jasmine

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jasmine was contemporary jazz-ish band with a hard-ish edge. With a pitch like that no wonder we didn't have a big impact in the Blacksburg area. We certainly didn't make a lot of money. One gig at 117 S Main brought in a total of $27, and we had to pay for our own beer. The band went through a few changes, but Don Dissinger on keyboards, Bart Broadnax on bass (from Bob's Group, with perfect pitch), and me on guitar were there from the start. Don played a Fender Rhodes, still one of my favorite keyboard instruments. Bart had a beaultifully worn Fender Jazz bass, and I played a Fender strat which (sacrilege alert) I modified by replacing the center pickup with a humbucker to squeeze out a Les Paul sound. Kids use electronics for that these days, I used a router and saw.

Don rented a house on Giles Road, over by Patrick Henry Drive, and the band used that for practice. The landlord wasn't too happy. Hard-ish means we played loud -- hey, this was the '70s. The spring of '78 we did a high school prom and that was a disaster: mismatched genres, one extension cord in the school gym for the whole band, blown breakers, Bernie the sax player smoking in the boys room. I was certain we were going to get locked up or ridden out on rails and never be seen again. I left the band summer of '78 to finish up my masters in EE, they continued for a bit and then finally disbanded. I haven't seen any of those guys since.

The first picture was a publicity still near the time of the last gig I played. The others were taken 117 S Main by good friend Jodie Flackowitz, my first college date freshman year. We only went out once, but she became friends with the Lee Hall basement guys, and was best man at my roommate Stuart Hughes' wedding.

We gigged at 117 South Main (now Cabo Taco), a club on Draper Road under the parking lot (now Books Strings and Things), and a nightclub on Turner Street (now Sub Station II.)

The tracks below were done at a recording studio in Roanoke. The week before Don, Bart, Bernie and me went to DC to get some equipment we found in the want ads. I got my only speeding ticket on that trip. Good thing we weren't searched (Bernie the sax player again.) I picked up a red Gibson ES 335 that was used in the recording. I remember the session was on a Friday night, and that weekend I had a killer take-home EE exam which I didn't do until after the session. When the exam was done Sunday night I went to the kitchen in the Carlton Scott apartment (are those still there?), and stabbed it through the heart onto the bulletin board (that was really cathartic.) The prof (Gail Gray, a great teacher) never asked me about the gash in the paper. The last track, A Little Nod, is one of mine (nod the head signal, not the drug reference like the band insisted.) I did the framework and the band as a whole modified it in the great jam tradition -- the nods were needed to transition from one jam to the next. We played this one every gig as a release. The first take went bust 2 minutes in, and the studio time was running out. The second take had to stick or that was it. The studio tape (yes kids, tape) was originally copied to cassette, later digitized to wav, cleaned up, split into tracks, and finally converted to mp3. Use the download link below for the iTunes compatible mp3's.