Lauren Zettler's new EP

I've been working a new EP with Lauren Zettler. You can pre-order it from her here. We're in the home stretch. It's been a very cool, laid back process. The recordings should reflect the vibe of the sessions, which means they'll be good.

This will be the fourth DIY recording I've finished in the last 18 months, and the first with vocals (though I did the Follow Through album in 2001, and recorded Matt's vocals last summer). It's impossible to compare any of them to each other, but I always feel like the most recent is the best.

So head over to Lauren's MySpace page, listen to some of her new tracks, and order the EP. It's going to be goo.

Live recording coming soon

The sound guy recorded our show last night. Rose Live Music is a relatively small club, but mostly in that it’s narrow, and the stage faces across the width of the room. In other words, there’s a space to walk past the front of the stage, then a row of tables along the wall with chairs facing away from the stage and a booth style bench on the other side, looking in.

The close quarters makes you keep your volume down. For a funk band, lower volume is actually a good thing. There’s a deeper groove when you don’t hit the drums as hard, and a lot more dynamic space to build to a frenzy whenever necessary. This played in our favor, and along with an agreement to PLAY LESS, it could have been one of our best performances.

The sound engineer needs to bounce down the recording at his studio, but I have my fingers crossed it comes out nicely, because I really feel that musically, it was a step in the right direction for our group.

Play less.

That's what I'm telling myself from now on. I've written before about playing rests, but I've been falling off the wagon. The other night I had a great conversation with a friend that plays some great tenor saxophone about this very thing. We talked about how Miles and Dave Liebman would just lay out for 4 or 8 bars at a time and just let the rhythm section play.

My trio has a show this Monday at Rose Live Music in Williamsburg. I intend to record it and hopefully share some of the tracks with all of you. We'll see if I'm able to execute.

Speaking of the trio, I've nearly finished the new tune and will finish blogging about that process soon. It's coming together pretty nicely.