Function bands

Had a fun gig yesterday with a function band led by Polish singer Agata Maliszewska. The bass player Vincenzo De Fraia was great and really solid to play with. I only started doing function gigs last year and the first few were a lot of work - you get sent a 30-40 tune set list and have to learn the music at short notice then turn up to play with musicians you have never met. It's getting much easier now though as usually there's a lot of overlap with the set lists so they are not all new anymore. I used to memorise or chart out the tunes by hand but my song list got to over 200 tunes and it was getting confusing - so now I've started charting them out using ForScore on an iPad. So I'm building up a digital library of these tunes and can easily drag and drop them into new set lists for any future gigs.

It's still got a novelty to it - I particularly like playing the Motown and funk tunes, although I can see it getting depressing doing those gigs after a while.. It's not the same as playing original music. On that note, the Cygnus Flare gig this week at Pizza Express was really fun and went down well - here's a video of us playing a tune I wrote called Diatone.