all right so I'm here with the barrel stove combo we're back here in the Green Room at the Remington I'm here with Vinnie Rebecca and Eric um and we're going to talk a little bit about their band so you guys are a three-piece jazz band um and you've been together for like 20 years so can you kind of tell me how y'all got together well uh yeah purple front Gardens used to do this party where it was a Sala days and uh I was working with Mike JC on a political campaign and he said bring …

all right so I'm here with the barrel stove combo we're back here in the Green Room at the Remington I'm here with Vinnie Rebecca and Eric um and we're going to talk a little bit about their band so you guys are a three-piece jazz band um and you've been together for like 20 years so can you kind of tell me how y'all got together well uh yeah purple front Gardens used to do this party where it was a Sala days and uh I was working with Mike JC on a political campaign and he said bring your drums down to our party cuz it did like an open mic and then I met Eric there and then uh I just kind of we all kind of like met other he knew this other guy David and that's in our bio the experimental folk band we talk about and uh DAV David KN singer and then uh he brought we kind of like we in a band together there and Rebecca joined that band on flute in saxophone started playing her saxophone a little bit shortly after that and then uh we were playing in that with a bass player and the bass player quit or sort of he went and joined another band and Eric picked up the a string guitar which was pretty revolutionary at the time yeah and then uh story so he started playing that has three bass strings and five guitar strings so he started playing that and he that kind of mimics kind of an organ sound so you see in a lot of jazz bands there's an organ Trio and there's not a bass it's an organ Trio a lead instrument and then a drums and so we kind of took that approach and made it our own so so when you guys got together all those years ago I guess maybe first could you tell me a little about the the folk band you were in and kind of like what that was like so it was all built around this guy David knv singer who was the songwriter and I had started working with him and as then he mentioned he kind of folded in and then we brought Rebecca in and it was all written around or all put together around David's songs and so we were kind of building Parts up around that um not very Jazzy but we all are fans of jazz so we brought a lot of jazz influence into that um I guess that was probably where we started realizing things like uh in a silent way we started playing Miles Davis Tunes as background to some of his raps and songs parts were pretty impro improvisational in that band yeah you guys were yeah that's true I had more fix Parts but yeah so that that kind of gave us the chance to work out together and get to know each other musically gave me a chance to pick up the E string um when the bass player left that I've been kind of looking for an excuse to spend a lot of money on a guitar and I found it and yeah so it was a great project always nice to have an excuse to spend a bunch of money on a guitar yeah totally not that we really need the excuse but so I guess you guys were just pretty drawn to Jazz and you started noticing that you B I had grown up playing it um I play saxophone as well and so I played it in jazz band in high school and Junior High and I don't know what your guys exposure to Jazz was but I'm always looking for ways to play it yeah I was always interested in it and I actually tried to get involved in college and at the time I was just playing flute and it was more at the classical emphasis I I think I tried to get into a class and the instructor said that they had too many people too many saxophones already doubling on flute they um I I felt like I didn't have an end there and I uh I kind of let that defeat me for a while which I should have but then you know it wasn't until much later that I just you know became self T and that you know I didn't pick up the ax until after yeah after the FK band The Folk band and when we started playing together yeah that's I forget that in the beginning you were mostly flute with this band and the saxophone started working in that was a long time ago yeah both are really fun instruments yeah yeah especially Jazz flu it's so like different and Lively how was that transition for you but from classical to Jazz because I listened to Jazz and because working with David and that band was just a great stepstone because it was really improvisational it wasn't Jazz but it was just um I felt more free to improvise and I there were some other bands that we tried um and so yeah that was a stubbing stone and just I I am not formally trained in jazz because some people really spend a good chunk of their lives studying it and I cannot say that I'm one of those people I don't know just bring what I enjoy about it into into the way I perform which is not highly technical but um the lyricism and everything is what I what I like yeah it was very fun I've seen you perform before with 20 grand and it's so just makes you want to get up and dance you know so when you guys got together what were some of the the tunes that that you drew from for inspiration play a lot of Miles Davis and we played um some simp cold train [Music] songs right away probably 50 60s era Jazz kind of the what I think of blue note years yeah the hard bop we all kind of gravitate towards that time period so a lot of stuff out of there yeah a lot of Miles Davis still in our in our repertoire like we also try to like stretch out to find some Latin Tunes push that kind of angle with things we can do when we're doing standards not necessarily the stuff we write or he writes every once in a while we try to mix in pop songs not very often but we'll cover Nirvana every once in a while or things like that yeah so Nirvana you said mhm and so you're the the songwriter for this group is that right primarily yeah yeah uh what inspires you to write it comes in waves and long troughs of no activity but but um yeah sometimes I just get hit with a bunch of ideas and I sit down and practice and usually it starts with riffs so I'm kind of practicing guitar and I'll just start coming up with ideas and refining those a little bit more and eventually they grow into songs um sometimes it comes and I'll get like three or four at once and then I may not be inspired again for another year um yeah it's not very predictable and I try to recognize when it's happening and get on that wave and ride it for as long as I can yeah it's been a little while since I had a good one for this band I haven't written a lot of material in the last couple years we were digging up a few that we hadn't played for a while like oh yeah getting into the archives yeah do you know how many original songs you've written for this group dozen maybe 15 something like that probably yeah maybe more some have just fallen off over the years that sounds like enough for an album do you ever think about recording this has been a long running thing with us we yeah I don't know if we'll ever record we keep trying to every few years we make an effort at it and it's hard to schedule it in with everyone's time and it hasn't gone well so far but someday I'd love to get some of the stuff down so totally cuz you guys are all in other groups um do you mind I'll just kind of go down the row what other groups are you in uh so I play with both these guys also in 20 grand I play saxophone in that band primarily and I play keyboards in hot Dam also with these guys currently this 20 grand in hot Dam