DCIC in-store at Crooked Beat

On Friday night, the DC Improvisers Collective played a little show at Crooked Beat in Adams Morgan. It's a super-cool little record store - the kind of place that I'm especially grateful for these days with the music retail business in such turmoil. It's also the kind of place that I'm not allowed to browse in because I'll spend a small fortune in no time at all. On this occasion, I had my hands full with the guitar playing, so was able to keep my paws out of the record bins and kept a few dollars in my pocket for dinner and a beer afterwards (Asylum is just up the street and they have Shiner on tap, and several vegan treats on the menu).

We set this show up as a "release party" for our new quartet disc that's out on Sachimay Records' "interventions" series.

For this show, I left the laptop-guitar-rig at home (to save space, the "stage" at the store is quite small). So I had to do the whole show with no effects. No looping. No gadgets (except low-tech stuff like alligator clips, paintbrush, etc). Imagine that - I had to play the guitar. That is my job in this group after all. Hmmm. I think it worked out pretty well, and honestly, I think I should do it this way all the time. Cameron mentioned after the show that she thought there was better listening and interacting among the group - maybe because I had to focus on playing guitar and not think about what buttons to push. She's a smart one... I think I better keep her around ;-)

Photo by Alexandra Gardner