PG Music Home Forums General Discussion Off-Topic Performing Live Jazz with BIAB

I'll jump into this....or perhaps at 75, I'll wobble snapping my fingas like Buddy Greco.

I've been playing...singles/duos/whatever, live...for many years, mostly in Chicago and mostly in syndicate owned bistros.

I've played jazz guitar since the mid fifties after our college days when the livin was easy, and we had a Dixieland band that played on Chicago's near north, Wells Stree, Gate of Horn, College of Complexes.

At times we would gig behind Ken Nordine, long time free-verse jazz poet of international caliber!

Ken had a many-years-long love affair with his unique brand of "Word Jazz" ..even a weekly show on PBS radio!

....and this guy invented the mind-set of being "outside" with his thinking and stream-of-consciousness-ra... about this-a and about that-a. All the story telling in a very jazzy vein with jazz backup.

A deep baritone voice and rhythmic iambic-pentameter approach to Story Telling of "the jazz life, life in the big city, life digging these "new" bop cats like, Bird, Prez, Sonny, Gene, Dizzy, Horace......

Let me tell you, he transfixed his listening audiences, which were many, in clubs or on the radio.

Like man, the record came out of Moe Kaufman playin' "Swingin' Sheppard Blues"...and Ken would begin with that deep deep forbidding patter...and damn...you just sat there bowled over...
by the stories, his jazz-tinged, rhythmic, slicing voice... that would seem so contemporaneously "real"....like "jazz.... spontaneously moving along on his story-telling, jazz-drenched journeys..So...what the hell does this have to do with BIAB....?????

Actually nuthin', but he did have a Band-In-His (Throat) Box...and he did come at you live and in technicolor, with LIVE jazz accompanyment! Live...that's what this software is all about!

Picture this...walk into the bar...jerk your head towards the stage where you'd swear Ray Brown's quartet were stridently swinging. You bump into the waitress with your sudden move...she drops a few filled glasses of booze on the customers sitting below...then...still startled...your foot catches the back of someone's chair, and you lunge forward trying to catch your balance, but never stop looking at the stage to see where these
cats are "hiding"!!

As a jazz guitarist/keyboardist, I lug a Metheny Roland synth 303, a knock-off 335, and a 175 acoustic electric, a PA-80 Arranger workstation, a Fender 100W and Behringer 300W, both keyboard amps.

Usually have my Toshiba Qosmio with BIAB/RealBand on USB drives. I have also taken those "numbers of real-tracks" and put them into sets for whatever I feel like, on MP3-type set numbers/songs/ takes, so I don't wait for any loading to interrupt the groove.

If I feel like it, I'll start with some guitar/vocals from my American Standards Fakebooks. My voice has been mistaken for Mel Torme, so I can get along well playing ballads/playing and singing just guitar

But for cocktails, dancing and schmoozing music.... I'll play with the "Real Band", whole nine yards, including them solo, me solo, them solo, me sing, me play on the keyboard....until my pacemaker blows up!!...then it's break time!

I've got six or seven or eight great synths, including Karma, ES8,
Triton, Roland G-1000 Arranger...so maybe yes, maybe no, bringing
this stuff out. I've also got a jam man looper if need be.

I don't think you need to put the BIAB real stuff in any particular format: wave, mp3 or whatever...but organize it for a steady stream of playback, with only small breaks.

We all agree..."got to keep the set going... and... if there's a computer glitch, immediately fall back on your "Ken Nordine Throat In a Box", and do a real LIVE gig, playing and singing...
or perhaps just some soft word jazz with a pre-recorded "LIVE" BIAB/RB swingting softly behind your lucky A--!!

Remember guys, jazz cats are cool, never flustered, always in time and in key....well maybe not always.....Hey Manny, flip the swith on that playback machine!!