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Doing originals is scary.....


Bilbo
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I did a gig last night with my own sax - bass - drums - trio called 'trio East' and, after investing over a year on working on the issue, we have reached the point where we can do a whole night of original tunes. We did actually do 5 standards last night ('In a Sentmental Mood', 'Goodbye Pork Pie Hat', 'Alfie's Theme' and a deconstructed 'You Don't Know What Love Is') but we worked them in around a dozen or so of my tunes (others are written but not yet gig ready - they are too difficult for the sax player to read without rehearsal due to sixteenth notes in 5:4 or alternating 7:4/9:4 bars etc).

It's not the first time I have played my own composition live; I remember doing originals in Cardiff in the late 1980s, but its been a long time and I have never before tried to let my original compositions 'carry' a gig. What, for me, was interesting last night was that, all of a sudden' people's reactions to the material became really important and when mistakes happened (they always do when you are improvising), the stress levels were so much higher. What this tell me is that, for most of my playing life, what I was doing didn't really matter to me and that I ordinarily have much less investment in the outcome than I do when the material had my name on it. I think that I have learned somthing about what drives me to do this and where my
efforts should be concentrated, for better or worse.

As for audience reaction; it varied from polite to enthusiastic applause or open mouthed disbelief (it wasn't supposed to sound like that :lol:). One regular said he liked most of it but didn't 'get' one of them on one hearing (which was unsurprising as the sax player screwed up the head). What was a relief was that the overall reaction was pretty much the same as it would have been for a set full of the same old same old and no-one walked out. So the 'you can't do originals, do something they know' mantra, on the evidence of last night's gig, is pretty much a myth.

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Quite agree. Played a gig on Fri night with my originals band, the Tuesday Club, and the audience seemd to get into it just as much as they do when I play with my covers band. The only real difference being that they couldn`t sing along as they didn`t know the words/songs - though they quickly caught up with our song called Na Na Na Na Na.

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Same here. I enjoy playing originals more, but on occasion we chuck in a couple of covers for good measure (but played in OUR style).

At my level of playing, it's all about having fun & making the audience have a good time too. :)

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