Springtime In The ATL aka Pollen Made Me Crackers: A Celebration of Light Rock, Deep Blues, and Melodic Jazz at Capital City Club with The Billy Batts Ensemble

My black car is green.  Well, it's always a bit dirty.  Don't keep your car too clean.  Then it looks like you have money to keep it clean, thus, you might have something valuable inside, like that nifty iPad or perhaps a bass guitar...  Just sayin'.  Um, don't you just hate when people say "Just sayin'?"

It was another round of blues, jazz, and soft rock in the hallowed halls of the Capital City Club downtown.  The Billy Batts Ensemble has enjoyed a fairly long tenure there (knock on wood).  I recently found out that they hire a band to play every Friday night.  We share time with the likes of Joe Gransden, so we must be doing something right.  This time out, we tried a few of the ones that Walt had suggested.  He has wanted to do Edith and the Kingpin (Joni Mitchell), Your Gold Teeth II (Steely Dan), and that old pop gem Hello It's Me (Todd Rundgren).  Surprise, surprise, I volunteered to handle vocals on the Todd tune.  It's high for me to sing, but the high notes are falsetto anyways.  I have 4 versions of Todd doing it: Nazz (in the original key of Dm), the Something/Anything? "hit" version (Gm), the live album Back to the Bars (Fm), and the Latin/Bossa reworked album With a Twist (back to Dm).  We went for the S/A version.  I never knew there was a bar of 3 in it (twice)!  I also never knew that the 2nd verse is "reharmonized" to the relative major (ie Bb).  Wow!  As many times as I've heard it, I just tuned out and listened to the vocals, I guess.  I knew the Brecker Brothers played on it, as well as Peter Frampton's drummer John Siomos.  Well, great live-in-the-studio recording.  I did okay.  It will take some more practicing to nail those vocals.  The Joni tune was a bust in a way.  It took me a while to get with the chart I had, as Walt somehow learned it up a whole step in Dm instead of Cm.  We never did try the SD tune - too bad.  I made some chord charts.  Wish I had time to sit down and make a real Finale-created chart for all of these.  We also did Brian's blues number, that I had inadvertently played the Stormy Monday changes to - in the key of A.  I don't really know if that's what he wanted, but we've done it that way twice now, so I guess it'll work.  Got some nice compliments afterwards, like, did we record the show?  This from one of the managers!