marriot brooklyn rm711 ursula rucker @ BAM
a travel day to nyc for our show tomorrow as we have a 9am soundcheck…head out to 55bar where my pal ari hoenig is playing with bassist victor bailey
and wayne krantz…an enjoyable extrapolated funk stomp…great to see ari+victor….3am back to marriott.
early rise@7am…super coldday…brrrrr. soundcheck is plagued with problems from union soundcrew confused about patching my samplers up…finally success…but only a brief but ample amount of time for ursula, doc gibbs and me to run some things down….a union stage means there a lots of 15 minute coffee breaks and we have to clear the stage…strange….anyway rest of the day was spent at k7 raiding the vinyl collection, on to lunch at elmo, then took the f train to 63rd+lexington and caught arakidocumentari at theimaginasian theatre. interesting look at japans’ most controversial art photographer…a very inspiring film…f train back to brooklyn…dinner…then to our soldout show…tonight we are playing with poet sonia sanchez and guitarist vernon reid (living colour, masque)…
as does happen sometimes when we do multi-artist theatre shows, my gear is unplugged and pulled off stage, meaning that later we’ll have to repatch everything, reload programs, and hope all will work…seemingly at the beginning of our show i thought it was, but as we went forward i realized my guitar sound was not full, kinda frazzy, so while we played our set i was trouble shooting trying to figure out the problem…during ‘untitled flow’ it actually started cutting out…really disturbing…which left me no choice but to kik various pedals and cables trying to find the issue…i finally found the source of the problem on our last song…but we all
kicked it out with all we had anyway…it still came off…audience went crazy…they loved ‘what a woman must do’….the bam is a beautiful place to perform….off stage greeted with unexpected wonderful hugs from sonia sanchez and vernon reid…wonderful people and their set was beautiful as well….an amazing night here even with the equipment problems…. (((**)))

photo: tim motzer, vernon reid, doc gibbs