Dragons 1976 Baltimore 6-24-2006

Drove down through the rain from New York to get to Baltimore & Normals Books, home of the Red Room. Audrey Chen helped set up the night which had two groups playing, us and a quartet of Chen, John Berndt, Charles Cohen & Paul Niedhardt. Because of the rain both groups had a little it of noise to contend with, namely a leaky roof, and it really did affect the performance, but in a good way. The crowd that came were listeners, so in the quiet spaces during the quartet's set drips of rain worked itself into the music, which tended to be sparse between the group swells. Their quartet had alot of sounds to work with - Charles plays the Buchal along with assorted other electronics and has a real control of it, Audrey uses Cello and voice, and has lots of option swith each, Paul tends to use the drums & percussion as noise generators more than as a kit, and John played alto and soprano saxophone - lots of extended technique to get out a lot of sounds.
Our set was affected by some food poisoning that Tim & I got the last night we were in New York - pizza....but we made it through playing Drifting, Passage & Sock It. Kind of a shorter set in terms of songs, but longer in terms of improvisation. The Red Room records all their shows and have a duplicate ready to give to the musicians afterwards, which is a really good thing to do. Being able to hear back what you played the day before is a good thing to have access to. After packing up we got some food at a Korean/Japanese restaurant that's open until three AM. Finished my night with Sushi and Miso Soup.