Hello, good afternoon and welcome to the Saturday Morning News Post... on a Sunday afternoon.
This is gonna be a quick one folks! I have had a 4 and 5 yr-old who will not let me rest, let alone blog, this weekend. But here we are and I have something different to share with you this time... a video!
Click here to watch some footage of the quintet I co-lead with Quincy Davis. It's a great band (Quincy, Brad Turner, Oliver Gannon, and Karl Kohut) playing a beautiful song (Come Rain or Shine), at Vancouver's finest (and sort of 'only') jazz club, Frankie's.
But that's not all! There's a bass clarinet solo, with one gigantic, glorious SQUEAK!
There's just something remarkable about squeaks on the bass clarinet. Maybe it's because the instrument is so low, and the squeaks are so high. Or maybe because the squeaks are about TEN TIMES LOUDER than anything else you can play on a bass clarinet. Whatever the reason, there's surely no hiding them. There's no pretending it didn't happen. You just embrace it, watch your bandmates laugh around you, and keep on keepin' on!
Now, I don't seek to squeak, but when it happens, I kinda enjoy the ridiculousness of it. It's all part of playing "unscripted" music. Mistakes happen. You can either get upset by them, or you can shout out "WOOO!" like you've just grabbed ahold of a live wire.
So please enjoy! And feel free to comment under the video if you did.
May we all embrace our squeaks this week! Thanks for reading and see you next week... maybe even on a Saturday Morning... yeesh!
JD