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Ellen Cornfield and I will be premiering a new work named “Dance for a Small Room” as part of a program called “Dragon’s Egg” at the Construction Company this weekend. The work features a stirring combination of structured and improvised music and dance, and should be a whole damn lot of fun. It’s the first time I’ve written for live musicians in quite a while, and I’ve been extremely happy with the results of our recent rehearsals. The piece includes the usual suspects from Ellen Cornfield Dance, as well as Sean Imboden (alto saxophone), Morgan Price (bass clarinet), Kevin Moehringer (trombone), John Lindaman (guitar), Madelyn Burgess (bass), and me (drumset). John and Madelyn you may know from the bands True Love Always and Hula, respectively, and Kevin from the Dixieland Space Orchestra. Morgan and Sean played with me in The Monster Zero Orchestra, and this is the first time I’ve played with them in almost three years. Awesome. We will blow your socks off, perhaps even blowing them right through your shoes, if need be.

Here are the specifics:

Ellen Cornfield Dance in “Dragon’s Egg”

Sunday, September 16th, 2pm

@ The Construction Company, 10 East 18th St., 3rd Floor (between Broadway and Fifth Ave.)
Manhattan, NYC
Reservations: 212 924-7882

Awwww, yeah.

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Listening to: Sam & Dave – Soothe Me

Koven Bands, Performances

Apologies, y’all: it’s been a hell of a long time since I’ve rapped at ya here on kovenjsmith.com. So much happening. A couple of things coming up:

• For those of you in the New York metro area with time on your hands this evening, I will be playing with the M. David Hornbuckle Dixieland Space Orchestra at the Alphabet Lounge (104 Ave. C, Manhattan). If you can’t make it to the show, at least click over to their Web page and enjoy the laid back sounds kicking out of your speakers.
• I will be premiering a new piece with Cornfield Dance on Sunday, September 16th at 2pm at the Construction Company, which is located at 10 E. 18th St in Manhattan. The as-yet-untitled piece will feature members of The Monster Zero Orchestra, so you know it’ll be bad-ass. More details will be forthcoming in the next week.

Rock and roll, everybody. Rock and roll.

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Listening to: Harry Betts – Ambush – Escape & Roundup

Koven Bands, Performances, Uncategorized

Hey, all, come on out to see the M. David Hornbuckle Dixieland Space Orchestra this Sunday!  We’ll be playing at the fabulous Otto’s Shrunken Head, located at 538 E. 14th Street (between Avenues A & B) in Manhattan.  We’ll be bringing more of that sweet kinda-Dixieland-ish goodness that you have come to expect from the M. David Hornbuckle Dixieland Space Orchestra.  We play at 6pm, so there will still be time for you to go out to a fancy dinner afterwards.  I am also willing to climb into the photo booth with anyone who appears at the show, but you have to pay for your own photos.

Koven Bands, Performances

So things have been so busy here at Koven J. Smith dot com that I haven’t been very good about updating my loyal five or six readers on what’s been going on lately. The most exciting recent development is that I have begun playing drums for the M. David Hornbuckle Dixieland Space Orchestra, which, to explain, is an orchestra that plays spacey Dixieland versions of songs by M. David Hornbuckle. I’ve been a fan of Dave’s from back in the days that he played with the great Gainesville band PopCanon, so it’s been just fine to suddenly find myself sitting in the middle of his songs, albeit with a tuba player named Ron sitting next to me. Some enchanted evening, you will see a stranger across a crowded room, as Harrison Ford once said. Anyway, here’s a video from our debut performance at NYC’s monthly Ukelele Cabaret. It was the most wildly supportive audience I have ever played for. We played after a guy played Madonna songs on the uke. I wore a stripey shirt.

[gv data="http://www.youtube.com/?v=GL8-fTZxfNQ"][/gv]

Koven Bands, Performances

Aww, yeah.  I kinda got some mp3s mostly uploaded, somehow.  I hope that they work out well for you and don’t, you know, crap out right in the middle or anything.  Anyway, as I said in my last post, I have recently received word that Matt Chandler, the bass player for Saraswati, a fine band I was in once, will soon be joining us here in New York City.  I realized at that point, of course, that nary an mp3 of this great band exists on this site, and that that situation could not possibly be allowed to stand.  So with this post, Mr. Gorbachev, I am tearing down this wall.

I don’t know if I’ve ever had as much fun playing in a band as I had playing in Saraswati. It was the most truly collaborative band I’ve ever been in–every song we put together sounded nothing like what any one of the four of us would have written individually.  Listening back to these mp3s from our farewell concert, I was astonished at how scary, and at the same time effortless, much of it sounds.  Listen to “A Name In German.”  We played like this all of the time, usually cracking up because Andrew would try to work “Tighten Up” into almost every song and Todd and Matt would try to out-Henry Rollins each other with frequent shouts of “Yeah!”  “No!” and “Oh, yeah!!!” while we were in the middle of a sensitive Aaron Neville-style ballad.  Actually, that’s not true.  Or rather, the Henry Rollins part is true.  Not the Aaron Neville part.  The closest I guess we ever came to a sweet love ballad was “Thousands of Insects,” which lacks Mr. Neville’s sweet falsetto but does have a freak-out feedback section at the end.

I am not usually prone to patting myself on the back here at kovenjsmith.com (quite the opposite, in fact), but I am quite proud of what we did in this band, and I hope that y’all (that is to say, my loyal four or five readers) don’t mind indulging me for these few minutes.  These are precious days, ladies and gentlemen.  Precious, precious days.

Um, I don’t know what any of that meant there, at the end of that last paragraph.  Anyway, here’s one more song, called “Say, You’re Beautiful In Your Wrath,” which is, of course what Genghis Khan (as played by John Wayne) says to the Tartar princess Bortai who resists his swagger-y advances.

Further reading at Indianapolismusic.net.

Koven Bands