Australia: Tracks from a Soggy Dog

It wasn't as easy as I thought it would be to find a saxophone in Australia. Jonathan and Kaira Ba (www.kairabamusic.com) asked me to add tenor sax tracks to several of the new songs they’re recording. I was pleased to help and said I’d find a way to do it. However, making good on this commitment required more effort than I’d anticipated. Schools and conservatories turned me down, and friends of friends came up empty-handed, searching for saxes—in all the wrong places, apparently!

After pursuing a number of dead-ends, I finally was able to rent a reconditioned Super Action 80 from the good folks at Ozwinds in Melbourne. I’m traveling with my mouthpieces and reeds and was delighted to blow into a newly overhauled Selmer. It wasn’t the same as playing my old Mark VI, but it was closer than I thought I'd get to the sound I’m used to.

So what a treat it was, the next day, to ride a Melbourne City train to the end of the Belgrave line and meet Steve Vertigan, of SoggyDog Recording. Steve is an accomplished musician (classical clarinet and pop piano) who has also been a school music teacher and administrator and a sound engineer at a broadcast television station. His very successful recording and production business has evolved, over the years, as a natural outgrowth of Steve’s interests, abilities, and wide-ranging professional contacts. (I got to stick a pin in New York, as my birthplace, and joined hundreds of others, from all continents except Antarctica, on Steve’s world map of Soggy Dog musicians!)

Soggy Dog is beautifully located in the hills outside Melbourne. I told Steve that it reminded me of the late Les Paul’s house in Mahwah, New Jersey, where I used to go to rehearse in the late ‘60s with Gene and Russ Paul, and Doug Schmolze. (That band, The Dynamic Answers, is beyond the reach of even Google’s long arms!)

It was great to work with Steve. He has two good rooms, excellent mics, and is very quick with the Cubase program he prefers to DP and ProTools. (He’s sponsored by Yamaha, just like the Ozwinds people.) What’s more Steve has a keen ear for pitch, rhythm and musical form. Recording these Kaira Ba tracks with him was a great way to spend a soggy spring morning!

Before lunch we had two good tenor parts for each of the three new songs that feature horns. Zack Rider’s trumpet part was already down, and it was fun to follow his able lead. I know Quran Karriem will sound great on tbone too!

  

Steve said he loved Kaira Ba’s music—even the rough tracks we worked with—and was excited to be involved with the project. Steve and I called Jonathan on Skype to say, “Mission accomplished!” and then took a few photos, including some with Charlie, his Labradoodle—the eponymous “Soggy Dog.” (When you have a blog, and no editor, you get to use words like eponymous!)

I can’t wait to hear the final mix of the new Kaira Ba songs—and hopefully to connect Steve with Tony Bowman in order to collaborate on the Australian HUG Your Baby lullaby that Jan and I have written and Tony is poised to record.

Cheers, mate!