Even When There's A Problem, There is No Problem

Yesterday I did a gig at a jazz festival that takes place in the vineyards of the east end of Long Island.

I got up very early in the morning to pack my car up with the sound system and other gear. I even had plenty of time to practice a bit before I left. Check out the entry on my practice log. Anyway, I left a little later than I wanted to, but still in time to set up the sound system and be able to start the hit in time. Things were going good until...

...at 1:00pm, basically an hour before we were to start the performance (I was still driving to the gig) the bass player called. He was a cat that I called as a sub because my usual guy couldn't make the gig. At first I thought he was calling me to tell me that he was there or something. That wasn't the case. He was calling to tell me that he couldn't make the gig because his car got towed.

Of course this was not what I needed to hear an hour before the gig and when I still had to be worried about things like putting the sound system together, impatient event coordinators, etc. I immediately got off the phone with him and called a bassist who I thought would be around and really the only guy that I knew who stood a reasonable chance of making it there in enough time so that we would only have a 10 or 15 min late start.

Long story short, the bassist arrived just as I was finishing the head of the first tune. The whole gig was off balance for me, though. I had to readjust the set list on the fly, I ended up needing to play some standards that I hadn't played in a long time. I try to tell myself that it shouldn't matter and that I need to just be professional, but when your mental game is thrown off it's tough to recover!

So what is the point of all this? I think that I need to work on the mental aspect of my playing as well. Something I've long known about, but now I have to do something about before I end up having a train wreck on a more important gig (though, my philosophy is that EVERY gig is important). My mental policy is now, "even when there's a problem, there is NO problem".

I need to learn to shut out snags and just move on. Actually, from the natural process of maturity and getting older, I am much better at it now than I was in my early to mid twenties. But now I think I should really work on it because in the end the only thing that should ever really matter is what comes out of the bell of my horn.