Here is a picture of me and Marco Fiorini at ICMC 2025 in Boston. This was a Somax2 workshop, run by Marco, who is on the IRCAM team that is developing the software. I learned a lot and will be developing new work that incorporates Somax 2 in the next few months.

From September 16 – 19, 2021, I had the pleasure of participating in the Instigation Festival in Chicago. Steve Marquette organizes this long weekend of musical collaboration, and it is always fun and artistically rewarding but this year it felt particular restorative for me. It was the first time I had performed daily for four days in what seems like years, and they were all musically rewarding endeavors.

One of the highlights of the trip was a new piece that the festival commissioned from Mikel Patrick Avery called Nice to Meet You. It is Mikel’s musical exploration of the idea of restarting so many of the relationships that have been paused by the pandemic. We performed the piece at Constellation (which was not the original plan but sometimes things work out for the better) so there is a lovely archive of the excellently produced stream.

This video also contains the second set by Charles Rumback, James Singleton, Jim Baker, and Ed Wilkerson.

Our regular woodwind collaborator, Rex Gregory, could not make the trip because he is busy being a new father, so we had Dan Kinzleman on clarinet, flute, and tenor sax. Dan is an American musician who has lived in Italy for the last ten years or so. He is a wonderful musician, a fun hang, and a great road comrade. We were happy to have him with us. It was also nice to have two people who spoke the language of Italian sound engineers at sound checks.

We did most of the touring in Marcello’s Toyota Yaris Versa. Somehow we all fit, with the stuff.

Setting up for soundcheck in Udine, for our performance at Udin&Jazz. The concert space was lovely and the sound was very good. The festival also had great hospitality.

Sound check selfie.

The last gig of the tour was in Rovigo for the summer jazz series presented by the conservatory there. We shared the concert with the quartet of Massimo Morganti, who teaches at the conservatory. This pic is Massimo’s band at sound check.

After the gig in Rovigo, Marcello and I drove overnight to Chateau-D’Oex, Switzerland for the ISIM Conference. The over night drive was crazy, but when you arrive to this view from your hotel room, it feels less stupid.

This tiny alpine village seemed like an odd choice for the location of this year’s conference, but the setting was lovely, and the hosts were great. There were some good conversations about diversity, and community building. I presented on improvisational structures I use with my student laptop orchestra, and I really enjoyed Jeff Morris’s presentation on his weblogmusic.org project.

I also got the chance to hear a great house concert before I came back home. The band was led by Filippo Vignato, and they did his arrangements of Albert Manglesdorf’s music. The band included Piero Bittolo Bon, who has performed at Open Ears, and a great young bass player named Rosa Brunello.

It was a great trip. We made some good music, and I met or reconnected with a bunch of great people. I am happy to be home, but a touch sad that I left before I could experience Mirano Baseball Day.

The first day involved driving from New Orleans to Dallas, and performing that night. Aaron Gonzalez presented our concert at The Oak Cliff Cultural Center, and the trumpet/effects/drums duo Swirve (from Dallas) was also on the show. The Oak Cliff Cultural Center has a very nice, if quite resonant space, in which we performed.

We were hosted by Dennis and Carol Gonzalez (Aaron’s parents) who provided us with a place to sleep, two beautiful home cooked meals, and some wonderful fellowship. Of course Dennis is also a renowned improvising musician himself.

Dennis cooking eggs.

Carol’s world famous biscuits.

On Sunday, we drove to Austin, and played Sunday night on the Church of the Friendly Ghost concert at the Salvage Vanguard Theater. We stayed at the home of my friend and colleague John Worthington. Thanks, John.

The show in Austin also included sets from SYSTM, and Lunch Money. It was nice to get to hear and hang with some of Austin’s improvisers, who also offered excellent post gig taco truck suggestions.

The venue.

Sound check/set-up and the COTFG logo.

Monday we drove from Austin to Houston, and played at the fabulous “They, Who Sound” series at The Avant Garden. Dave Dove organizes the series, and they have a very cool scene happening there. Nice venue, great audience, the real thing. Damon Smith opened the show with a solo bass set, that was excellent.

Just to make sure the tour was grueling enough, we drove back to New Orleans after the concert on Monday night. By the time I dropped every one off and got back to my house, it was about 7am on Tuesday. The tour was fun and the music was good, but it was nice to be back in my own bed.

