Monday, November 14, 2011

Sweat 'til you get wet

Discovered a new open mic jam today. It's every Sunday at a place called Beau Brummel Club, less than two miles from where I live. I don't go to open mics much anymore, as I stash my keyboard at Ron the Drummer's house, but the guy who runs this one said there'd be a keyboard available to play. Sold.

I played a Cinder Bridge song by myself. I played another Cinder Bridge song with a couple other musicians jamming on it with me (they'd never heard it before). Instead of selecting another original for the finale, I decided it would be more fun to just jam out on something improvised. A whole bunch of other musicians took the stage, I asked somebody to pick a key, and off we went.

Here's the impressive part. One or two guys actually sang parts of the improvised piece.

I can't even imagine how you do that. Yeah, the lyrics were goofy, with a lot of repetition, but I still don't get it. When I jam on the keyboard, all I have to know is what chord I'm supposed to be playing. Because I have to stay within the parameters of that chord, I have some guidance. But lyrics could be anything at all.

The only words I remember from our jam (retroactively titled something like "Ladies Don't Like to Take Showers") were "Sweat 'til you get wet." Not profound, but pretty clever for being dreamed up on the spot.

1 comment:

DeppityBob said...

Sounds like fun! Now you understand what it was like for me, Paul, and Andy that evening at Honker's. :)