Neil Shah - Pianist/Vocalist/Composer

After the previous weekend off, I was back at St. Nicks Pub on Saturday night. It was really rainy and overcast all weekend—after spending most of Saturday cleaning and reorganizing my place, it was good to get out and play. I also did a lot of writing and came to some important realizations about my songs.

The gig was once again with George Bragg on drums. Dave Croce was filling in on bass. Dave and I started out just duo since George was nearly an hour late. All and all it was pretty typical—standards, bossa novas, George’s Louis Armstrong and Ray Charles impressions, and people “sitting in.”

An old-time friend of George’s played the piano at the end. They did an old latin tune that they used to play together when they were in a band together during their youth. Just duo and it was beautiful the way the played together. Makes me wonder—when Stockton and I are in our 70’s will we still be able to get together and play Autumn Leaves in 7/4? Will it sound better and more elegant than ever? It’s amazing… you memorize one of these 32-bar standard songs, and it will stay with you forever, and serve as a vehicle for a lifetime of potential musical experiences. Outstanding.

Switiching gears, I’m still writing like crazy. Alot of the stuff isn’t in the post-modern folk-countrified vein that I’ve been writing in for the last couple years. I’ve just been writing in whatever vein comes to mind. It’s been refreshing. At some point I’ll try to figure out what I want to do with all this material, but for now I’m just going to keep riding the wave.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 10th, 2005 at 10:10 am and is tagged music, shows. Follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed and Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.