Monday, December 18, 2006

Sunday Jazz

Monday, December 18, 2006
6 comments
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.

6 comments:

On December 18, 2006 at 1:18 PM NatureWoman said...

Your music is awesome! What better way to eat a meal than to hear you play jazz! The photo of your parents is great, too.

On December 19, 2006 at 9:25 AM Rondeau Ric said...

It appears blogger has struck again and refused one of your photos.

When I saw the blacke and white I wondered how Andy got in the shot.

He sure looks like your dad when he was young.

RR

On December 19, 2006 at 1:36 PM MojoMan said...

Very cool, Bill! Makes me wish I had a highball and a skinny tie.

What kind of digital recorder, if you don't mind me asking, and how do you post an MP3 on a blog?

On December 19, 2006 at 2:52 PM Bill of the Birds said...

Mojo:

This is what I recorded with, an M-Audio MicroTrack 2 channel recorder. It's easy to use and the sound quality is really great.

Posting an MP3 to a blog is a bit more complicated. I uploaded the file to our ftp site then specified the address as a link using the html-based posting interface. If you send me an e-mail I can fwd you the code.

On December 20, 2006 at 1:57 PM MojoMan said...

I love your music posts. I went out and bought Imogen Heap's CD last night. She owes you one!

Here's a fabulous jazz vocalist I discovered this summer:

http://www.gretchenmusic.com/

On March 15, 2011 at 5:56 PM Anonymous said...

Sad to say...Chet Backus passed away during the night 3/15/11. He will be greatly missed.


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