Frosty Nightz

Introducing Frosty Nightz, a semi-regular jam session in the 1974 time machine that is my basement.

The idea: Get musical people together, eat, drink, play music, and have fun. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. No bigger project. No ulterior motives. Just an excuse to connect with two of most important things life has to offer: People and Music.

Frosty Nightz is the spiritual successor to the practices leading up to Frostapalooza. In the year leading up to our show in August, we had monthly practices at our house. Those practices were so much fun:

Monthly band practice became such a fun ritual. Family, friends, and neighbors would show up to our house, we’d have food and drinks, and head to the basement to practice. We’d usually start with some jamming to get attuned, and eventually turn our attention to the Frostapalooza setlist.

After the show ended, I knew I wanted to keep the spirit of Frostapalooza — and the fun practices leading up to it — alive. I needed a few months to decompress after the show, but intended to set this up in the early winter. Alas, life got in the way, and it was a scramble as I suddenly entered a new phase of my career.

Now that I’m back on my feet, I planted the calendar-invite flag in the distance and let all of the Pittsburgh-based Frostapalooza musicians know about it. Since Frostapalooza, I met even more amazing humans/musicians through AcoustiCafe at Mr Smalls and at the ultra-fun Pittsburgh Plays The Cure show in December. So I extended the invite to those folks as well.

Frosty Nightz, Volume 1

On Saturday night, people came over and we got to work. Ian, Melissa, and I were joined by Zachary Lee, Amber Johnson, Harper Lines, and “The Steves” from Phase Shifter Shifter, Bethany Conley and her partner.

I had a vague sense of everyone’s musical talents ahead of time, but I was surprised and delighted at everyone’s willingness to just Go For It. There was no real prompting or much discussion; we just played music. Everything was done on the fly, songs were created in real-time. Harper and Bethany provided vocals that provided a lot of welcome guidance, and Zachary and The Steves brought so much of their improvisational prowess to the equation.

There’s a magical part of the Get Back documentary where we get to be a fly on the wall as Paul McCartney iterates his way into writing the song Get Back. You can hear that same sort of iterative song shape take form here:

Of course, we are not The Beatles 😂, but keep in mind that most of these people have never met each other before, let alone play/practice/perform music together before. I think the results are pretty impressive given that fact.

Melissa’s been on a Latin music kick lately, expressed she’d like to learn that style of piano, then promptly learned how to do that like Neo learning Kung Fu. We were able to jam on Bad Bunny’s NEUVAYoL, which was a ton of fun:

We even got really far out there, twisting and turning and changing things up over some impressively-long grooves.

We covered a lot of musical terrain in the 3.5-4 hours we played music! We covered Daft Punk, Bill Withers, Bad Bunny, and Herbie Hancock. You can listen to the whole thing here:

So yeah, the first Frosty Nightz was a ton of fun! Looking at my calendar now to schedule the next one.