First, a little non-music-related update. I'm going to be out of commission for a while. I have to have surgery the day before Thanksgiving. It seems that for years now I've had a secret hobby of collecting rocks. Even I did not know about it. Apparently I've been hiding these rocks in my gall bladder, and now a doctor wants to take them away from me.
Now the good news. I went into the studio on November 11th with my core group of great local musicians and cut four more tracks: My Neighbor Is a Lunatic, Take Another Chorus, Almond Roca, and Sunday Morning Blues.
Combined with the four tracks we cut on August (with my daughter Dawn on cello) and two bass-showoff pieces I have already recorded, this makes ten tracks and over an hour of music. I think this is enough for a CD. I may add one more track, but I'm not sure at this point.
The session was terrific. This was Michael Kora's first time playing drums with this group and he showed that he was the perfect fit for the project. The other players -- Jack McCreary on sax, Ted Clifford on Keyboards, Christian Botto on guitar, and Milledge Bennett on percussion -- played wonderfully and imparted a real feeling of a live jazz band. Pete Uchytil came and took some more photos, which I'll link to when they are ready.
The next steps are to lay in some overdubbed tracks recorded remotely by Dawn and also some from my old friend Dawayne Bailey down in Las Vegas. Then it's just mixing, mastering, designing the package, manufacturing, and selling. I'll probably sell them through CD Baby. It seems easy enough to do, and I'm all for any process that results in less work for me!
The one thing that I have noticed throughout this project is how difficult it is for me to wear two hats -- producer and performer. As the producer, I'm responsible for the whole project. In the studio, the producer part of me has to listen with a critical ear to not just my own part, but to everyone else's parts, and the sound of the whole take. That requires some distance and detachment to do well. As a performer, I need to distance myself from the mikes and computers and everything else, and just focus on playing the bass. I'm afraid that the producer side usually wins at the expense of the performer side.
Honestly, I think that what I want is to either (1) Have a separate producer in the control room, or (2) Just BE the producer in the control room and have a different bass player out in the studio.
In any case, I am wildly enthusiastic about the results of this last session. I think the overall project will be very pleasing when it comes out. Every individual musician gets a chance to step out and show what they've got, and it really does have a "band" feel, which was one of my goals.