Enrico Sartori (alto clarinet), Domenico Caliri (guitar), Silvia Bolognesi (bass), Simone Padovani (percussion), Marcello Benetti (drums) & Jeff Albert (trombone)

This was recorded at UDIN&JAZZ 2011 XXI EDIZIONE on
Monday, June 20, 2011 in Cervignano del Friuli, Italy

Supuesto Blue bassist, Silvia Bolognesi during sound check before our performance at the UDIN & JAZZ Festival.

Our fabulous lunch at a privata near Cervignano, Italy. All of the meat, cheese, salad, and wine was a product of the farm at which we were eating.

The view from Castle Runkelstein, looking back down the valley towards Bolzano.

The main course of our meal before the gig at the Mirano Oltre Festival. I called them tuna-scicles, which doesn’t come anywhere near doing them justice.

When we got back from Italy, I had a day and a half at home, before I left for a week long music information retrieval workshop hosted by the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford University.

The Knoll – Home of CCRMA

The week was great. On top of the beautiful weather, the instructors were fabulous. They were each among the best in the world in their specialties, and came from a healthy mixture of academic and industrial situations. There is a course wiki that has lecture slides, and a wealth of material about what we learned over the course of the week.

Course participants and instructors, from left: Chris Colatos, Jeff Albert, Kamlesh Lakshminarayanan, Sean Zhang, Doug Eck, Eli Stine, David Bird, Gina Collecchia, Stephen Pope, Steve Tjoa. Not pictured: Jay LeBoeuf, Rebecca Fiebrink, George Tzanetakis, Leigh Smith, Dekun Zou, Bill Paseman, John Amuedo.

On the last afternoon of the workshop we took a tour of the CCRMA facility. They have a great vibe going there and some super cool stuff. There is a bit of a museum aspect to it at times, but also some state of the art gear for making sonic art.

One of Max Matthew’s Radio Batons that had recently been revived and played at Max’s memorial.

The view from the front of the Knoll, looking across Stanford’s campus.

I won’t label each pic, but the band was: Napoleon Maddox (vocals), Jeb Bishop and me (trombones), Hamid Drake (drums), Joshua Abrams (bass and guimbri), and Hervé Sambe (guitar).

When we made our connection in Barcelona, it was a different story. As soon as I entered the plane, I saw the two guitars in the flight attendants area, and thought that we might be in for the same scene, but the flight attendant then told me that I must check my trombone, and said the same to Jeb, actually following him down the isle because he didn’t notice the trombone right away.

I explained that I have flown many times, and the trombone always fit, and that that very morning we had flown on the same airline in the same model aircraft, and it fit just fine, but he adamantly said that there was no other way but to check them with the luggage. We asked if they would gate check them, so that we got them back right at the plane door in Belgium, but he aid that was impossible because they must go through security in Belgium (which was a stupid excuse because the flight would be over at that point, and they had already gone through security). We soon realized that his sole intent seemed to be to exercise his power to see that we were not satisfied customers. Several flight attendants were involved in these conversations, but none of them seemed to have any interest in solving the problem in a reasonable fashion. They kept saying that they were not allowed to make exceptions. He then said that if we want to bring the horns on, we must purchase a seat for them. i said “great, how much are the seats,” and he said, “well, it is too late now to do that,” even tough that had been offered (by a different FA) as a option early in the guitar negotiations in Seville. I left my horn and sat down. Jeb continued to argue that he didn’t trust the latches on his case and asked for tape, which they didn’t have, but eventually the guy told Jeb that he would put his horn in a closet in the cockpit. Jeb asked about mine and he said, “No, it goes under.” So even though they weren’t allowed to make exceptions they did.

I tried to be nice and not become enraged or be a jerk, but that didn’t pay off. I got screwed because I was trying not to be rude to the people. Eventually Hervé left the plane (and caught a later flight on a different airline) because he would not allow them to check his guitars. That seems to have been the right call. My horn was checked, and when I got to it in baggage claim in Brussels, the bell was severely damaged. The case has a big roughed up scuff where it was dropped and that spot aligns perfectly with the damage that was done.

