bad things, good things

bad: Tomorrow night will be the last cc3 hit @ Canyon Creek Scarborough until the summer. The bar is very slow these days and the band is the first casualty. They’ve been good to us there, so this news is probably more sad than bad. We hope we’ll be back by the end of May.

good: I just booked a cool gig:

cc3 + CPZ

live at the Art Bar @ the Gladstone Hotel

Tuesday March 20 8pm-11pm

It’s going to be the official (pamplemousse) release party. Admission will be $8 and will include a CD-R copy of the album and a discrevolt card to redeem online for the mp3s. If you can’t wait (and why should you?), you can download the album right now at chriscawthray.com

Kentucky Report

I’m in Kentucky this weekend with my wife, taking a quick vacation that involves some 18+ hours of driving in 48 hours of total vacationing. Not as bad as it sounds, since we’re travelling in our SMART that is GPS-equipped (thanks to my Dad for loaning it to us… I’m pretty addicted to it).

Why KY, you ask? JM. Not this JM. This one. Our schedule and his lined up for this weekend in Lexington, Kentucky, so that’s why we’re here. The concert was good; his band is very fine (he’s got a couple of ringers up there, Robbie McIntosh and JJ Johnson), though I was dissappointed to find out that the great Ricky Peterson was not on keys for this leg of the tour. The venue was a basketball-cavern filled to rafters with folks, all of whom were dressed astonishingly alike (it was like and Old Navy catalogue coming to life). I noticed how similar my own clothing was to this throng and made a mental note to stop buying clothes at the mall. We had OK seats, up high and far back but we were dead-centre with an unobstructed view. The obstructions were all lateral: the seating in this section of the venue consist of long, skinny blue plastic benches. The individual “seats” are marked by small number plates glued to the tops of the benches. These markers made for uncomfortably close seating if you take into account the average American waistband is hovering somewhere around 48 inches (I’m not exactly trim in my 38″ pants, so I can make this comment with some degree of entrenchment in the land of XL). Needless to say, I hadn’t seen so much rubbing together of strangers since Edith Prickley at the Melonville Baths.

The sound was horrible, but what we expected given the venue. I have a soft spot for John Mayer (my wife’s enthusiasm for him is much more intense); I think he’s a sincerely creative and talented musician, who got lucky in the pop music world, but has managed to deliver some pretty uncompromised music despite the constraints of his place in the business. He can sing and play and write and lead a band and I think that if he wasn’t famous he’d still be doing that somewhere like most of us do, so he can have my $38 USD anytime (the $7 venue convenience charge is another thing, but I digress…).

My only gripe is that I wish he would cease his attempts to play “the blues” for his audience. His own blues influence is evident in his music, and I think he incorporates it in original ways into his writing and arranging; so the actual “blues” tunes he performs in his sets are superfluous, and given the nature of the concerts, end up sounding watered-down and come off kinda limp (I feel the same about this when he does it with the John Mayer Trio with Steve Jordan and Pino…).

This was the first mainstream arena concert I’d been to in a while (I saw Willie Nelson this past year too, but that’s a whole ‘nother kinda mainstream), and my first time seeing the phenomenon of people taking pictures and movies of the show on their cell phones. Very odd, very, very odd.

Today (Sunday) will be a driving day, but not before we take a swim here at the nicely appointed Radisson in downtown Lexington. No complaints here, though the horse-and-horse-racing themed decor is a little goofy (we are in Kentucky, so I shouldn’t tease…), here’s a few photos:

Ok, I’m off to saddle-up the GPS.

CPZ update

The proposed domination of upstate NY has been postponed (sorry Buffalo and Syracuse ), but we’re hard at work to make it up with an extra Canadian date. Stay tuned for details!

cc+ 2/3 of CCMC

Wow. I’m excited about this: Sunday March 11 I’m performing in a quartet with Paul Dutton, John Oswald and David Sait!

The gig is part of the AIMT fundraising weekend, and it happens at 4pm @ the NOW Lounge.

Dutton and Oswald need little introduction and I’m humbled to have been chosen to perform with them. Mr. Sait is also new to me, as is his instrument, a Chinese “ghuzeng”. Gonna be fun.

ask and ye shall receive…

A few days I posted an open letter spelling out an idea for selling redeemable cards for downloads…. Well, someone other than me had this thought too, and my dear friend Lia Pas hipped me to that fact. So, without delay:

I should have these cards very soon, and they’ll be on sale at my gigs. This isn’t the future in my opinion, I think it’s the present. I hope others share this view. Go check it out!

Starry Nights afternoon…

Before our gig tonight at Orleans, I got together with Jeff and Dagmar to lay down drum tracks for the Starry Nights demo. They had tracked 4 tunes, but no drums, so I overdubbed my drums onto their existing tracks. Normally, putting drums last on a jazz record shouldn’t work, but it went OK. The tunes themselves were quite short and succint, as the demo is purely for the purposes of showcasing the band to book gigs, as opposed to a true “jazz” record, with longer solos and improvisation.

The session was quick, about an hour of tracking, and we got a decent sound with only two mics in their home studio. Here’s some pictures:

Jeff Simard, guitar and recording engineer, having a conversation with my hihats.

Recording kit, from the front.

…from the back.

Here’s the setup I used:

RIDEAU drums:

14×20 bass drum with an Aquarian American Vintage front head and a REMO Encore Coated Ambassador with a felt strip vertically from 1 o’clock to 5 o’clock, no muffling inside.

