a free form jazz odyssey in front of a festival crowd

Lets do some photos, with a little bit of commentary, then maybe we’ll discuss.

I recently took my first trip to las vegas. You don’t need to know stories about gambling or casinos or debauchery. What you need to know is this:

This is a true fantasy picture, as you can see the fake New York in the background. Notice both arrows pointing to the restaurant itself, indicating “This Is The Place, Homes”

Oh, what a burger it is. It was absolutely delicious

Apparently, some other people had the same idea we did. This place was packed. The cab driver knew exactly where it was. An old school vegas lady, bleached hair, looked about 200 years old, big sunglasses, she said “when we have the world poker tour preliminaries, people from all over the world as me to drive them to In N Out Burger”

On we go.

These are some of my pedals, arranged in a messy and unorganized manner, running on battery power, on the floor, free to move around

I’m sorry about using a flash, it was in a rehearsal space with terrible lighting. A pedaltrain pedalboard bought off of the CL, voodoo labs pedal power supply eliminating all batteries (except the MXR original 70’s block logo phaser!) and everything velcroed down for maximum efficiency. The holy grail is still giving me trouble because of the weird ass power adapter EHX uses, but it will be figured out. Holla.

On We Go.

In an amazing last minute ticket phenomenon, I was able to secure admission to Andrew Bird’s show at the Music Hall of Williamsburg, before his next night at Carniege Hall. Notice the giant gramaphone speakers, he uses no cabs with his amp. The heads are made by my homey Tim Schroeder in chicago, who also makes amps for Nels and Jeff of Wilco. Bird uses the line 6 dl4 and creates some ridiculous loops on stage with a full band, its like a wonderful manipulated orchestra.

The double headed horn behind him is basically a leslie speaker- the 2 horns spin around at incredible speed, creating a badass doppler effect. The new album he just put out is very serious, some great songs. He basically played it in its entirety, with a few other jams thrown in. Serious Business.

OK, so a while ago there was a track floating around these here series of tubes, which featured a solo vocal from Runnin With The Devil, the original track, just DLR, doing what he does best. Its truly fantastic, you can just feel the high kicks coming through, its amazing. On a previously mentioned note, I got a bunch of multitrack sessions a while back from classic songs. Bohemian Rhapsody, Sgt Pepper, and finally Whats Going On, by the legendary Marvin Gaye. These elements remained unrelated…until this morning

On my way into work, I got an idea. Whats going on is fairly close in tempo to Runnin With The Devil. What if someone were to combine the 2, creating an unholy union not seen since the original combination of Hall and Oates. So, I arrived at 9:30, and immediately got to work. Right away…you could feel it. I dont want to overhype it…but it was magic. Pure Fucking Magic. Its like DLR walked into Motown, did a high kick, gave everyone in the room a High Five, got in a kyak, paddled down the halway to the studio where Marvin was recording, stepped up to the mic, and fucking killed it in one take. After that, he left with 6 beautiful women on each arm, got into a stretched limo with a pool on top, and rode off into the sunset.

The remix process itself was not too difficult. Some time compression was necessary to speed up a few lines, and lots of movement of sections, but there was no pitch shifting. The songs are oddly similar in key. By far my favorite section is the Scat after the choruses. Its as if they were cosmically pre aligned to meet in the distant future.

See for yourself, please spread it round the interwebs