One of the things keeping me busy and off the blog was the fact that we had our second house concert last week. When my husband had the first of these back in May he had wanted them to become a bi-monthly thing. Well, it took us a little more than that to put it together again. The idea was for him to play the kind of music he wanted to play with his then new project, and invite other musicians as well.
He had just started playing with a saxophone player we have known for years, and in the beginning it went quite well. After a while it turned out that the sax player wasn’t as comfortable with free improvisation as he had thought, and so my husband ended up alone again.
I, on the other hand, had been wanting to do some more improvisation for years. And had been looking for other musicians to do it with. I had thought about playing with my husband again, of course, but none of us was sure how that could go. Until about two or three weeks ago we decided to just try it. And it worked just fine!
So we decided on a date, invited a bunch of friends, bought potato chips, peanuts and drinks, set up about a dozen chairs, and had a concert at our house.
I’m really glad that so many people came to see us, and from what I heard and saw they did like the music too! It was a lot of fun, and it isn’t often that I say that about performing.
I didn’t sing much that evening, I was playing organ, drums, and ukulele in addition to singing. We changed instruments quite a bit so that things wouldn’t get boring.
At the end, after the encore one of the guests said, “And now I would like to hear the Les Paul with vocals.” And so we did. We had never tried that before because we thought it wouldn’t work. But that’s the thing about free improvisation, isn’t it? No need to plan everything ahead.
Emmy was nice enough to record that on her phone, so you can see and hear us too. Oh, and that weird look on my face near the end? That’s me realizing that the amp didn’t work anymore.