I spend Sat­ur­day at the NAMM show. My band­mate picked me up early in the morn­ing and we met their long-time friends, Chuck and Bar­bara Wack­er­man for break­fast. Get­ting to the show at 7:30am was bril­liant. We had easy park­ing and no lines get­ting badges and sit­ting down for breakfast.

I wanted to see some live music and check out some iPhone audio devices.

Jesse Henry — Inven­tor of the Jazzbone.

The Jazzbone is a tenor trom­bone with the slide folded over. Each posi­tion is 1/2 of a stan­dard trom­bone and should facil­i­tate faster play­ing. I wasn’t very suc­cess­ful with it on my first try but a few other peo­ple were able to do well.

While in the Kanstul booth I met Chris and Steven, the inven­tors of the pBone and had an inter­est­ing dia­log with them. Essen­tially, use water only on the slide, clean it with each use, use any mouth­piece that fits, the ABS doesn’t pho­to­graph well, and that the pBone is the proof of con­cept for a paper pos­tu­lat­ing that the sur­face of the instru­ment as as much or more to do with the tone than the sub­stance of the instrument.

I stopped by the Apogee booth to check out what’s new with one of my favorite com­pa­nies. They where giv­ing away stuff.

In the morn­ing I sat through a Line 6 demo of the new live sound prod­ucts Stage Source. The demo was fan­tas­tic and they really showed how a component-ized sys­tem could scale up and down. I really want one of these systems.

Bones West gave a fan­tas­tic con­cert in the patio. My friend Greg played a nice bass trom­bone solo. He had to fol­low Bill Watrous though and that would have made me nervous!

After lunch I stopped by the PreSonus booth to see Kate­lyn Benton’s demo with the USB One 2 (a DAW).

I met with some more friends at the MXL booth to watch a stun­ning per­for­mance by Lau­rence Juber. That guy is an inspir­ing player.

I hap­pened to see the iNuke — Behringer’s 10,000 watt iPod dock. They couldn’t demo it due to noise restric­tions though .. ah well.

At the end of the day I was able to see my friend Keren Tay­lor singing with The Band from TV (a celebrity char­ity band). They put on a lively show with lots of guest artists.

Through­out the day I saw some fan­tas­tic gear, inno­v­a­tive stuff all around. I really enjoyed the Yamaha build­ing and the very nice key­boards they had on display.

I came back on Sun­day to play with my klezmer band for the good peo­ple of NAMM 2012.

We weren’t the only Klezmerim at the 2012 NAMM show; we were the only Klezmer group with brass! The South Coast Sim­cha band had a chance to per­form one con­cert at the MXL Mic booth on the NAMM show floor. We played a lively set of tra­di­tional tunes and took turns fea­tur­ing all the instru­ments. Renah Wolzinger on clar­inet, Keith Wolzinger on Trum­pet, Alan Levin on acoustic gui­tar, and Sable Can­tus (me) on trombone.

The con­cert was recorded by the MXL engi­neers and we may have some audio or video to share in the near future.

South Coast Siim­cha Band at NAMM

P.S. I was plan­ning to bring my red pBone along but there was some logis­ti­cal chal­lenge get­ting in and out of the show so I opted to only bring one horn, the Conn-stellation 48H.