I’ll continue this afternoon of cataloguing the end of 2012 with a look back to the Madwort Sax Quartet gigs in December. We left London behind and set off on a mini-tour of The Midlands and The North: not bad for the second thing the band ever did! Arguably, as it was a pair of gigs, this should be referred to as a series, but due to the travel involved I’m going to stick my neck out here and call it a mini-tour….

The first stop was Derby and Corey Mwamba‘s ‘One Note Sunday’ night at the Flowerpot. We played two sets to an extremely interested and appreciative audience. Again, it was a cool thing to have this happen at the band’s second ever gig. The idea with One Note Sunday is that people go along to hear something new…as in, not even something they’ve listened to online in advance to see if they like it, but something brand new to them. Risky tactics, you say! Yes. But, what it means from a performer’s perspective is that the people who show up are definitely going to be there to check out the music…and that feels great! We had a good gig there. The sign below was posted by the bar but was totally redundant.

Tom recorded the gig and filmed it. He’s posted a series of four videos on YouTube: the tracks are Shard, S (by Larry Ochs/Rova), Maps and Islands In The Green. Shard and Maps were new tunes that Tom wrote in time for the December gigs.

After Derby, we had a day off before travelling to Manchester to play at Efpi Records’ Freedom Principle night at Sandbar. It was nice to go back and play there again after the Quadraceratops gig for them in June, which was a lovely night. With the quartet, we shared the bill with the Anton Hunter trio. I have to say, perhaps egotistically, that my favourite part of this gig was when we combined the two bands and played some of my music! Anton had clocked that if we merged the two bands we would have a sort of hybrid almost-Quadraceratops septet and he suggested we did a couple of my tunes. With, well, basically no rehearsal. More risky tactics! I like to think of it as the Madanton Worthunter Quartrio. Four saxes, guitar, bass and drums! It was FUN, and pretty anarchic. There’s a video of it, and I’ll post it up here once I get my head around cutting the video into tracks….