This was back in October at Vitellos Restaurant in Studio City. Vitellos is one of the last clubs left in LA that features acoustic jazz. For those of you trivia type buffs, this is the restaurant where actor Robert Blake and his wife were having dinner before she was tragically shot.

The vocalist Gary Brumburgh started in more of a Musical Theatre type background and in recent years has been singing more in the standards/jazz vein..

We did the club in spring of 2010 ; since then the club had sprung for 20's something rebuilt B. The piano sounded rich and warm in the middle, especially for chords. However when you get up high on it, it kinda thins out and lacks balls ..imo. Anyway it's a huge improvement over a pretty trashy Yamaha C2 that they had before.

The recording is straight off the board and is typical lame lo-fidelity You tube quality. Obviously for best sound and any semblance of bass use phones.

The first one is Bird's "Yardbird Suite"


A slight arrangement I did on "Night & Day " where I just elongated the first half of the *A* sections. We tried to give it a looser feel.

Very nice Dave, I always enjoy your playing. We just added a male vocalist to our trio, I'm kind of torn a bit because I like playing the melodies but it is certainly more "memorable" to have the vocals. I should be so lucky to run across a '20's B. Last place we played a Yammy P22, not great but in good shape and in tune and certainly better than a keyboard.

Hey thanks Swarth. Yeah putting a vocalist up there definitely gives the whole presentation a different vibe. In this case it was the vocalist, Gary's show, and he was hiring us. He was able to sell the club out-I'd be lucky to get 10 people.. He usually does one or two of these a year so it's easier to get all your friends to come out.

As long as the Trio musicianship is at a high level and the choice of tunes are good, I'm ok with doing it. The condition or quality of the piano is a big consideration too. Most of the clubs in this town that still have live music, much less Jazz, the piano's usually so brutal I'd just has soon bring either by Yamaha or Nord digital piano. This one was very good by comparison.

If you already haven't clicked on the side links here's another tune from that night. A Cole Porter tune, that I was unfamiliar with- I understand it's usually done as a ballad but Gary chose to do it up-tempo.