A good crowd is a mixed blessing. It becomes harder to hear each other and we don’t do crank so, out of necessity, we’ve developed a way to lower the din. We get really quiet in the middle of a song and the crowd follows along. A tuba player from the Eastman was there and he struck up a conversation about improvisation with the low end of our ensemble. Martin Edic was there celebrating his birthday. Tom Burke was there smiling. Jeff Spevak, the local music critic, was there so we should have been putting on our best musical face but we were getting kinda out, so much so that Jack, the bass clarinetist, suggested we do a waltz to start the second set.
Gap Mangione was there last week and I tried to start something a little more straight forward but we are not very good at that. We wound up doing some crazy stuff. Oscar was there tonight in new chair and he was a delight to play to. I thanked him for coming and like a true gentleman he thanked us for playing.
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