Summit Meeting - September 4, 2000
 The
Acoustic Guitar Summit is a four-man guitar group with
whom I have played with for more than five years. We are due
to release our second CD, Summit
Meeting, at the beginning of fall. [Summit
Meeting was released in the fall of 2000. --PC] The
following are the liner notes I wrote for the CD:
The Acoustic Guitar Summit has traveled many miles since we played our first concert together in 1995. We have gotten to know each other while touring, performing, recording (and sometimes even rehearsing), and we have developed a genuine solidity as a group. We no longer play solo sets bookmarked by a couple of quartet tunes, as we did in the early days. Now the four of us play the entire show, with an occasional spotlight on each member. The question is no longer which tunes we can play, but which ones we will have to leave out. We play looser and we play tighter, we take chances and rely on each other, and we have a lot of fun! Many random touring memories give me pleasure: Riding in the back seat of a rented van, listening to Terry's endless stream of historical facts and funny stories about every guitar player who has ever lived (Q: Who played the theme to Peter Gunn, Bonanza, and The Munsters? A: Bob Bain); Mark and Doug sitting up front doing New York Times crossword puzzles together in pen! (Mark: "What¹s a nine-letter word meaning shaped like a worm?" Doug: "Vermiform.") All of us bleary-eyed after a late concert, dragging into the Keystone Corner in Berkeley for a live, morning performance on NPR, and nailing it. A note about our stage lineup: If you face the stage, we always sit with Terry on the left, then Mark, Doug, and me. At our first concert, it just seemed to happen that the two really tall guys sat in the middle, and the two not-so-tall guys got stuck on the ends. This worked out particularly well for almost everybody on a night we played an outdoor gig that got moved into a tent because of a very cold and blustery wind. We were stationed by the tent opening, playing in our overcoats. Our usual positioning dictated that Terry sit by the opening, taking a direct hit from the wind, and running interference for the three of us. Being on the opposite end, I had the best seat in the band! A note about our soloing order: At some point we realized that we got utterly confused trying to figure out who soloed when. (Did that look Mark gave me mean it was my turn or his?) So we came up with the ingenious plan to keep our soloing order running clock-wise. Typically, Terry goes first, then I, Doug, and Mark. We follow this plan faithfully except when we don't. --Paul Chasman, June 2000 BACK TO ARCHIVES |
