Well I just played a really nice show with Red 5 on Saturday night at Studio Z. The band played brilliantly and even thought the crowd was rather small we had a real connection going between performer and audience. It’s the kind of thing I live for. Whenever that connection happens it immediately takes the gig from normal to great and it’s simply because we’ve all decided to be INTO this MOMENT. Now. No cell phone pics, no texting your friend during the song you don’t like, no band members talking to each other within earshot of the rest of the band. Just pure honest musical expression being respected and absorbed by a willing audience. Simple and straight forward.

A couple of weeks ago I was in Florida playing with my good friend Todd Clouser and a drummer named Jason Stander. It was a great experience getting to know Jason and developing a new rapport with another drummer. We had a great time and the music was really gelling quite quickly . Todd and I will be working together quite a bit in the next couple of months. His new album comes out Feb 19th and so we are playing a CD Release show at Icehouse on Feb 16th and then going on a short tour down through Iowa into Oklahoma and back up. Then at the end of March I’ll be playing with Todd in Mexico with the great and powerful Anton Fier on drums and in a holy-shit-dreams-do-come-true moment John Medeski on keyboards. John is one of my musical heroes along with his bandmates in MMW. Needless to say I’ll be super happy on that gig.

The biggest news coming up right now has to do with Bach and France. I’ll be playing with Framework on Jan 25th and 26th at Patrick’s Cabaret as part of Bach Society’s concert series. This is a reprisal of last years collaboration but we’ll be performing a whole swath of different selections including some pieces with vocalist Carrie Henneman-Shaw. She’s the bee’s knees in the classical singing world. Then it’s off to France with my brother JT for a set of three gigs with the British pianist Tony Hymas. We made an album a little while ago that features a bunch of blues tunes reworked by Tony to reflect some of his influences.

Look for more in Spring 2013!

cb