Busy few months gone by there! Here’s a summary (or summer-ry, if you will):

• No Static, after a couple of gigs in June (San Mateo County Fair and the American Legion Coastside Post 474 in Princeton-by-the-Sea), had a very full August with six gigs – Pedro Point Brewing in Pacifica, Freewheel Brewery & Pub in Redwood City, the Burlingame On the Avenue street fair, the Wine Room in Moss Beach, Winters Tavern in Pacifica, and Scopo Divino in San Francisco.
• In addition, in August I played a wedding with the terrific singer Le Perez and Jeff Moles on upright bass, and a gig with Jon Rubin at the Cigar Bar & Grill in San Francisco.
• Sharon Lea has emerged from her hiatus and expressed interest in re-estblishing Lea & Co., as a duo again, so we’ve started to shake off the dust and we’ve scheduled an afternoon soon to record a few demos.
• The erstwhile jamming entity consisting of Jeff Kamil, the bassist know to some as PJ, Tom DeFiglio, and myself managed to play together one Sunday in early July. I recorded it, and there were some nice moments, so I might go through and cull out a few clips to post on my SoundCloud page.
• I had a lovely jamming session with bassist Scot Larsen and drummer Jesse Van Hiller in May; hope to do it again soon, but it’s hard to find a time that works for us all.
• Speaking of jamming, my infrequent appearances at Stan Erhart‘s weekly jam session at the American Legion Coastside Post 474 in Princeton-by-the-Sea continue to be pretty infrequent, about once every six or seven weeks. But I always have a good time, sometimes a great time… I really should go more frequently.
• Aside from a small burst of recording several practice tracks in May for a planned playing party with my drumming friend Jeff O’Rourke that still has not taken place, I’ve done precious little recording. I’ve taken to watching too many Yankees baseball games since accidentally re-upping for MLB TV for the 2018 season.  Come October I’ll have no such excuse until next March… But there are a couple of things I’ve been working up, maybe I’ll get to them a bit. I have a solo arrangement of Jaco Pastorius’ “Continuum” and a couple of other pieces with backing tracks, including Wayne Shorter’s “Palladium,” which I’ve been working on. 
• Finally, in the Sound Toys department…
  • my most recent doohickey is the Electro-Harmonix Freeze Sound Retainer pedal, which allows you to record an instant slice of sound – for example, the initial strike of a chord – and have it continue as long as desired. It will take me some time and practice to become adept at using it, but it promises to be a helpful thing for playing solo guitar. I can, for example, play a harmony at the top of a section and then let it hang in the air as I improvise over it, and then drop that one and grab another moment as the chords change…
  • I have also tried to start actually learning how to use my Digitech JamMan Stereo looper that I’ve had for some time now. I’ve been interested in the possibilities of looping for some time but the learning curve has kept me at the threshold, never getting past the “quick start” section of the manual. To inspire me, I got a video course from TrueFire called “The Creative Looping Handbook,” presented by Robbie Calvo, which I’ve been working my way through.

As promised, here’s a video of No Static performing two songs that segue nicely from the first to the next: the Four Tops’ classic “Ain’t No Woman (Like the One I Got)” and the Doobie Brothers’ “Takin’ It to the Street.”

Summer arrived last Thursday, ushering itself in with a couple of scorching-hot days. As I write this, we are fortunately back to more seasonable temperatures, in the seventies.

Saturday I played the first gig of the summer with No Static, at the American Legion Coastside Post 474 in Princeton-by-the-Sea, just north of Half Moon Bay and adjacent to Pillar Point Harbor. It went very well and we were warmly received by the patrons. No Static will be off in July as various of us are going to be away on vacations for swaths of days, but we’ve got a bunch of gigs lined up in August. Check out the calendar. I have a video from our performance at the San Mateo County Fair on Father’s Day which I will post soon.

I also have a couple of private events coming up – another short afternoon Bread & Roses show today, and a wedding in  August.

