I don't know if anyone here has heard of him, but a trombonist named Conrad Herwig played with my school's jazz band tonight. He's really incredible. I'm definitely buying a couple albums. Check him out. I'll post an MP3 of one of the songs he played on sometime soon. Our band wasn't that great tonight, but he was amazing.

Looking foward to the mp3.....

Conrad Herwig rocks. It's always cool to play with a jazz great. In my junior year of college, my jazz band got to play with Stanley Turintine (tenor sax). Sadly, this was one of his last performanced before he died. Man could he play!

Damn, man. Stanley Turintine? That's awesome!

Sadly, I'm going to have to be pretty selective of which track I put up. Very few of them are any good (because of the crappy band that's backing him up - boy was I embarrased).

Anyway, I'll have them up by the end o the week.

I was worse then embarrasses when I F'ed my piano solo and Stan gave me a look like "If I was Max Roach and had a cymbal and you were young John Coltrane, I'd throw it at you. Now get off the stage, get your tail in the practice room, and don't come out until you have that solo nailed." I never played big band jazz piano again (honestly, I was sick of it after playing for 7 years).

Anyone else in this cult play jazz? Yo, we could jam at a meet or something!

Damn straight! That would be sweet I've only got what, 4 saxes?

Anyway, believe me, we were probably much worse. I was really pissed off at our performance. Oh well. Nothing I can do about it.

Yeah, I've played trumpet for about 12 years. When I was in high school, Our jazz band was the best high school jazz band in the state the first year I was in it. Definately not because of me though (I was just a lowly freshman). We won every competition we were in. The other 3 years i was in it, we weren't as good because we lost a lot of really good players due to graduation, but we were still always one of the top bands in the state.

I took a trip to see Arturo Sandoval play with Virginia Tech's jazz band a couple years ago. It was a great show but i could tell Arturo was getting pretty pissed. They kept dragging a little bit and he kept grabbing a cowbell and beating it trying to speed them back up. It was really funny. He was trying to do it in a way that didn't look like he was trying to speed them up but it was very obvious what he was doing since he was playing slightly ahead of the beat.

Haha, that's sad. I mean, these jazz guys are great guys (and I don't know how they pull it off) but I don't know why they do the gigs with highschool and college bands.

That's ok. How about this off topic story. I saw Toots Thielman play the Blue Note in NYC for his 80th birthday (just a few weeks back). Yeah, the show rocked. Mr. "Effortless Mastery" Kenny Werner was on piano, Billy Drummond on bass, and Reggie Workman on drums.

Well, Billy Joel was booked to sit in for a few tunes, so the place was packed! Unfortunately, it was packed with mostly mainstream pop listener Billy Joel fans who couldn't appreciate the incredable musical mastery of Toots as he plays the friggin harmonica! So, Billy Joel came on at the end and did two pop songs that he had recorded with Toots (NY State of Mind and... that other tune i don't know the name of).

Poor Billy Drummond and Reggie were stranded up there, having to play so square. Then, Kenny Werner was going to come back for the last song, but the fans made Joel stay on stage. He tried to cut through some blues tune, screwed up the words, and sounded generally bad. I think the rhythm section was pretty pissed.

But it was a great show. Kenny Werner really is the man! And Toots practically quoted the entire Real Book on the solo for his first tune. It was amazing.

Dude, my band director is something like 62 years old. He talks about taking the actual A train to see the Duke. The Count, too. Man, he's got some stories.

Man, I love those stories. Here I live so close to the city (NYC that is) and I never go in to see jazz. I gotta change that... Get some of my own stories.