For those of you who haven’t been following the Busk Break project, over the past few weeks I’ve been digging into the digital archives to unearth recordings from the past few years. And, perhaps not surprisingly, I’ve uncovered some fun finds.
Let’s start with a video from 2010 of local drummer Daniel Hensley doing his thing on Patton Avenue. For this era in Busk Break — pre-DSLR camera, pre-monopod, pre-Final Cut — it’s actually not bad. So why was it hidden away for two years? Well, the main reason is that I’d lost the recording of Hensley telling me his name, and it seemed extremely unprofessional to post a video of a guy playing a non-song and also fail to include his name. It wasn’t until Ursula Gullow and Chris Wood did their story on downtown buskers that I was able to identify him, and by that point the video was already dated and well at the bottom of the backlog.
Next, we have a recording of Asheville-based jazz band Big Nasty performing their version of “Tin Roof Blues.” This video actually dates from earlier in 2012, and is the companion video to “An Evening in Caroline.” It was from a brief period where I was experimenting with 3D video, and the main reason I didn’t render it out is that the quality always seemed very low to me. Granted, it’s better than most cell phone-quality videos out there, but it always seemed like Big Nasty deserved much better. Most people, however, don’t care about that kind of thing. They just want to see the show. So, here it is.
Lastly, we have a video from 2011 of jazz musicians Mario, Drayton, Luke and Jaffee covering “Black Magic Woman,” a song made famous by both Fleetwood Mac and Santana. I lost the original sound recording, and am generally loathe to use the lower-quality camera mic when I record buskers, as it tends to come out sounding flat. But this was such a fun, strange find — I don’t actually remember recording it — that I thought it was worth tweaking the sound as best I could, and presenting.
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