There are a couple of bits of No Static news:

• I’ve revised the No Static website to include two audio files from Scott’s 2007 CD Scott Goldstone II, which we’ve had in the band repertoire for a while. At some point we will likely record the band’s version and replace these two. I also revised it to mention that Scott and I also have a duo project and included our lone demo recording, a cover of Sade’s “Jezebel.”
• In addition, after a bit of a drought we have four upcoming gigs on our calendar starting with the San Mateo County Fair on Sunday, June 17th at 12 noon.

It’s the middle of January 2018… days are starting to get longer as we slouch toward spring. Latest music stuff:

• No Static played a Sunday late afternoon gig at Winters Tavern in Pacifica. We hope to get a bunch more soon. I finished mixing one remaining leftover track from the August recording session, the Steely Dan tune “Black Cow,” and added it to our SoundCloud playlist.
• Lea & Co. played a private Christmas party in early December, but Sharon has decided to put it on the shelf for the moment for personal reasons. Hopefully we’ll be back before too long.

It’s early October… you would hardly know it outside right now (an early Saturday afternoon), it’s in the mid-seventies, but lately there’s been more of a morning chill, and the light at dusk is beginning to get that fall thing going on…

Recent music stuff:

• the Scott Goldstone band project, now called No Static, recorded some demos (mixed by moi) and popped up a website. We had a nice gig two weeks ago at the San Benito House in Half Moon Bay, and we have two more on the calendar in the next couple of months.
• Demos for Lea & Co. are up on the website, but we’ve been on a bit of a hiatus, as one of us had sadly had a death in the family. We should be getting back to business soon.

No Static will be playing on Saturday, September 16 at the The San Benito House in Half Moon Bay, from 8-10:30pm. I’m very excited about this band! Check out our demo recordings and you’ll see what I mean.

Hope to see many familiar faces…

The No Static band I joined recently published our website today:

http://nostaticmusic.com

Check it out and listen to our demo recordings!

We’ve also got a Facebook page:

https://www.facebook.com/NoStaticHMB

We will be playing this Saturday, September 16 at the The San Benito House in Half Moon Bay, from 8-10:30pm. Hope to see many familiar faces…

We are slowly emerging from stealth mode as Jeff comes up to speed on the rest of the repertoire; I trust we’ll be getting some gigs soon with this project. Here’s the website:

http://sharonleamusic.com

We’ve got a few demo recordings there to check out.

Lots going on this year so far…

First off, I’m still accompanying vocalist Sharon Lea, but the Sharon Lea Duo has morphed into Lea & Co. with the addition of bassist Jeff Moles. We’re folding Jeff in to our repertoire and it’s going very nicely. The cool thing for me is that when I do my instrumental improv sections in the tunes, I don’t have to keep the whole ball of wax in the air – I can rely on the rhythm and the bass line being there and I can play more freely, which is both more fun for me and sounds better. Our website will soon be available and there will be a few demo recordings, which we laid down about a week and a half ago and which I am currently mixing. I’m looking forward to getting out there and playing with this ensemble.

Secondly, the Scott Goldstone Band has been in a little bit of a hovering state, as several of us have had summer vacations that have interrupted our usual rehearsal schedule a bit. But we’ve continued to learn some new material, and it looks like we have found a sax player to augment the band. Last week we recorded some raw demos and we’re going to clean them up and get them mixed after Scott returns from his overseas vacation. We also hope to settle on a name and get a website together by the end of August, get back on track, and take it to the street. I’m very excited about this group and I look forward to the autumn.

The guitar duo with Jeff Kamil has had two gigs so far this year, with another couple likely coming up at the Madrigal Family Sausalito Wine Tasting Salon & Gallery. We haven’t attempted to find other places to play, and with the other projects I have going on there’s very little opportunity for us to rehearse at all or think about it much. But we’ll see… there’s definitely potential there.

Finally, I have played a couple of Bread 𝄞 Roses gigs with acoustic finger-style guitarist Jon Rubin. He’s also invited me to two gigs coming up soon, which are on my calendar at my website.

One thing that I’ve learned for sure over the last couple of months – when you have a full-time day job and then you add not one band but three or four, the paucity of time you can devote to the music becomes jarringly obvious! But I’m not complaining! (Yet…)