ROB MATHES - COUNT

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COUNT
Rob Mathes Digging With The Ditch @ The Carriage House Studio in Stamford

"Count" is one I wrote the night before the session. I had seen The Apu Trilogy directed by Satyajit Ray at the Film Forum and was tremendously moved and felt remarkably grateful for a lot of things. This was the outpouring of that. Zev Katz is on Bass and Joe Bonadio is on percussion. We are all older men but have been doing this a long time. As I grow older my heroes are the blues musicians that never stopped, the Sonny Boy Williamsons, the Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhees and the B.B. Kings and Eric Claptons. That music, that blues based music, gets deeper as the years go by. It is a music that usually lives far away from pop music (though there would be no pop music without it obviously) but it is an abiding music. It is that kind of music that this stuff bows to. Enjoy. There are two other songs, Full of Hallelujahs and Wheelbarrow.

Joe Bonadio and I made a promise to each other that we would perform some stuff live with just percussion and acoustic guitar or piano and put some clips on YouTube. We had played just percussion and acoustic guitar/piano for a couple of colleges in Utah in 2009 and had the time of our lives. Playing with a small group of musicians, though the texture is sometimes threadbare, you can really hear the song. We talked about this five years ago and never did it.

I did go in and record a record with Joe, Zev Katz, Oz Noy and Jamshied Sharifi. That record was called Flesh and Spirit. That group of musicians played so strongly and in such a pocket of groove I ended up calling them The Ditch, hence the title of these sessions, of which this is only the first. I hope there will be many more with different musical friends and guests. Thanks 10,000 fold to Bob and Susan Conover for filming this.