Musical Anarchy and Musical Order

The past few days have been filled up with contrasting musical experiences. The first involved playing with vee device in an anarchist hangout. The second involved sight reading a Mozart opera.

On Monday, vee and I drove down to Denver to play a show at the Brokedown Book Collective. Basically, this is a place that serves as a gathering place for anarchists, hippies, radicals, poets, artists and other sorts of free thinking crazies. It was awesome! G Man and Charlie Rose joined us onstage for the performance, and while their playing was top notch, most of the nights memorable moments happened offstage. While playing music, I was witness to two different crimes, and a third occurred shortly after we arrived and before we started playing. Descriptions of these events (penned eloquently by vee) can be found here. Audio clips from the performance can be found here.

On the other side of the musical spectrum was my Wednesday night. I play occasionally with the local university symphony, but they’ve been playing Mozart’s Cossi Fan Tutti lately with the opera program and it only requires two bassists. Last week, I got a call from one of the bassists asking me if I could sub for the dress rehearsal.

Now for those of you who may not know me, I’m not a fan of Mr. Mozart. I find his music to be rather annoying for reasons too complicated to describe here. Still, playing an entire opera that you’ve never even read through before seemed to be an entertaining way to spend a night, so I accepted.

The rehearsal went rather well considering I had never seen the music before. The only really horrible mistake I made was because of an improperly marked cut. My playing wasn’t great, or polished, but I got the job done. I’m fairly good at sight reading music, but doing it for two hours was very taxing on my mind. By the end, I was quite glad it was over.

After the performance, the conductor thanked me and asked me what I thought of the experience. To him I said, “let me put it this way: I’m going to go home right now, drink a glass of scotch, and pass out.”

And I did.

In related news, vee device has a show tonight at 7:30 PM at Café Amoré, 255 Linden St. in Old Town Fort Collins. It will just be vee and I, but it promises to be an entertaining evening. Hope to see you there!

Also, in completely unrelated news, a big “Happy Birthday” to Barb!