This Week's Freebie from The 1937 Flood

 Now, we first started playing with this song about a year ago, but it’s been languishing for a while. 

It was just waiting for a blue and rainy evening like last night when Veezy, Danny, Randy and Charlie could revisit it.

It sounds like it’s ready to be a regular in our repertoire now.

This Week's Freebie from The 1937 Flood

What a wonderful family the Coffmans are, a young household full of musicians and artists, students and teachers. We feel so fortunate to know them through the transformative music of their eldest. Each week 21-year-old Vaness Coffman’s playing takes our ears to brand new places. 

Now, when Veezy plays her solo jazz sets at venues around our area, she’ll often mentions that every member of her family has a favorite song, and if you’re lucky, she’ll play them for you sometime during that night. 

Well, high on our list from that collection is her mom’s favorite. Julianne Coffman teaches music in the Cabell County schools and her Veezy tune is this 1948 jazz standard by Sonny Burke.

 So here it is, from last night’s Flood gathering: “Black Coffee.”

This Week's Freebie from The 1937 Flood

 The Flood learned its version of this tune from the great Jim Kweskin’s jug band and its 1966 album for Vanguard called “Relax Your Mind.” 

At last night’s Flood rehearsal, we were doing just that, thank you very much. Here we’ve got Randy Hamilton killing in on the harmonies and double dips of scintillating solos by Sam St. Clair and Danny Cox. 

As Jim Kweskin says, “I got mine — hope you got yours!”

This Week's Freebie from The 1937 Flood

 If you were trying to make a graphic representation of a Flood rehearsal, your best model would probably be a crazy quilt. In the span of an hour or two, we go from rollicking jugband tunes and blues to re-imaged rock ’n’ roll classics of the ‘50s and ‘60s. 

And then suddenly: something completely different. 

Our Randy Hamilton has been doing “Wayfaring Stranger” for a while now, but it’s always changing, depending on what’s new in the room. This week that “new” was Randy’s old buddy Danny Cox — the two of them go back to high school days together! — who for the first brought his sweet, imaginative guitar work to the tune. 

Meanwhile, Veezy Coffman, who’s usually playing tenor, this time brought her big beautiful baritone sax to the session. Now, that bari can rock us to the very soles of feet, but here Veezy shows us that her horn always has a softer side.

Just listen to how she weaves in and out of Randy’s haunting vocals and Danny’s enchanting chords.