26 April. Best Buy Theatre, New York
Before the New York gig I met up with Leonardo Pavkovic of Moonjune records and manager of Soft Machine Legacy . He brought me some copies of our new album 'Burden of Proof' which I had not seen yet and wanted to have for myself and also to sell on this tour. The music is kind of ' psychedelic free improv' bluesy progressive jazz', so should be of interest to some fans of Steven's band. We went out for coffee and some proper New York cheesecake which was good but pretty rich! Good to catch up on news too.
The gig itself went well. A big crowd which was actually about 50% bigger than last time. The audience was enthusiastic and speaking to people later they all said they really enjoyed it, but compared to the Montreal audience they were notably quieter. There were some loud heckles too and we even had to restart one song. Adam had lots of friends, family and students at the show and he played particularly well I thought. Afterwards, I saw my friend the singer songwriter and jazz bass player John Lester who moved to New York not long ago, and is about to move back to San Francisco. He made a jazz quartet album in London called 'Jazz?' recently that I am featured on with great jazz arrangements of rock songs by artists like the Cure, Tori Amos, the Police, Crowded House and others.
After the show I started to feel a sore throat coming on. The following morning when I woke up in Boston I felt a bit rough and it did not improve much during the day. I was supposed to meet some good friends for dinner but cancelled as I just needed to chill out and try and feel better for the gig. I did meet up with my sister in law and her children in the afternoon for coffee and that was really nice. She said they live 3 minutes from where the Boston bombers lived and the kids go to school in Watertown, Boston where the bombs went off. Fortunately they are all fine though.
Sometimes when you feel a bit rough on tour and there is no hotel so you just have to hang around backstage or on the tour bus it can be a bit of a drag. I later heard that Marco did not feel so good during the day either. However when we walked onstage at 8pm, I felt OK. The gig was at the Berklee Performance Centre, which is the concert hall at the Berklee College of music. It is world famous for its jazz course and there are a lot of famous jazz musicians who have attended the college like Branford Marsalis, Keith Jarrett and Gary Burton. Some well known rock musicians too like Mike Portnoy and Steve Vai. So we were very aware that there were going to be lots of musicians in the audience and indeed there were. Maybe it was the contrast with the rest of the day, but for whatever reason it felt fantastic walking onstage. The fun we had been having on the sound check on 'Luminol' seemed to be creeping into the gig version, and it sounded totally on fire to me. The audience was really stoked and very enthusiastic. The show itself went very well I thought and for the first part of the encore we did something very unusual and a bit crazy but both amusing and actually pretty musical in a very off the wall way. I won't say any more...Then we played the more usual encore medley of 'Remainder the black dog' into 'No Twilight'.
Afterwards I went out to sign CDs and programmes etc with Nick and we met and chatted with some fans. One guy had flown all the way from Australia for the gig!
Tomorrow Albany, New York for a triple bill with Opeth (who I have not seen or heard before but heard lots about) and Katatonia. Apparently Albany is the capital of New York State, not New York City. Seems odd, but maybe it is a way to share out things bit. It will be interesting to see how it works having three bands all setting up, sound checking and performing on the same bill. Could be interesting (or chaos!).
Theo Travis