My Band Could Win a" Most Improved Band" Award

This is a continuation of the thread I started August 21, 2005 titled, "Just Realized How Mediocre My Band Is".

In August, my band, "The Jazzernauts Rock and Soul Revue" had not rehearsed or gigged in over four months. We were tired of each other after a couple of bad outtings.

I got an opportunity for a great gig this January and set up a band meeting. Before doing this, I met with our lead singer and guitarist first. We decided that the weak section of the band was the horn section (trumpet and sax). They were never together musically and it always sounded sloppy. Our keyboardist had issues too. We decided to add another horn player who is a middle school music teacher locally to become the horn section leader. He agreed, we had the meeting, and everyone decided to put the effort into improving the band.

Well now it's three months later, and the band has improved greatly. The new member has rewritten all the horn parts, the horns sound tight, the keyboardist cleaned up his playing and everyone is having more fun now than ever before.

I mentioned the name of the band because I've always hated the name. We don't play Jazz. As a result, we've lost gigs because people didn't want to hire a jazz band. We've now changed the name of the band to, "The Rhythm Doctors". This is much more appropriate since 5 of the 8 of us are doctors. It's become a great marketing schtick too. The name matches the music we play better too which is R&B, Motown, Classic Rock and a little Disco.

With the name change, we now have a major department store that wants to sponsor us for gigs that wouldn't normally pay. They also want to dress us in their clothing at their cost as long as we promote them at our gigs. It hasn't happened yet, so we have to wait and see. They are having us play one of their big promotions in early December in their clothing. We better play that gig flawlessly as many prominent people will be their too (future bookings hopefully).

It looks as though we are going to get the big gig in Orlando we had the meeting about too.

That's all for now. I felt obligated to post this because I bitched and moaned about this same band three months ago. I was getting ready to quit, but now it has taken on a life of its own. Thanks for listening to my manic rave. Hope you guys are doing well too!