We're back from the Montreux Jazz Festival. Quite and adventure I must say. First of all, when we arrived in Switzerland our guitars didn't. They apparently never got on the plane. We were scheduled to perform that night so they had about five hours to find our guitars. They did eventually find them but the stress level was profound. When we finally got on stage (we were the opening act for the festival, as if we needed more pressure) it was so hot the sweat was running into my eyes and I couldn't see. My guitar was drenched by around the fifth song and went horribly out of tune. I tried in vain to tune it while I played. Finally I told Al (bass player guy) to take a solo while I tuned up. Then things were better. The MIDI sounds in my set up (synthesizer sounds, which I blend with the regular sounds) were mixed way to loudly by the sound guy. Therefore you couldn't really hear the guitar sounds the way you're supposed to. Other than these things, I think the first performance went pretty well. After that first night we had several days off before we would be on stage again. We tried to rehearse but could not find a place to play. So we just took in the sights and watched the other bands perform.

    On Wednesday we played on one of the outside stages. That was fun except they gave me a transformer to use that wound up blowing up my Axon (synthesizer thing). Being the overly prepared monkey that I am I had another one with me. So I just broke it out and everything was good again. We did lose about 20 minutes of our set though. We sold the most number of CDs from that set. Lots of compliments. Lots of new fans. If you go to check out the performance at the montreuxjazz.com web site, check out the drunken french guy who keeps dancing into the camera view. He was at many of the out side shows we saw and has a very interesting physical improv thing going on. We enjoyed watching his wine induced interpretive dance steps.

     Later that evening I played with BB King. I had a great time. And BB (we're on a first name basis now) was very complimentary towards me. There was this other guy though, an older Kentucky blues man, who was having a lot of difficulty. It seemed like he was really struggling with the whole "Play with other people and follow a chord progression" thing. BB (my pet name for Mr. King) was very nice about the whole thing though. He never said a cross word to the guy. A perfect gentleman.

     Later Later that same evening (3:00 am to be exact) we played as a band again. This time we played at the Jazz Cafe. This might have been our finest moment over there. Even though it was so late (or so early, depending on your perspective) the place was packed. we'd had little or no sleep for two and a half days and were running on straight adrenaline. The audience was totally pumped though and we played well to them. They were screaming, I was screaming, we were all screaming (no ice cream though). I was so happy when we finished that last set. I felt like this one was a pretty good representation of our "Thing". I've been getting lots of cool e-mail from the people who saw us over there. Please continue to email me. Soon I will have pictures up for you all to check out.
Burr

     I hope you all got to see our interview about the band on Cable Vision. It was pretty cool having an opportunity to talk about the band and our experiences. I definitely learned a lot doing the shoot. One thing is I NEVER SHUT UP. Got to work on that.