Standards

I got this gig tomorrow night, a private party and the band is kind of a thrown together affair. The musicians are all good players but, we haven’t ever all been on the same stage before.

Here’s the plan; we will play an hour of “dinner” music then, a few sets of rock and roll. So, we’re talking about four hours of music and that means we will be dipping in to the standards. Songs everybody knows, in theory at least.

Used to be, when somebody said, “we’re going to play standards”, they were referring to a lot of jazz type type, pop type, show tune kinds of things from days gone by. The great American songbook, in other words.

Nowadays, it could mean anything. It could be Beatles songs, Zep, Michael Jackson hell, it could be “Enter Sandman”. Could be any damn thing.

What is a standard to you, may not be a standard to me. I’ll tell you what’s standard to me; the songs I have been playing regularly with Thirst N’ Howl or, songs I have written. That’s the stuff I’m comfortable with right now.

For this first set tomorrow night, the dinner music set, the leader gave me a stack of charts just yesterday. There’s probably at least 50 songs in there ranging from “All The Things You Are” to “My Foolish Heart” to “By The Time I Get To Phoenix” to “Killing Me Softly With His Song”. Now, this guy might call any of these songs at the spur of the moment but, we won’t be playing all of them. In a perfect world I would know all of them cold and be confidently prepared. In fact, even though I’m familiar with these songs, I haven’t played any of this stuff in many years. And, a lot of these songs are deceptive in that they have some complex chord progressions. It’s not like jamming on blues song.

My plan here is to sight read these charts best I can, keep time and not make an ass out of myself. If I get called to solo on something on which I haven’t worked through the changes; let the ears take over and keep it simple.

For the rest of the evening, the rock and rollish stuff, there’s things like “Listen To The Music” by the Doobie Brothers or, “The House Is Rockin” by SRV that aren’t rocket science but, they have big assed guitar kickoffs that have to be spot on especially in regards to tempo. Nothing worse than starting one too fast or too slow; no groove hence when that happens.

The bandleader says, “it’s a no-pressure gig”. Yeah but, you don’t want to look like a buffoon in front of a couple hundred people.

But, like I say, they’re all good players and that’s the key. That’s what allows you to loosen up and have some fun because you know you’re not going to get just hung out to dry. If you blow it on something, the team will pick you up and you move on.

I think I’ll go get some new strings that always makes things run a little smoother too.

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Tags: great american songbook, Guitar, Standards