The claims office in the Brussels airport says there is no recourse because the case wasn’t damaged (the big scuff is normal wear and tear). I have insurance and we’ll see how that shakes out. A wonderful repairman, named Jos Briers, in Genk fixed my horn so that I can finish the tour, but that bell will never be the same.

I have never before encountered personnel in an allegedly customer service oriented position that showed so little interest in helping the customer find a viable solution to a difficulty. I have never dealt with another airline that had what seemed like an active vendetta against musical instruments.

The things I have learned from this:

1- If they make me check my horn, I will leave the flight. (Gate check is different) Getting to the gig with an unplayable instrument is the same as missing the gig.

2- The people in Belgium, specifically Taxi Peters Genk and Jos Briers, and great helpful wonderful people.

3- I will never again board a flight operated by Vueling.

Vueling code shares with Iberia and they are part of the OneWorld system along American Airlines. I would like to publicly ask AA to disassociate with these people. I know when I deal with AA that I am dealing with a real airline, when I deal with their partners, I would like to be able to know the same, and in the case of Vueling that is simply untrue.

On Monday night we played in Bolzano, Italy at a great small theater called Carambolage. It was a nice intimate space, and we were treated to a wonderful meal by our gracious host Vic. The music was really great, there was a lot of energy from the crowd, and the band went to some fun spots that we hadn’t found before. Jeb and I ended up doing an unaccompanied trombone duo in “Kali Dub” that was a lot of fun, and seemed a bit telepathic at moments.

The stage during soundcheck in Bolzano.

Our green room in Bolzano.

Our manager, Ludmilla, and driver/man-who-gets-things-done, Matteo.

Tuesday morning, we left very early to drive through the mountains to Innsbruck to catch a flight to Vienna. Our flight to Vienna was on an airline called Niki. The plane was comfortable, and the people were very friendly and helpful (this will contrast greatly with a Vueling Air experience I will get to in a minute). We also flew Niki from Vienna to Seville, and my experiences with them were great.

The view from the tarmac as we boarded our early morning flight in Innsbruck.

In Vienna, we played at Porgy & Bess, and again we were treated very well. Porgy is a pretty big club, and the Austrians are not so obviously enthusiastic as the Italians, but the music was good, and the friendly experiencers seemed to dig the show.

Hamid at soundcheck in Vienna.

Wednesday we travelled to Seville, Spain. What a beautiful city. We didn’t perform Wednesday night, but the guys in the band went out for tapas at a cool sidewalk café that was on a little park, and it was great. There was a strolling accordionist, who was not great, but he did almost accidentally play “Space is the Place” at one point.

The sidewalk view (with Jeb partially in view).

The concert in Seville was good. It was in a big hall, and the crowd was enthusiastic. A big thank you to our host Ivan for his hospitality, and excellent transportation planning.

Yesterday, we travelled to Genk, Belgium. It was a long travel day, made even more difficult by the actively anti-helpful policies and attitudes of the people of Vueling Airline. I’ll dedicate an entire post to that ordeal, but for this entry I will simply say that i was forced to either check my trombone or not take the flight. Of course the trombone was significantly damaged. The bright side is that by the time we had reached Genk from the Brussels airport, our wonderful driver (from Taxi Peters Genk) had phoned ahead and found an instrument repairman in Genk. After he dropped the band at the hotel, he took me to the repair shop, where a lovely man named Jos Briers took the time at 5 PM on a Friday to repair my mangled trombone bell. He even offered to deliver my instrument to the venue when he was done, so that I would have time to have dinner with the band before we played. I now call him “The Angel of Belgium.”

Jos, and me, and my no longer mangled bell.

And now the obligatory food pic:

Stoofvlees and Westmalle

Our first concert was last night in Tampere, Finland, as part of the Tampere Jazz Happening. They put on a great festival there. They treat the musicians really well, and program great music. I had the chance to hear sets or parts of sets by Donkey Monkey, Mostly Other People Do The Killing, Jazz Mob, Marc Ribot’s Sun Ship, the Dave Holland Quintet, and a couple of others whose names I am spacing at the moment. I love when our travel schedule around a festival allows us to hear some other musicians.

