¡Viva Mexico!

It's been an insane couple of weeks. Backhouse Mike, né Michael Corcoran, and I spent many moons working out horn arrangements for a Drake Bell tour in Mexico. We arranged a bucket o' tunes for trumpet, tenor saxophone, and trombone. After a quick show in Denver and a trio of rehearsals we hopped on a plane headed para Ciudad Mexico.

I took Spanish in elementary school and in seventh grade. In high school I switched to Français. Seeing as how I now live in driving distance of a nation of Spanish speakers, this may have been a poor choice. Somehow, by the end of the week, I was remembering palabras de Señora Rhoda, my elementary school Spanish teacher, whose fashion sense, even to my untrained, fifth-grade eye was a decade or two behind the times. I vividly remember the middle school Spanish teacher informing us how to use the phrase "que lastima!" "You don't have your homework done? ¡Que lastima!" Why my brain hasn't ejected this moment in favor of other current pertinent data, such as the serial number of my stolen alto saxophone, I will never know.

My favorite aspect of the trip was trying to communicate my ideas to the locals using my hyper-limited vocab. This mix of Spanish and English was also particularly apropos because I'm in the middle-end of reading "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" by Junot Diaz. This book has introduced me to vocabulary words such as culo and ripio (these are not family friendly words you learn in elementary school).

The tour was an unequivocal success. We played five sold out shows to about 10,000 peeps a pop. I've uploaded a video of what it looked like from behind the organ:



That was with the volume turned down to ten percent. I wear in ear monitors to keep from going deaf.

Now that I'm back in town, I'm about to get busy doing some ghost-writing (spooky-style, just in time for Halloween) on a movie.

Before I descend into the paincave of the studio for weeks upon end, I'll come up for air in time to play a show at the Hotel Cafe this Friday at 11 pm.

Nice hat, Picasso

I set a new personal best for traveling hellishness yesterday. We had a weekend o' Drake Bell gigs, starting with Tulsa on Saturday, and finishing with Richmond, VA on Sunday. Sunday "morning" (if 4:25 in the AM can really be named as such) I awoke before my alarm, because my desire to avoid oversleeping overrides my desire for sleep. We hopped a plane to Cincinnati (I think). It was not a jumbo jet. It was a "let's gate check your saxophone, because if it's bigger than a box of kleenex it won't fit in the overhead bin" plane. The nice lady who was in charge of the gate-checked luggage said "we'll take good care of this" when I handed her my baby (and by baby, I mean Mark VI Selmer sacks o' fun, not an actual infant). When we landed everyone got their gate checked luggage after we walked off the six steps from the plane to the tarmac. Everyone, that is, except for me. After a tense five minutes of waiting for the also-nice luggage lady in Cincy to find my saxophone she said "it must have been stuff under some other bags, because it was hard to find." In the words of Bill Lumbergh, that'd be greeeaaaaaaaat.

We had three more flights after that point, with an afternoon gig in Richmond mixed in. All in all it was 24 hours from waking hotel bed to sleeping home bed. There were no alarm clocks in my life today.

I almost forgot! Whilst in Richmond I was talking on the phone to a friend. I was wearing a hat at this moment. I was backstage, and standing next to a fence. On the opposite side of said fence was the parking lot. A friendly fellow was strolling past and heckled me with this line: "nice hat, Picasso!" To which I should've replied, "yeah, but at least I haven't mailed an ear yet!" I was wearing one of these hats:



Perhaps he mistook my chapeau for a beret, the kind you find in a secondhand store.

I posted this heckle on Facebook and a friend replied with this:

"Picasso did love his hats. I for one like am delighted to hear that people are still referencing obscure artist biographical details in every day life. Does the heart good."

Now I'm back in the mix. Tomorrow (Tuesday, 10/6/08) I'm playing a solo show at Boardner's in Hollywood. See you there.