I may not be doing a great job of explaining this.
I won't avoid gigs because there might be a soundguy. That would be stupid. If it's my band or my gig, I can handle the soundguy, although if he's a tool, they'll still bug me, I can hold my own. When I'm hired to play with someone in a semi formal setting who I don't normally play with who has posters plastered all over that say "An Evening with This Guy", then I try to do my job and not draw attention away from the guy who's paying me, as we all do. Which makes winning battles of wills with evil forces such as the one personified by the evil soundguy (as a literary device) more difficult.
The "on the other hand, I probably shouldn't take those gigs" (which I immediately contradicted in that same post by the way) was in reference to something else. I'm really not a great all around musician, as much as I'd like to be. I listen to different types of music and I occasionally play a rock gig or do something with a composer or a singer songwriter if I have good reason to or if I really like them, but I'm not one of those guys who you call for klezmer one night and country the next and "you'll tell me at the gig" the next and "we're going into the studio to record a jingle of some kind on Thursday". I don't play orchestra or big band (although I should and will at some point). I pretty much just play jazz. I play with a circle of say 50 people that expands and contracts like the universe every year and we generally (although we've never agreed to it or written it down) seem to have settled into a standard set of rules, behavior and vernacular. So, this Saturday, Adrain, who I haven't seen in over a year, needs me at Sabastians to play with someone who I'll meet when I get there. When I ask him if there was anything I needed to check out, he said "No. Standards and I'll have stand if end up reading anything you can look over my shoulder (he plays 'bone, which is politely in bass clef)"
So, 3 minute conversation, very little information appears to have changed hands. I'm going to play with a guy who I don't know and a guy who I haven't seen in a year and we have no plan that was articulated to me and I have no worries. I know how it's going to go and it will be fine. I'm looking forward to it.
It's tough for me to play with people who don't live in my little world and speak my little language. That might make me small. The fact that I took this other gig and that I take gigs like it now and again is a sign to myself that I don't want to be Provencial. I think there are two types of people who don't fit into my circle; those who have their own thing and those who just haven't figured it out yet. I like to welcome and help people in the later category, but I'm growing impatient with them. I'm willing to flex and grow with the former, but it's challenging for me, because it means that I need to have my game really together. Which of course I want.
Anyway, I'm going on and on at this point. Therapy in a box...laptop.