We played a long set as the club closer after the stage shows. It was a fun night, with people dancing and having fun. Jeff Parker is not with us for the beginning of this tour, and we miss him, but Hamid brought in Hervé Samb to play guitar, and Hervé is great. A very different player from Parker. There is already a move afoot amongst band members, that we’d like to hear them together. I don’t know that that will happen, but it sure would be fun to hear.

Today was a long travel day starting with an 8:30 am van ride for two hours to the Helsinki airport, followed by a short flight to Stockholm, and two hour layover, a longish flight to Milan, and finally to our hotel. It is probably good that tonight was a night off, because it was a long day of travel after a short night of sleep.

Once we got settled into our hotel, Napoleon Maddox, Joshua Abrams, and I had a nice long Italian dinner at a restaurant near the hotel. One of he joys of traveling with a great band is the time spent talking about music and life, and broadening one’s own perspective through the wisdom of one’s friends.

Tomorrow, we are off to Bolzano, Italy, then Vienna, Seville, Genk (Belgium) and London. Full details about the gigs are here: http://jeffalbert.com/?page_id=253 If you are in the area, please come say hello.

Before the first concert on Thursday, there was a press conference. I have never participated in a press conference that was held largely in a language that I don’t speak (“Ich möchte ein Bier bitte” doesn’t count as speaking a language). It was fun. There were enough Americans there that they were kind and spoke English to us.

The concerts on Thursday and Friday were great. We did different music on each of the 4 sets. Most of it was some form of organized improvisation. A few pieces had more or less standard notation for some sections, several had purely verbal instructions, and one had newspaper clippings. Liz Allbee put together a piece based on the morning paper. It included a chess game and the family tree of the N. Korean rulers. It was amazing to me how those factors affected the music. She could have given us simple verbal instructions that were free from extra-musical implication, and gotten very similar musical textures, but her inclusion of these other ideas profoundly affected the content of what we played. It was a lesson learned for me. Maybe I just liked the piece because I got to be “The Great Leader.”

We rehearsed each day, and people were writing new material throughout the process.

L to R: Almut, Sanne, Toby, Claudia, Katrin, & Helen

After rehearsal on Friday, Jim took Quin and I to his favorite döner place in Dortmund. It is nice to have some local knowledge. Since musicians often live in (or near) the hood, they also often know where to find the best ethnic food. Jim Campbell is a great musician and a fun hang, I am glad he was on the gig. The food tour guiding was just an added bonus.

On Saturday, Quin, Helen, and I played with Georg at The Loft in Köln. It is a great space with some history, and the music was a lot of fun that night. Hopefully there may be some recorded evidence of that night.

I was told that when in Köln, one must drink Kölsch, so I did.

Of course the tour diary must end with a food pic. This was the pork shoulder from our great dinner at Aubergine in Bochum, late night after the gig in Köln.

We rehearsed a number of pieces last night and this morning. Some are for the entire group, and others use subsets of the ensemble. The shows tonight and tomorrow promise to be quite varied, and very musically interesting.

Seen here are Katrin, Helen, Jim, Els, and the back of Liz’s head at rehearsal last night.

After rehearsal we had a nice dinner at a tapas restaurant near the venue. I love the way a rehearsal and good dinner can make good friends out of musicians who only met hours before.

Right to left are: Quin, Claudia, Roman, Sebastian & Nadin who are the behind the scenes folks who are making this happen, and Sanne.

Right to left: Sanne, Katrin, Almut, Georg, Liz, and Els’ hand. Jim, Helen and Toby were on my end of the table thus avoiding an appearance in the dinner shots.

I am very much looking forward to the concert tonight.

Yesterday afternoon before rehearsal, I heard a bit of a street band near the market. They were playing Autumn Leave when I took this picture.

I like getting to Europe a day before I have to do anything to try to get my body on local time, but it didn’t work too well this time. I was awake at 4 am, and ready to go. I’m sure I’ll crash this afternoon at some point.

My friend Quin Kirchner, who is the drummer in the Lucky 7s among many other bands, and I were on the same flight from the US. We had a good time exploring Dortmund’s city center on foot yesterday.

We scored some street grill food pretty early on. The lady had this very cool bratwurst slicer that made perfect bite size chunks. They do that mayo on fries thing here. Not really my bag, but I try to explore local food customs, so I gave it a shot.

We walked around and found a cool music store, and eventually the club where we will play on Thursday and Friday.

