Otis Redding Show

So I got a call from band mate and genius show fixer Alik Peters-Deacon last week asking if I fancied some horn section work at the well known music venue The Watering Hole in Cornwall.

"Cool," I said, "Who for?"
"Otis Redding."
"Erm, right. I thought he was dead?"
"Yeah, but he had a son called Otis too and he wants a band put together."

When the reply came back I nearly lost it. This man's dad is pretty much the godfather of soul and after hearing we'd be playing all the classics like My Girl and Dock of the Bay it was pretty much the best thing ever.

The band I was going to be part of was made up of 8 guys and girls I've had the pleasure of knowing and working with around the South West for some time and I hadn't seen a few of them for a while so it was pretty exciting. Drummer Gary Kroll is a great guy and I've played with him on a few sessions, bassist Celso Rocha a Brazillian firecracker and at the time was part of Freshly Squeezed. Alik the MD on guitar and Jacob Kodicek are also Freshly veterans and of course Simon Dobson the other Badcore Horn I spend most of my time playing next to. Backing vocals were a real treat to have and provided by Alex Hart, a local country/pop songwriter and blue singer Becca Langsford. Rehearsals sounded great and as Simon and myself had a few sessions on that weekend and a lot of material to get down we were running iPad music stands which worked fantastically.

Fast forward to the day of the show and we were at Cube Studios in Truro at lunchtime to run everything with Otis. We'd made some adjustments to the arrangements and were hoping he liked them. After setting up we were feeling pretty good and relaxed, then someone said "Otis is here," and suddenly the game faces came on.

Rehearsing at Cube Studios

Aviators, leather jacket, gold boots and left handed Strat, the dude looked every bit as soul as you'd expect. First thing he did was see if everyone knew Green Onions and had us jam it to size us up. Seemingly pleased with that we moved on to the main event and after a good number of hours adjusting and transposing he was happy and we packed up and headed to the venue.

We chatted for a while and the guy is the nicest dude ever. Totally humble about his beginnings and properly switched on about soul and music in general. The mood in the Watering Hole was crazy when the evening got underway. You could tell the crowd were dead excited and that definitely rubbed off on us. Otis meanwhile was in his dressing room sleeping off the flight like a pro.

Showtime, and as we played the opening track the man himself strides onto the stage wearing a sequined shirt with security on either side. For the whole set he commanded the stage, throwing solos around and weaving in bits of family history and at some points I saw people at the front in tears, it was an amazing experience. The end came all to soon and he was pretty
much mobbed for autographs and photos until he left.

Afterwards he told us how impressed he was that a bunch of young guys from little old England could groove out so hard and how he'd love to take us across the Pond to play with him in the US. Turns out he'd had trouble getting session players together who worked and he liked the way we worked. There's a big festival due in 2015 and he wants us there. Needless to say I've got my passport ready for the call!

The band with Otis afterwards

As cool shows go, that's way up there!

The day after was a drive to Cardiff to play with London collaboration, High Cross Society as a last minute dep gig. It was great, but a long night that included sleeping in the car at an unremembered service station at something like 5am. Ooof.


Dan
@frame_boy

New Reeds!

Yo! Short update on the new brand of reeds I'm now totally digging. After years of being a Vandoren convert and playing on the standard blue packets, I then discovered the different flavours like ZZ, V16 and Java. I loved each type for a fair time until discovering the next. 

V16's were brilliant and powerful, but lacked finesse. The ZZ's produced a lovely tone but gave me less power and I'd find they were blown out after a couple of particularly lively funk shows. The original Green Java's were the first variation I tried and I must admit I was never truly taken with them. They played a bit harder than the vanilla version, but nothing really leapt out. 

However I saw the Java Reds on Reeds-Direct.co.uk and gave them a go. They have an amazing balance of power and finesse, being great for both hard funk and smooth jazz. They bed in and warm up quickly, but like all reeds you do get some duds in the box. At the moment of writing on average 1 or 2 per box of 5 warp the minute they're wetted or are woolly sounding, but the rest are sharp and clear. 

I play these at 2.5 on my Series II Selmer Tenor and plan to replace the ZZ's I'm running on my other horns when I run out.

Go well, 

Dan

@frame_boy 

Yet again I am an awful bloggist!

Wow, so yeah, this diary of musical escapades really hasn't worked very well. The problem with chronicling life is that you have to 'do' some life to chronicle it and therefore reduce the amount of chronicling time you have. Still, never mind!

So as you, dear reader, can imagine, plenty of things have happened since 10 months past. I'll try to compress things a little to save eye strain.
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The bunch of funk meisters Freshly have been working on originals and we've got a small collection brewing away nicely. Our eminent Brazilian bassist Rokko and as we recently found out, producer, has been stocking up one some mean hardware. Neve and SSL mic pre's, AKG 414s, Logic interfaces and all sorts have been secretly piling up at his doorstep and he unveiled them to us not so long ago. Also, keyboarder Trip Hazard has the most awesome crib there ever was. Options of the piano room with choice of 2 full size grands and crazy sculptures and also a mill to ourselves.

Unfortunately a week before we were due to record our guitar/synth man Alik had his Novation Mininova stolen after rehearsal. This put a rather large downer on the whole thing, but being a small village and after a few heartfelt notes, the synth was returned by a mystery man, no questions asked. Pretty cool really.

With Rokko and Trip's powers combined we made a nice little studio for a week and got to work. We stayed up far too late and started way too early every morning, but in the end we've got something we're all hugely proud of. We couldn't have asked for better surroundings either, table tennis, chasing chickens, kayaking down weirs, playing Dungeons and Dragons (terribly and drunkenly) and to top it off Trip's dad is some kind of Czec master chef.

