It’s been a very long time I last posted an item here. It’s reflective of a couple of years of little real musical activity. As you can tell from the SNUG items earlier, we didn’t ever actually get many gigs. So around August of 2015 I started looking around and ended up in another cover band based out of Redwood City. We played more often, but for various reasons, it didn’t work out and I dropped out in mid-2016. In the meantime the folks from SNUG had moved south to San Jose and, when I told them I was working with another group, they found another guitar player. I wish them the best.
Not too long after I found Sharon Lea, a very good singer who was interested in doing standards and such with an accompanist, and we started working out repertoire. We had our first public appearance at an open mic at Angelica’s in Redwood City in mid-October, and hopefully, we’ll start finding gigs in earnest in the coming months. It’s nice to be doing the sole accompanist thing again, so much simpler to deal with in every way… well, except for how hard it is to be a good sole accompanist.
I still am struggling with trying to find enough time to practice and to work on my playing AND work on recording projects AND compose music AND get involved with looping (I bought a nice looper in 2016)… what happens is, I spend most of my available time practicing and neglect everything else. I did manage to crank out a couple of quick and dirty recordings playing over pre-recorded backup tracks from Bobby’s Backing Tracks, two Stevie Wonder covers; you can hear them on my SoundCloud page if you are so inclined:
I still go out to play on the odd Sunday evening at Stan Erhart’s long-running jam at the American Legion in Princeton-by-the-Sea, but not as often as I used to, and I have not been to either the Club Fox or the Pioneer to play even once throughout 2016 and so far yet this year.