Hey Graeme,
I agree of course, it would be great to do a more extensive tour of the UK... Heck, we're only playing 2 gigs in Germany. I think there are a couple reasons.
One is, even though most musicians know who Gadd is (and indeed some of us sidemen) owners of venues do not know this band. There always has to be a first time around as a proof of concept. Club or theater owners are asked to take the risk in committing to an expensive band they may have never heard of and hope they can sell tickets. Fasching in Stockholm offered us 2 nights and Ronnie's in London only offered 3. I'm sure Ronnie's was surprised when it sold out several months in advance.
The other thing is, this band is kind of rare. We all play for JT, Gadd juggles Clapton and sometimes Paul Simon, Goldings and Landau have their own bands, Fowler is a busy movie orchestrator. So it's going to be a rare occasion when we can all tour together in this format. We were lucky too all be able to make this 3-week trip and so it seems they tried to cover as much territory as they could within this timeframe. Even playing 19 out of 21 nights I understand the money is tight.
And 3rd - we're all OLD dudes. HAHA!! These 6am lobby calls to make a flight on a gig day can beat you up pretty good. We all agree that we're only good for about 3 weeks of this kind of thing at a stretch.
So like that. We all hope we can play with this band at least occasionally because it's a musical treat. And the audiences have showed up and been very responsive everywhere. I expect we'll try to at least do some jazz festival work over here at some point but there's no telling because of all the moving parts involved.
Hopefully we'll get up your direction at some point Graeme!
thanks,
Jimmy J