You can see what transpired here and the tunes will come soon.
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The Seahawks love releasing new stuff and yet another tasty album us out with some mixes and remixes I've had the pleasure of playing on. Have a look at this beauty! Coloured vinyl to go with the picture disc from last year!
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The Badcore Horns have been busy too and a fair number of works we've been on have been released to the world now at long last....

• Granville Sessions have put their album Forward on Bandcamp, we laid down trumpet and saxes on this and there are some huge moments in the first track March and ridiculous baritone in The Next One.

• We're all over Electric Swing Circus' release too and they've sampled us for live use meaning we probably featured a bit at Glasto this year ;)

• The hush hush bit of work we did for Madness has now been released and you can hear us on their live DVD of Oui Oui etc... Links fail me but check it out for sure!

Our latest project was for rock band Canturbury. If you like a cross between good old British rock and Muse you'll be on to a winner. I spent a ridiculous night there with the usual crew, band and a London based string section. We ended up drinking wine and playing Countries, if you've never played it you'll find it the most irritating game 'till you get the rules. I was also coerced into waking Pete up with some sexy sax action (See Picture). He was not as excited as we were. We discovered Peter Miles, producer extraordinaire is also Peter Miles, Ugandan rapper. It kinda explains all the mystery hits on his website from Africa...
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So, term starts again in a few weeks, I'm now teaching sax, clarinet, flute, uke, guitar, drums and piano. Worried much? Naaaaah!
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Oh! Almost forgot, we got a jazz night started in the local pub following in the footsteps of local legend Tony Harris. It's started getting quite a reputation and we've had loads of guests get involved! It's pretty rough and ready and mostly a bit of fun. Check our version of All Blues.


Dan.

PS, I'm going to be reviewing a wireless IEM unit over the weekend. Check it out!

Releases!

Finally some tunage out and about! I've been waiting to see these come to fruition for a while now, but here they are...

First is a slim EP released by the Jag Harps written by Graham Rutherford. Simon 'Peacekid' Dobson and myself provided some brass on this and it sounds lovely. There's talk of touring it and adding some more tunes so here's hoping! It's called Theta Waves, check it out and buy it here.

Next up is a full album by the Seahawks called Invisible Sunrise. Its's spacey as hell and clearly making some people very happy as it's apparently hit number 29 in Rough Cut Records album charts. I'm credited with wielding the 'space horn' on there due to the crazy effects we were working with, but it's sounding great! You can listen and buy it on iTunes here.





Also played on an album in production for a folk singer called Mr Paddy. Nice sounding stuff that I'll hopfully be able to demo soon.

Lastly, few more of my own up on www.soudcloud.com.dan-hillman and I've got some vocal talent coming in soon to lay their skills down!

Hope you like,

Take care,

Dan.

Videos ahoy!

Yo readers of the lost ark, here be some videos I done made of me done making music a few days ago. Your life will never be the same after watching me parp around on a baritone sax or show you my lovely samples that I tooted and thusly plonked.

I've been looking to merge my love of electronic tinkering and saxy good times for a while and came up with recording a harmonised line and mashing it about a bit to come up with new ideas. Checkum out here:

Also here's me recording the baritone sax solo in my new offering to the world. It's nice and jazzy and I thought it was a pretty good first take so I kept it and uploaded it. Videoing recording sessions is a great way for me to keep a record of what I've been up to, demo my skills and show you that there still remains a live element to my music even through the veil of electromagic. Go forth and watch:

I hope that was worth a few minutes of your life, come back next time!

D.

I've been keeping busy over the past month as I hope the picture (insert) suggests. The life of a wandering minstrel is never a steady one, but as the funk has dipped slightly, other things have peaked.

Monday nights are now spent keeping a finger to the pulse of the student population at Mosaic in Exeter by playing sax to funky house beats courtesy of 4Play Events. It appears that as the weeks go by I bear witness to more and more of the weird and wonderful. After a few sessions getting the feel of the place and putting up with the tedium of in-house engineers wanting to crank every piece of gear to the point of redline I arrive one time to see the entire ground floor covered in turf (yes, really) and another to see snake charmers plying the crowd with their serpentine friends! I'm intrigued to see what's next....

As far as my own music goes, I've been getting my teeth into dubstep in a big way having decided to remix a chilled electronic tune I've been producing with a local singer/songwriter. It looks like the cheeky, wobbly bastard child of UK garage has fallen from favour amongst the punters, but that makes it all the more appealing to me. I've been forced to learn so much about music production in this short space of time and there are so many concepts to get my head around. I also have a couple of Cinematic Orchestra inspired light jazzy tracks almost ready to go apart from needing some soul vocal samples laid down. I've had some interest from a video producer looking for soundtracks, but I'm currently waiting for more info on that one. Check my Soundcloud for more of my work.

In other news The Seahawks album I've been working on has been for trial pressings, the artwork is done thanks to the same dude who does the Super Furry's stuff and a boatload of remixes are already in the pipes. Can't wait to get my hands on a copy!

Lastly, Graham Rutherford, the jazzy swine who dragged me to Bristol to jam on a few of his tracks a few moons ago has been in the studio for the last day mixing the album down. Got a call this morning asking for some last minute additions to a tune in the vein of David McCallum's track 'The Edge'. Some big dark woodwind chords and flute tooting to top it off. I recorded a video of my first go at tacking down some lead stuff on soprano sax to get a feel for what it needed which can be seen here on Vimeo:

That's all for now, take care,

Dan.