9 Goes To 10

On Monday night, my friend Josh Irving played at a fairly new Brazilian jazz club in New York called Cachaça.  Josh is a saxophonist I’ve known for nearly nine years now (has it been that long already?).  His quartet featured long time collaborator George Dulin on piano, Danny Zanker on bass, and special guest Francisco Mela on drums.  Josh kindly gave me an opportunity to sit in on his song "9 Goes To 10".  I didn’t know it at the time, but Jen took this video on her digital camera:

It was really dark in there!  This is the first video of me playing since high school (I dare anyone to try to dig that recording up!), so I thought I’d post it here.  This is actually my least favorite of Josh’s compositions to play on…it just has this way of kicking my ass and is very difficult for me to find anything melodic to play over the chord changes.  Last time I saw Josh perform this tune, he had Dan Pratt  playing tenor.  Dan made it sound like a piece of cake!  Not surprisingly, as everything he plays is supremely lyrical.  That’s one of the beautiful things about New York…there are always brilliant musicians to inspire you!

Incidently, Josh and I recorded a more relaxed version of this tune in the studio in 2000.  It’s totally different in this setting…

Anyway, this really has me excited to play more jazz.  I have a very busy next three months, but I’m managing to get some tenor time in there.