Parish Entertaiment presents Breakestra, the New Orleans Suspects and MJ's Brass Boppers
2014-02-21
the New Parish
579 18th St, Oakland, CA
9:00 PM, Friday, February 21, 2014

[~8:20 PM lights down, go; didn't get the deck rolling for a few min]

1. [8:2m PM] ?
2. [8:37 PM] ? » 8:43 Give Up the Funk » ?
3. [8:49 PM] ? St James Infirmary
4. [8:56 PM] ? Sweet Dreams
5. [9:01 PM] ? (Lovelight/Blackbird) »
6. [9:08 PM] ? Here Comes a Fire »
7. [9:m PM] ? Feel Like Funkin' It Up
   [set ends 9:23 PM]

[9:41 PM lights down, intro by Roadie]

1. [9:41 PM] ? (inst)
2. [9:51 PM] Classified
   [9:56 add FT]
3. [9:57 PM] ? He Got All the Money
4. [10:03 PM] ? Willie's Second Line
5. [10:11 PM] Sailin' Shoes »
6. [10:18 PM] Hey Julia »
7. [10:21 PM] Sneaking Sally Through the Alley [10:30 FT off]
8. [10:31 PM] ? 32 cars [10:40 +FT ^]
9. [10:40 PM] Flambeaux (add Michael Jones: cowbell)
   [show ends 10:49 PM, no encore; we pack up and leave on account of lack of free time tonight]

[sorry guys, wish I could have stayed, but the dictates of sensibility mean I had to go!]

the New Orleans Suspects

• Jake Eckert: guitar, lead and harmony vox;
• “Mean” Willie Green: drums;
• C R Gruver: keyboards, lead and harmony vox;
• Reggie Scanlan: bass;
• Jeff Watkins: tenor saxophone
  - with special guest -
• Fred Tackett: guitar, ^ trumpet, vox.

MJ's Brass Boppers

• Big Chief Ray Blazio: vox;
• Greg Gomez: trombone;
• Michael Jones: snare drum, percussion, mc;
• Luke Kirley: sousaphone, trombone, tuba;
• Naazir Magbool: trumpet;
• Tom Salvatore: trumpet;
• Mike Waters: tenor saxophone;
• Harold “Homeboy” Wilson: bass drum, percussion;
• ?: sousaphone;
• ?: trombone;
• ?: tenor saxophone, percussion;

We arrive pretty soon after the doors open, thinking that this will help me set things up for tonight's experiment in multitrack recording. And it's true! The sparse crowd means no one gets strangled when I drop the mic cables to the ground after clamping the stereo microphone rig onto the projection shelf at the front center of the balcony. Happily, there are stray hooks and strings attached irregularly to the ceiling, so it's not too much trouble to cinch the cables up high overhead. And in the “whew, just right” category, the cable run is just barely long enough to drop down at the soundboard where I've made some space for my gear bag on the drink rail.

While I'm getting set up, MJ's Brass Boppers have finished and impromptu soundcheck, and they leave briefly, then march back in from the courtyard outdoors, beginning their set about ten minutes early, and catching me by surprise. What with this being my inaugural run on the Tascam DR-680 I bought recently, it takes me a few minutes to get it booted up and running – at this point only two tracks, from the stereo pair mentioned earlier. Since the band is playing from a circle on the floor in front of the stage, the mics aren't really oriented properly – they're aimed more at the PA and stage, somewhat higher than most of the horns – but my approach is not to mess with things that aren't horribly wrong, so I let it go. Hopefully the resulting sound is OK.

I'm mystified by the fact that the deck seems to be recording on four tracks instead of two, but I find out later that's because I'd enabled the two presently unused soundboard tracks while prepping things at home. Apparently the deck is happy to record in the absence of a signal, merrily filling up space with zero-valued 24-bit words at 96 kHz. That's a whole lot of nothing in an hour's set!

Another conundrum, not resolved until much later when I have time to read and reread the user's guide, is the correspondence between the track level metering and actual levels. Apparently, the hair's width, unlabeled “mystery line” represents -16 dB, while the similarly unmarked and hard-to-see line just below the top of the display is -2 dB (i notice only later the teensy white screen-printed labels at left say 0/16/50 from top to bottom). So anyways, this is just a long-winded gripe on the awkward UI; as for the recording, I was conservative, and aimed to set the levels at roughly the midline, figuring that would offer plenty of headroom.

It was fun listening to the Brass Boppers – an Oakland spin on classic New Orleans second-line brass band funk.

Once they finished their set I got a patch from the soundboard connected to channels 3+4, then set the levels for that pair based on the stage hand's “check, check” mic testing and drum whacks. Good enough!

Not more than fifteen minutes later, the lights went down, the roadie introduced the band, and the Suspects were off! Racing through a new instrumental before taking on the Radiator's classic, Confidential. By this time the crowd had really filled in, and folks were dancing and whooping things up like crazy. Must be that out-of-control Friday night energy.

Fred Tackett the climbed up onstage with his guitar to sit in on a nice 30-min chunk of tunes, ending with an energetic cover of Little Feat's Sailin' Shoes medley. Fred sat out the next tune, 32 Cars, which ended the set. Dang, too short at barely an hour. Happily, they got the sign that the could play one more, and this time, Fred added a bit of trumpet as well as guitar and harmony vox. The new tune, Flambeaux seems to me to be an update of an Indian chant. Something to ask the guys about next time I get a chance.

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