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It was beautiful today out be the Alice in Wonderland Sculpture. Cassidy and Clifton are coming together real well with all kinds of different rhythm ideas and grooves. Fun.

Just as we were warming up and before Stefan arrived a tour group of Canadian Musicians was standing in front of us. A girl, Ashley I think, had some questions about the bass so we asked her if she wanted to play. We insisted and all her friends were chanting her name! So our first tune had a special guest. We played a blues in F, I wrote some lyrics for her on the spot!

A good day for sure. We are now sold out of the “Jazz and Americana” CD’s that I made last year. I just put in an order for a re-up so we should be in stock again soon.

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Headed to Phili tomorrow morning to play at the Italian Market Festival there. I’m curious and excited about it.

I’ll be brief but there is a bit of good news.

It all started this weekend. It was our best weekend in the streets as a group. We sold 130 CD’s in two days. The music was light and fresh and we had a great time.

On Tuesday I got a call from Tim at Music Under New York. He told us that we had been selected fro a banner but we couldn’t tell anyone yet because they weren’t releasing the results until Thursday. He was calling us to ask us to perform at the press event where they would announce the winners.

So that’s what we did yesterday. We went to Grand Central Station over by the S platform and performed three little tunes. We wound up with mentions in today’s Daily News, New York Times, and New York Post – the post gave us a nice photo and a great little review saying that out of the three bands that performed we “won the gold!!” We also were interviewed a bit and wound up being broadcast on NPR!!

Very stoked about it all, clearly!

Here’s some links I found…
1010wins.com – This one also has an audio clip we are on.
nydailynews.com
nypost.com – This one a good photo and says really nice stuff about us.
ny1.com – This one has a little video (.ram) file that features the band.

This photo appeared on the front page of the Metro Section in the New York Times – 5/2/08

Yes, I guess we made an impression on somebody!! The audition for the Music Under New York program was actually a lot of fun. We were as cool as cucumbers back stage waiting our turn. We were cracking jokes and dealing with the fact that it was pretty early. Drinking coffee. It seemed that there was quite a bit of nervous energy around us but we were keeping it cool.

The performance itself was good but not great. We did nail the ending so at least that. Starting and stopping together are obvious landmarks of ensemble playing and we did get good support from the staff and the media their and not everyone did. It was funny how some of the judges seemed like enthusiastic people who were smiling at our music and others were determined to be as stone-faced as possible. I was having a great time as a front man and leader and it didn’t phase.

Immediately afterwards we were ushered to the side where we were interviewed for a Korean TV station (!!?) and a new york arts radio pod-cast. We were really, really big stars! And then that was that. We’ll find out in a few weeks whether we made the grade. Fingers crossed.

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Next stop, Central Park where Cassidy met us (Tuba Joe had to return home) and we had the best set we’ve had to date as far as CD sales are concerned. 29 Cd’s in 40 minutes. Nice. Then two Central Park Conservancy people came over and told us to move on so we went about two hundred yards away to the Hans Christian Anderson statue on the other side of the pond and did ok there as well! We’ll be back soon although the weather looks a little sketchy for the next few days.

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Wound up the night playing at Super Fine with Tuba Joe again in the Bass chair. The first set was rough as we tried to adjust to the sound there. Juliette (from Shanghai Mermaid) sang a few songs with us as did the wonderful blues singer, Mamie Minch. The second set however was killer as we shifted in to our wheelhouse of dirty blues and grindy minor key tunes. Did Bill Baily in Minor again and it was awesome. It seemed a slow night there due to the rain.

A busy day for certain.