We were picked up from the airport by a great guy named Jörg. He told us that at one time Dortmund was second in the world (to Milwaukee) in number of breweries. They have some good local pilsners, and we tried a few. For dinner we went with a place that looked “German” to our tourist eyes. It had a moose head on the wall, and excellent schnitzel.

That’s Quin in the foreground under the moose.

We also saw a number of signs with (sometimes) interesting use of English words. My favorite was this McDonald’s sign near our hotel.

I arrived in Sant’Anna Arresi yesterday afternoon, after 24 hours of travel from New Orleans to Chicago to Rome to Cagliari (all by plane) then a van ride from Cagliari to Sant’Anna Arresi. Riding through the beautiful but very hilly Sardinian countryside in a van on very little sleep and nothing but airplane food in the previous 15 hours isn’t all that pleasant, but once I got to the hotel and had a shower and a few hours sleep, I felt much better.

I got to hear the festival concert last night, which was a wonderful performance. It was Conduction® No. 192 “Possible Universe” by Butch Morris. He had an all-star cast on hand. It was essentially a double orchestra and was placed on the stage in stereo, with one of each instrument to each side. The only musician without a double was Alan Silva on synthesizer. The guitarists Jean Paul Bourelly and On ka’a Davis were on either side of Silva with Chad Taylor and Hamid Drake on percussion to the outsides of the guitarists. Silvia Bolognesi played bass on Hamid’s side, and Harrison Bankhead was near Chad. The horns on the Taylor/Bankhead side were Meg Montgomery (trumpet), Greg Ward (alto sax), David Murray (tenor sax & bass clarinet) and Tony Cattano (trombone). On the Drake/Bolognesi side, they were matched by Riccardo Pittau, Pasquale Innarella, Evan Parker and Joe Bowie.

I had never seen a Butch Morris conduction before, and it is quite an experience. Initially it was similar to some electroacoustic concerts in that I was seeing things happen on stage but was not completely connecting the actions with specific sounds. As the music progressed, I began to be able to connect Mr. Morris’ signals with the musical behaviors that they instigated. He exacts very specific and subtle control over the musicians. When it works ideally, the ensemble becomes on instrument that Butch plays, but that instrument still contains all of the personal sounds of Evan Parker, and David Murray, and Joe Bowie, etc. It was refreshing to see so many world class soloists forego their egos and submit to being part of a beautiful and organic sound that was completely controlled by someone else. It seemed to me that this system requires large amounts of trust going each way, from Morris to the musicians, and from the musicians to Morris. I’ll save the blow by blow description of the music, and simply say that it covered a lot of ground from the quite noisy to the quite accessible, and I enjoyed it greatly.

The pre and post gig hangs were great. I made some new Italian musician friends. Trombonist Tony Cattano (col lenga?) is a great hang and a great musician. Silvia Bolognesi also plays in the Italian band of Marcello Bennetti, who also has a New Orleans based band in which I play. Tony, Silvia, Pasquale and I explored the ways that musician jokes do and don’t translate across languages. I had the requisite trombonist gear chat with Joe Bowie, who is a warm and personable cat, and got to hear David Murray lay some of his unique “zen” ideas on us. I also got to spend some time talking to Greg Ward. Greg played one gig with a Chicago version of my quartet a couple of years ago. I really enjoy his music and company. He has a new CD that is about to be released, and he laid a preview copy on me last night. I’ll be sure to post something about it, once I have given it a few listens.

It was a great evening last night, and I am looking forward to getting to play tonight.

(Added 1 Sept) Originally I thought there would be a second post in the series for this trip, but there won’t be. Too much school stuff to do. I’ll leave it with, our gig was great fun, Ernest Dawkins and crew sounded great after us, Butch Morris is a very interesting dude and a nice cat to hang with, it takes 24 hours (for real) to get from Sant’Anna Arresi to Mandeville, LA, and the caprese salad in the Rome airport isn’t bad.

One more note: beware of the man in the hat. His name is Mack, and he runs a cool little bar, and apparently likes to get musicians loaded. Approach with care.

We played in a cool small theater in Mira for a concert that was put on by Veneto Jazz. They are very nice people, who treated us very well, and put on a good show.

