What's going on in your lives? Where have you been? What are you working on?
I won't bore you with any more talk of LA. Life here consists of me trying to find an apprentice to take over the acoustic guitar section of Bananas, so that I can take more time teaching. And now it's time to actually sit down and write a practice manual to hand to each student. I've been doing it by embedding it in the lessons I record for them, but I want them to have it complete in hard copy, in one place.
The Gayle gig at Amnesia had another nice bit of fallout for me. One of our hot little local bands is Whisky Richards, that includes fiddler Katy Rexford, from Misisipi Rider (if you're only on one band around here, you're a slacker), and a standout Tele-bender named Adam Roskiewicz, who came up to me after our show and told me he'd been stealing licks off me all night, and would I like to get together to pick. Big ego boost, and you bet I would.
And next Saturday, 2/5, we're playing a little dive called the Spice Monkey, and our steel player can't make it. We've been using Jeanine Richardson on percussion for the last 7 or 8 months, and her husband, Maurice Tani, has been coming to all our gigs. You might recognize Maurice's name from my hyping of his band, 77 El Deora, here on the blog. Besides being a great singer-songwriter, Maurice is a fine guitarist, and by this time, he knows most of our stuff. And we're going to have him fill on guitar while Jon's out. I really like the guy, am in awe of his talent, and am just stoked about getting to work with him. He's multitalented, and did the poster I posted for our Amnesia gig. That's him in the hat, up to your left.
And just for nothing, the top photo is Norma and me at Multnomah Falls, on our vacation last fall. We've renamed it MultNorma Falls.
7 comments:
Nice photos!
T
Is that T for Texas or T for Tennessee?
T for "Testing... 1, 2, 3..... Is this thing on?"
For the binary impaired:
Testing 1-10-11
The Maurice Tani/Rik Elswit guitar duel turned out to be far more interesting than we'd planned. Probably because we're longtime support players. I need another soloist to work off of, so adding Jon Mitguard on pedal steel really lifted my playing to a new level. Having Maurice sit in ont only solved the problem of having a great second soloist, but he also really added to the rhythm section. We both got a lot of applause for our solos. And a big plus was having the fiddle player from the other band sit in with us as well. We made it up as we went along.
The Spice Monkey is a very nicely laid out restaurant with a dedicated showroom upstairs. The food was superb, and the place was jammed. I had some friends who showed up late, including my bassist from another band, and wound up having to sit on the stairs at the back.
Norma declared it a triumph.
Congratulations, Rik. That sounds like a great show!
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