The Paris Cat is a small jazz cellar in Goldies Place in the city of Melbourne. Between Little Bourke and Lonsdale street. Its an alley with several clubs in it. Near Hardware Lane. The room has a high ceiling and paintings hanging on the brick walls. It might fit 75 people. The round tables and wooden chairs go right up to the edge of the stage. Well, playing area. There is a bar at the back of the room. The pa is for the vocals. There is a large piano taking up a quarter of the stage and the house drum kit is there for whoever wants to play it. No lugging your own kit down the stairs. Nothing else is mic'd up, everything is set to the volume of the kit. People are right up to you when you play.
We start to play at 9:30 pm. I am playing my borrowed Ibanez 70s Artists series 12 string (A friend dug it out from his barn in Mt Gambier where it had been sitting for a couple of decades and told me to take it for a ride) which has a monstrously fat sound but which also goes out of tune on a couple of strings at will. Both sharply and flatly. Its a wyld stallion!
We've been rehearsing some new material and the sound of the Ibanez just meshes with Stu Pereras Rickenbacker so sweetly I am hot to play and record the sound.
I tell the people we are happy to be invited into a jazz bar and feel guilty that we are depriving a jazz unit of a gig as there are only two jazz joints in melbourne for all the musicians. I try to plead that we have the occasional voicing in the chords that approaches jazz anyway. I also mention that my thoughts , voice and words are jazz. They allow us through and we begin.
We play for an hour. A great venue and an excellent time of the night to be playing music. (9:30). The club has an owner who stands at the door and works the room. It works, why can't all the rooms be so sweet?
We'll be coming back to do a show here in may.
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