I patiently deleted over 4k spam comments awaiting moderation yesterday, twenty at a time. Sheesh. I also noticed that most of them were appended to four posts, which I then deleted. Today I had 36 waiting for me instead of a thousand.
Tonight’s the gig at Lemonjellos. I am looking forward to it. It is a bit of a self-indulgence. I have rented a piano for $125 and am planning to pay my talented young bass player $50. Last time I told myself I would try to get sponsors so it wouldn’t actually cost me to play. Just didn’t get to it. Plus I find self-promotion very repulsive. It is possible the owner will give me some money. Last time he gave us $90 which I split three ways among the other four players. We were the headliner. This time Nate and I are second on the bill and warming up for another band. If the owner gives me any money, I will apply it to the costs I am incurring. I have fantisized that one of the other musicians would use the piano and kick in some money, but I don’t think that’s going to happen.
When I played in March, the other three band members didn’t enjoy themselves for various reasons. I found that discouraging and was reluctant to use them again. I mean, I lose money and paid them all we got paid, put tons of effort into arranging the music and working with the egos of the people involved. And then the players were sort of unenthusiastic about the evening. Fuck that. I had a good time and I think it was probably as good a show as I could have put on.
One of my challenges tonight is that I am playing piano for the whole set: no instrument changes. Contrast is essential these days in this kind of a gig. Attention spans are short and we will already be challenging them with a rather long Arvo Part piece (we abbreviated it but not for time’s sake…. instead the span of the piece for the solo instrument was extreme for the double bass so we lopped off a section that went out of the range…. it’s not noticeable.)
So I have put a lot of effort into creating interesting arrangements for piano, bass and voice. I even wrote one arrangement last tuesday (Naked Boy). I do like changing my songs each time I perform them. Fuck recording. I will do one song tonight for the first time on piano, last time it was banjo, and the orginal arrangement was guitar (Candle is the name of this song). Each arrangement has stuff I like about it. Tonight on this arrangement the bass carries the melody. Nice to work with talented people.