Sound check in Mira

We arrived in Mira the night before our show, so some of us took some time Friday morning to go to Venice. It was rainy, and the off season, so it wasn’t too crowded. Venice is a trip. It is an odd little confusing city in so many ways. It is also quite fascinating. We stopped in a wine shop as part of Jeb’s continuing search for a very specific grappa, and the shop owner was playing Frank Rosolino on the sound system. We did find S. Marco without too much trouble, and got back in time to catch our train. It was a rainy but fun time in Venice.

Today we drove to Chiasso, and played the last show of the tour at the Chiasso Jazz Festival. It was a pretty electric show. We all had that end of tour energy happening, and it came out in a great way.

The view from our hotel sidewalk in Chiasso

This tour has been a real treat, both musically and personally. This band is a great bunch of people, and they are each top notch, world class musicians as well. The food has been excellent almost all the way around, and Ludmilla (our manager and agent) and Matteo (our driver and man who makes things happen) have been the best.

Tomorrow is a super long travel day to get home, but hopefully my arrival in New Orleans will be accompanied by jubilant cheering Saints fans.

linguine with frutti de mare

After the show was another great Italian meal.

The onion gnochi was great.

Today we travel back to Milan, with a night off tonight. Tomorrow is a photo shoot of some sort. I am curious about this.

Our show in Milan was at 11am on Sunday. It seemed like an odd time to me, but apparently it works here. The show was sold out, and people crowded the stage for autographs after. I think the music went well, but it was 11 am and I was still not back to 100%.

Jeb and Napoleon towards the end of the autograph frenzy.

The promoter gave us a great lunch at the hotel after the gig. These Italians can eat, and they do it quite well. Jeb had a great line in the dressing room before the concert. He filled his cup from a somewhat generic looking coffee thermos and said, “wow, they just don’t know how to make bad coffee in Italy.” The lunch was good and huge. My body still wasn’t quite ready to eat it all, but I had tastes and it was great, especially the saffron risotto in a parmesan cheese shell.

I slept the rest of the afternoon, and was finally feeling completely like myself again by 9pm or so. Jeb and I went for a longish walk, and I finally got to see some of Milan. We ended up walking by La Scala, which was cool.

The statue of Leonardo in the square opposite La Scala Opera.

The part of Milan that we walked in has a great cool old city vibe, although there seemed to be a few too many McDonalds.

I wonder if Milanese folks that are visiting New Orleans or Chicago say things like, “why would we eat at McDonalds here, we can do that at home.”

Tomorrow we travel to Milan, where we play Sunday morning.

I have always heard about how these European festivals can turn into big musician hangs. Tonight we split a show with Kahil el Zabar’s Ethnic Heritage Ensemble with special guest Neneh Cherry. Ernest Dawkins and Corey Wilkes were in Kahil’s band, along with Matthew Kent and Franck Orall. Also hanging out were William Parker, Billy Bang, Nasheet Waits, Flip Barnes, Rob Brown, and Rasul Siddik, plus a bunch of other cats that I didn’t get to meet. We are all staying at the same hotel, and ended up at the bar across the street after the gig. Neneh told me that her father, Don Cherry (the great musician and trumpeter, not the hockey guy), used to play the the Dr. John record with the Meters as the band (“Right Place Wrong Time”) all the time. Pretty cool.

Last night we went to a lecture/symposium at University of Paris Diderot. The subject was Don Cherry, the speakers were Hamid Drake and Kahil El Zabar. It was hosted and translated by Alexandre Pierrepont. The was a good bit of insight presented on Cherry’s life and music, and music in general and drumming in particular. I’d like to hear it again, minus the jet lag.

Earlier in the day, Jeb Bishop took me to a la Biche au Bois, which is a great little restaurant that has developed quite a following amongst the Chicago improvisers. The food was great, and I fulfilled my cultural study needs by getting a full on almost two hour long déjuner.

I started with les œufs aux mayonaise.

Next was the coq au vin, which I was told is a must have at this place, and it was fabulous.

Next was le fromage.

…and I couldn’t pass up le creme brulé avec armignac.

Lunch was followed by une promenade sur la Champs-Élysée, and my touristing was complete. I have rehearsal in a few minutes, so hopefully the next installments will be more about music than food.

