expand-a-band

This pic(courtesy of Valarie)is from a performance at Robbie's just yesterday. My regular trio(Bill Schlipf, bass; Don Cochran, drums)plus Frank Parker on trumpet and Mark Russillo on harmonica and vocals.

The music was 'spot on', both us 3 and with our sitters-in.
And for once, the weather/competing events downtown/position of the stars all complied with us and we had a pretty much capacity crowd from the get-go(we've all-too-frequently had excellent music nights but sparsely attended, so it's nice to get both).

So I am now enjoying 9 consecutive days free from the rigors of daygig, aka vacation. A gig like this is a wonderful way to kick it off, and I try to schedule both my gigs and vacation time so that happens.

This front line of Mark and myself and Frank is something we've had at least twice now, which I call the men under 5'8"(Mark is I think 5'6", I'm 5'4", and Frank is I think 5'2"). I might just take it a step further and put a ceiling on the height of the people sitting in, so that no one over 5'8" gets in and wrecks our nice even line..

At this moment, I'm on day one of my vacation, still de-compressing, still shaking off the stress of the daygig, but with the memory of a very nice gig. Here's to many more.