Songs: I Could Have Danced All Night, All of Me, Baby Face, Johnny B. Good, New York New York, Birthday Song, Beatles Birthday, Tequila.
[Instant play MP3 hotlink][MP3 download][MP4 download][Other formats page]
With the end of Schroeder’s in 2002 and an effective end to Fletcher Music since the store nearest to us at Metro Center shut down, and with the end of our seven year run at Shangri-La and Golden Buddha in 2012, we kept looking for gigs in 2013 and 2014 via restaurants, Gig Salad and other online services, arriving at this following concept by the end of 2014: A piano-keyboard duet that we could take to RETIREMENT COMMUNITIES where we knew all the tunes they knew and where we could play for an hour at a time before a birthday party.
I came up with the CONCEPT of the keyboard backing up Dorothy’s 88 key piano playing from my early years seeing piano and Hammond organ in jazz bands. My concept worked for the most part. People love watching & hearing the piano being played but adding a multiple instrument backup with the modern portable keyboard is a concept-breakthrough in my opinion. The piano-keyboard-back-to-back configuration you see here was one of several, the others being the required side-by-side and that right-angle-piano-inside-or-outside-keyboard configuration for two-person-playing or single-person-one-man-band operation if needed.
SONGS & COMMENTS
I Could Have Danced All Night
Good example of keyboard background with bass and percussion as well as ORCHESTRAL STRINGS by Rick while Dorothy carries the 88 keys to open.
All of Me
Bass boogie on the keyboard hides the expert left hand comping by Dorothy because its a bit louder than it should be but the camera angle here shows her left hand in action doing their chromatic half tone changes constantly while the right hand handles the bluesy slide notes on the melody while she sings at age 79 in 2014 just as as our Retirement Residence Tour with the Rick & Dorothy Piano-Keyboard Hour got started. Note how my keyboard trumpet takes turns with Dorothy’s vocal
Baby Face
Dorothy’s left is moving so fast in this video due to her expertise and of course, the lower resolution of the video, but still! She keeps it going while singing. I’m on the keyboard but mostly handling the left hand on the lower part of the keyboard controlling the bass and orchestration. My right hand comes up only to handle the clarinet instrumental solo.
Johnny B. Good
I used the electric guitar in the solo on this while Dorothy pounds out an early left hand rock boogie bass. We only sang the chorus for this as a sing-along-shout-out for the audience. You can sing along too now!
New York, New York
Dorothy coached me on how to syncopate my vocals like Sinatra on this one. Pretty good I think.
Happy Birthday, Beatles Birthday & Tequila.
We would bring the show to a climax for birthday parties with these tunes, appropriately danceable and shout-outable. All these tunes were well known on the ‘duelling piano circuit’ around the world in the 1990’s, 2000’s and 2010’s before that stupid Covid-World-War struck and blew out all our gigs, parties and moods. Dorothy couldn’t take it much further than 2020 anyways at 85. Still, we had a great 2014 to 2019, about 5 years and 100 concerts.I Could Have Danced All Night, All of Me, Baby Face, Johnny B. Good, New York New York, Birthday Song, Beatles Birthday, Tequila.
COORDINATION CONCERT BOOKS
Note that we both have a spiral bound book on our music rack in front of us. Each one-hour concert demanded we have total coordination so there were no "requests" taken for these types of gigs. The set ups for the keyboard had to be planned in advance and programmed so that I could call it up instantly.
I tried to create different types of shows for various types of holidays through the year and for different cultural groups like Jews, for example, which we were able to learn (!?) and for Chinese, which we did too! (!!?) The Italian show never got a gig because our Italian club doesn't really have Italians in it and their hiring practice seemed to be out of our orbit. We DID go to see other bands there, however, and saw amazing keyboard + solo instrument acts and participated in Karaoke there.
I had Dorothy and me doing about a dozen different types of shows including Irish for St. Patrick's Day and Christmas for that famous day. I even produced a Halloween Show for us where Dorothy got to play her favorite tunes like Phantom of the Opera and I got her to back me up on Ghostbusters. What a hoot. We were a fantastic team with a phenomenal concept. The Yamaha E433 keyboard and Casio 88 key PX555 Privia piano served us well with true piano sound with weighted keys and true pipe organ sounds for Halloween. The ALTO 400 watt amp we bought from our new-friend-in-an-instant at Guitar Center, Juan, along with a "vocoder" or "pitch correction" unit from BOSS served us well.
Each type of show demanded its own songs, photocopied into a 3-ring binder and duplicated for each of us. We would load up my 1995 Ford Taurus station-wagon or, from 2016, my 1997 (newer!), Ford Escort mini-station-wagon, for each show and roll through the freeways in the Greater Phoenix Area to our location, unload, set up, do our thing, get paid, and tear down and load up and go home. The logistics alone were mind boggling and actually quite potentially hazardous but we made it anyway. It seems miraculous now looking back on it.
I'm quite thrilled that my concept worked, and that I helped to extend Dorothy's performance career to age 85. I once saw Eubie Blake play, live, in Buffalo, in 1975 at age 95, a famous jazz musician. Dorothy didn't make it that far, but she was close! I hvae doubt that she'll be extending her music career in the higher realms of the quantum mind dimension and that I'll meet up with her to set up our next gig! Dorothy developed her own "Play Like a Band" copyrighted program in Phoenix in the 1980's so our careers really dovetailed well since we truly "played like a band".
No comments:
Post a Comment