Available on Bandcamp at http://option3.bandcamp.com/album/peaberry
and iTunes at https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/peaberry/1351641335
It was a long time in the making but we finally put this album out. In 2013, Jon Wang, a recording student at MI (now a recording teacher at MI!), asked us to record for him. Luckily, Mark Ferber was in town. Joe Bagg and I always seem to have a surplus of original music handy, so we brought in some charts. Here's a run down of the tunes:
01. Peaberry - This may have been an example of me having a completed, untitled tune and drinking some Peaberry coffee and thinking, "Yes!". I have another coffee inspired tune that I wrote in the late 90's called "Coffee Junkie Nation", written before I started drinking coffee. So 20 years later, I've progressed to being a coffee junkie and writing tunes in tribute to specific coffee beans.
02. Ba-Ba-Do-Op - The title is in the tradition of the great Dizzy Gillespie bebop tunes with phonetic titles like "Ool-Ya-Koo" and "Oo-Pop-A-Da."
03. Saturday Pants - Joe Bagg says, "part of my “write a song a day” experiment that lasted 50 days. There’s a part in there, somewhere in the middle that is inspired by Keith Jarrett’s compositions for his American Quartet."
04. Dropping Darkness - Joe says, "Dropping Darkness’s title comes from some poem I read that I can’t remember the title of. I’ve tried Googling the phrase but nothing comes up. I like how it ends on a kind of question mark."
05. Indolent Fowl - I wrote this using the chord progression of John Coltrane's "Lazy Bird", switched the time signature to 3/4 and had a thesaurus handy. I was thinking of the feel of Wayne Shorter's tune, "United". Jamie Rosenn fans will note (Hi Mom!) this was also recorded on the last Joeless Shoe album, Midsole.
06 A Gerbil's Hearth - Joe says, "A Gerbil’s Hearth is named after a children’s book I vaguely recall having read 40+ years ago."
07. Cousin Jim - I wrote this sometime in the late 90's for a jam session hosted by my cousin, cardiologist/ sax player/ Cuban food lover, Jim Weiss.
08. Brief Bob - Joe says, "Brief Bob is named after a 95 year old drummer that I met at a jam session in San Diego. He had a terse way of speaking that was mirrored in his drumming."