz standards for the folks brunching in the swank surroundings of The Blenner. This time of year we also lay in a heavy rotation of Christmas songs.

Yesterday I took along my new portable digital recorder and captured a couple of songs we played.

Here's one of them we recorded, Song for My Father, a composition by legendary jazz pianist Horace Silver.

Hope you enjoy it. As you can hear, we had a nice crowd on Sunday.

I feel pretty dang lucky to get to play music on a weekly with these two master musicians. But I'm dedicating this post to MY father (and mother), who made sure our house was full of music when I was growing up. I'm trying to carry on that same tradition in our house for Phoebe and Liam.