All this talk about old recordings... I'm a ridiculously completist archivist of what I do, probably to a fault. I pretty much have documented everything I've been involved in for the last 20 years or so, the good, the bad and the ugly.
The earliest surviving recordings were one horrible one of me jammin' on guitar in '84, and the other one, a recent find that I cherish greatly, is from a jam I had in my garage in 94 in the Connecticut 'burbs, right before I moved to Vermont. It was with two really serious players from Brooklyn (gtr and sax) who knew how to compose, a jazz drummer with crazy chops, and a four-piece horn section, which, at that time was always my favorite kinda lineup. I was, at that point, into a lot of fusion, prog, Zappa, that kinda stuff, but had nowhere near the chops to do it. It's significant because I can really see where I was going to go and how much better I am. I was just getting out of my Jaco/Jeff Berlin wannabe phase and you can clearly imagine all the baggage that comes with when you're talking about a guy with no formal training who'd only been taking it seriously for a few years.
But I was able to at least understand some more complicated concepts, and so I learned a bunch of tunes with these guys. On some of it, I hold my own. Sometimes I wank way too much, guilty of the 'stick a fill in every possible place you can ' variety. But I was like 21 or something, and just thrilled to not be playing this kinda stuff.
It ended up sounding like pre-76 Chicago meets Steely Dan meets Tower of Power, except not as good. When I finally heard it after almost 30 years, I was so thrilled I almost cried.
The earliest surviving recordings were one horrible one of me jammin' on guitar in '84, and the other one, a recent find that I cherish greatly, is from a jam I had in my garage in 94 in the Connecticut 'burbs, right before I moved to Vermont. It was with two really serious players from Brooklyn (gtr and sax) who knew how to compose, a jazz drummer with crazy chops, and a four-piece horn section, which, at that time was always my favorite kinda lineup. I was, at that point, into a lot of fusion, prog, Zappa, that kinda stuff, but had nowhere near the chops to do it. It's significant because I can really see where I was going to go and how much better I am. I was just getting out of my Jaco/Jeff Berlin wannabe phase and you can clearly imagine all the baggage that comes with when you're talking about a guy with no formal training who'd only been taking it seriously for a few years.
But I was able to at least understand some more complicated concepts, and so I learned a bunch of tunes with these guys. On some of it, I hold my own. Sometimes I wank way too much, guilty of the 'stick a fill in every possible place you can ' variety. But I was like 21 or something, and just thrilled to not be playing this kinda stuff.
It ended up sounding like pre-76 Chicago meets Steely Dan meets Tower of Power, except not as good. When I finally heard it after almost 30 years, I was so thrilled I almost cried.