14×14 floor tom with an Evans Coated g2 on the batter and a REMO Coated Diplomat on the resonant side, no muffling

Pearl Sensitone Elite Aluminum 5×14 snare, REMO Coated Ambassador batter and Clear Ambassador snare-side

PAISTE cymbals:

14″ hihats: Traditionals extra-thin crash (top), Signature Full Crash (bottom)

18″ Sound Formula Full Crash or 18″ Traditionals extra-thin crash (with duct tape)

Regal Tip brushes, Zildjian Arnold Reidhammer sticks

DW & Gibraltar flat-based hardware and a Pearl Eliminator throne

how to roll a grapefruit?

Something that has been nagging me lately is the prospect of getting (pamplemousse) released and promoted to a wider audience. The download is up and ready for you to enjoy, but it’s hard to sell a download at a gig, and that’s where I think we’ll move a lot of this music.

Short-run CD manufacturing is expensive, and really can squeeze the profit margin on a CD, if you factor in recording costs. Another route is to get a record company involved, but then while I may not pay the manufacturing costs upfront, I’m certainly going to have paid them before I see any money from sales.

On top of that, the notion of a “hit” jazz record in Canada is 1000 copies sold. Let’s assume cc3 gets a hit with this record, there’s still a ceiling to our sales income before we have to re-invest to promote it internationally.  One runs the risk of having to spend all of the profits from domestic sales just to get the record noticed elsewhere.

All of this pulls me back to downloads. With download releases, I have to cover recording costs and promotion costs (both of which can be  controlled), and then simply put it out there. The profit margin remains similar or better to CDs, and the cost to the consumer is lower, so we both win. On top of that, the potential to record and release more often becomes apparent.

My dream-solution to this problem would be some sort of low-cost way of selling a coded “credit card” that someone can buy at a gig for the cost of the download, and then go home, log in to my site, type in the card # and get their music. Not a “gift card” per se, where the consumer can purchase any music they wish with the money, but a card that is dedicated to that particular download. It presents some interesting options:

-unique cover art for each card, thus making the cards worth keeping (in a leatherette album, under your pillow )

-the “card” version of the download could have access to exclusive music or photo/video related to the album

So, Mr. Jobs, I’ve just given you a zillion dollar idea to get iTunes into live music clubs. Make it happen and get back to me.

out on a limb wasn’t as far as I thought…

I played the On A Limb series last night at the Tranzac, #9 in a monthly gig where two singer/songwriters are teamed up with a bunch of improvisors (last night the improv folks included myself, Chris Banks (bass), Simeon Abott (keys), Jeff Burke (bassoon), Julia Hambleton (clarinet) and the songwriters were Erika Werry and Dan Fournier.

I expected it to go a bit differently than it did, but I had a good time. Dan’s songs were particularly compelling (with great lyrics, so obviously dirty that they almost sounded clean, or something, anyway I liked his songs); Erika had a really affecting way of phrasing her vocal melodies and I thought that could have been really extrapolated and enhanced by the free improv element. It did, but not to the degree that could have been acheived.

What is was, for lack of a better term, was a jam. I think the songwriters expected the “band” to back them up in a fairly traditional sense (to the point that they were calling out chord changes and offering up cues for the forms of their tunes, etc.). I chose to ignore most of all of that and just listen to the songs as they came out in real time and I reacted and interacted as I felt it. Sometimes I would end up keeping time, other times offering colours, etc.

I think I got a few shocked looks from the songwriters a few times, but I was there to improvise, and I hope that, in the spirit of the event, they took it as a complement that I was inspired to play what I played.

Anyway, I think it’s a great idea, and is probably something that could be best served by a “conductor” in the band. The promoter/organizer of the event chose not to get involved in that way, but I think the series could really shine with a musical director of sorts: someone onstage maintaining the improv status quo and also taking the imagined burden of “leading” the band away from the songwriters.

Also, it’d be so much more humane if it started at 20:30 and no 22:30 on a Sunday night.

back on the streets, took my time, took my chances.

(that’s a Survivor lyric…)

Anyway, back from HI. It’s FREEZING in Toronto. So awful.

What’s happening:

<> cc3 is back in the saddle, with our usual gigs, and I’m trying to raise the capital to get (pamplemousse) out on CD, as it seems many of our fans are stuck in the 20th century and like it that way. If that’s not you, please buy the download. Please.

<> CPZ is booking a short tour for late March. We’re returning to our fave venue, Pepperjack’s in Hamilton, and hitting two new cities: Buffalo and Syracuse.

WED MARCH 21 – Pepperjack Cafe, early set at 8pm, Hamilton, ON

FRIDAY MARCH 23 – Jazz Central, Syracuse, NY

SATURDAY MARCH 24 – TBA, Buffalo, NY

Stay tuned for more details.

<> CPZ is also releasing an “official bootleg” CD-R to sell at our shows to pay for the luxurious Motel 6 accomodations we look forward to. The CD-R will be the first in a project called  sashimi series , and will be titled (appropriately): sashimi series one

Why? Well, the project is featuring our live gig recordings that are usually done  with a DV camera, an Edirol digital recorder, or some other one- or two-track device. The recordings are “raw and delicious”, just like sashimi sushi.

Get it? Got It? Good.