Saturday was a long drive from Cromwell, CT to Richmond, VA. It was too long. One of the things I learned on this trip is that what looks like a reasonable drive in google maps weeks before the tour, might not be. We were really too tired and mentally drained when we got to Richmond. One bandmember had something of a musical meltdown, which was the catalyst for me to have something of a social meltdown. It was by far the weakest gig of the tour musically. On the other hand, the Richmond groups that we heard that night were great. Verbatim and R2Dtoo were both really enjoyable. Well played, creative, and fun. We ended up not hearing the No BS! Brass Band. I was melting down socially, and we had a loooong drive ahead of us the next morning, so we left before they started.

Yesterday we left Richmond at 7 am EDT, and I got back to my house at 1 AM CDT today. We all drove quite a bit. I reset the trip miles and elapsed time counters on my van before I left my house at 4 AM on June 13. When I got back last night, we had traveled 3,933 miles, and had spent 76 hours and 35 minutes in the van.

I learned a lot about what not to do when putting together a tour, but I also learned a lot about our band, and about the stronger and weaker aspects of our music. We made some great music, and had a lot of laughs, and never came to blows, so I’ll call it a success. I was musically happy with 7 of the 8 gigs, and we laughed way more than we grumbled obscenities under our breath.

We might do it again next year, with a booking agent, bus, bus driver, and budget for better hotels…or maybe not.

The drive to Philly yesterday was ok. It rained most of the way, which was a drag, but the traffic wasn’t too bad. We had dinner at a cool Laotian restaurant with my publicist Matt Merewitz of Fully Altered Media. It was a nice hang. Matt did us right on the food suggestion, and it was nice to interact with him in person, instead of online.

Last night’s gig at Chris’ Jazz Cafe was a bit odd. Musically it went well, and the people that ran the club were nice and seemed to dig what we did. It wasn’t well attended, even though it got a Critics Pick in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Financially it was a bust. We made some money, but I was expecting that gig to carry more of the load. It ended up being less bread than the Hungry Brain, with no CD sales. I am learning that performing in your natural habitat is best, and I am not sure if “jazz clubs” should be our natural habitat. Open minded places that have music seem to work better. I’m not saying the folks at Chris’ weren’t open minded, they really were quite open minded, but that setting of the dark room with silver and glass ware and crisp white table cloths sets up all sorts of expectations for both the audience and the performers. I am finding that removing expectations is a good thing. It lets both the listener and the performer be relaxed and natural.

We are looking forward to tonight’s show at Boney’s Music Lounge in Middletown, CT. Some old and new friends will be there, and we’ll have a chance to get all New Orleans on them. It will be fun.

BTW, what’s up with all the toll booths up here? It cost $22 in tolls to drive from Philly to Cromwell. We have to run through all that again tomorrow on the way back south. This has turned into the Jersey Turnpike tour.

We took the Holland Tunnel through lower Manhattan and across the Brooklyn Bridge to meet my old buddy Andy for pizza at Grimaldi’s in DUMBO. We got to the Douglass Street Music Collective and heard a great set by Josh Sinton, and Ayreh Kobrinsky. Then we played to a room full of friends. It is a great feeling when so many of your friends take the time to come hear you play. I’d like to thank Andy, George, Sam, Linda, and Pete for coming out to hear us. When musician friends support you, it is especially rewarding, so I’d also like to thank Steve Swell and Rob Wagner for their presence.

After the gig we had something of a Loyola College of Music circa 1990 reunion at 4th Ave Pub in Brooklyn, which was just around the corner from the venue. It was great to catch up with Andy, Linda, George and Sam. I hadn’t seen any of them in a couple of years, and some of them I hadn’t seen for more than a dozen years. What a blessing to get to make music for, then visit with old friends.

I am looking forward to a short driving day tomorrow as we head to Philadelphia.

We also had a fun gig/hang last night at the Skylark in Chicago. It was great to see some old friends and play some fun music, even if it is really hard to play after eating a Skylark burger.

We are getting ready to drive overnight for our show in Brooklyn tomorrow. East coast here we come.

More soon.

We drove to Chicago this morning and picked Ray up at the airport. The next stop was Johnnie’s for a great Italian beef, and now we are at our luxurious low budget suburban motel digs, looking forward to a great show at the Hungry Brain tonight.

For more tour minutiae check out www.twitter.com/jeffalbert