Instrumental Invasion, 4/6/22 April 7, 2022

The April 6 Instrumental Invasion on WCWP was recorded over three days in mid-February: the first hour on the 14th (Valentine’s Day), one second hour segment on the 15th, and the last two on the 16th when a pickup was also recorded.

The playlist was created on February 12 and annotated on the 13th. The talk break script was drafted before recording on the 14th.

A few days before work on this show began, I finally took the plunge and bought the Kaotica Eyeball microphone isolation shield. Since my remote location has minimal room echo, the Eyeball is for home recordings. It only took two days to ship from Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Here’s how it looks from my chair:

It’s as big as my head, a challenge for Zoom meetings and for reading text on the right side of my monitor, but it works! Room echo was practically gone from any talk breaks I recorded at home. You will have to lower the pot (potentiometer) on your mixer. The Eyeball isolates background audio so well that more of the mic is picked up.

Thank you to actor and impressionist Jim Meskimen (son of Marion Ross) for recommending the Kaotica Eyeball in one of Mark Evanier‘s 2020 voice-over panel livestreams (cued to the relevant portion) and then jogging my memory about it in an Instagram post a few days before my purchase.

This wasn’t the first show with talk breaks recorded through the Eyeball, due to pickups I recorded for March 16.

After acquiring new music releases in the weeks leading up to this show, and the Friday after, I re-instituted two 2017 to present segments for the second hour. I included “Feet First” by Rick Braun unaware that it was the first single off his eponymous album. I did know that “Sun Princess” by the Jeff Lorber Fusion and “Out to Lunch” by Oli Silk were on the smooth jazz radio charts. So, I worked them in. Due to time constraints in the last segment, I couldn’t remind listeners about the accelerando at the end of the Bob James Trio arrangement of “Westchester Lady.” That same arrangement was part of their Blue Note set in November 2018, a month after Feel Like Making LIVE! was recorded. I said of the Blue Note performance:

This song had a call and response between the trio and ended with an accelerando that led me to polka dance [in my seat].

“The Big Windy Cat” by Nick Colionne was played 52 weeks after the previous cut from No Limits, “Headin’ Wes Before Dawn.” “Rippin’ n Runnin'” by Gordon Goodwin’s Big Phat Band, from That’s How We Roll, was played exactly six months after “Howdiz Songo?” We also went exactly six months between tracks from the Jeff Lorber Fusion’s Space-Time – “Louisiana” and “Sun Princess” – and between the last track to date from the previous Bob James Trio album, Espresso, and the first off Feel Like Making LIVE! The Espresso track was “Mister Magic,” which was also recorded for the new album.

Little did I know my inclusion of “Swingin’ for the Fence” by Nelson Rangell, and addressing personnel as “heavy hitters,” would coincide with the delayed start to the 2022 Major League Baseball Season, and appear in a show preceded by the baseball edition of The Rock Show. And it slipped my mind that an unusually late blizzard affected the New York metro area 40 years ago: April 6, 1982. You can watch WABC-TV‘s Eyewitness News coverage of that storm here.

Click here to download the aircheck MP3 or listen below: