The Beachside Album Hour. This is a concept I started three years ago to put together a core band along with some original band members from Jimmy Buffett’s band to play an entire album from beginning to end. I have seen these album concepts many times with many different bands and I really enjoy the listening experience. It can be very challenging to pull this off as you are dealing with so many players and many of them never see each other until the day of the event. It takes rehearsal and many hours on the phone developing the whole segment. There are many details to get this to go well. I have had a list of things to play and the order I wanted to go in from the very beginning. Given this is one of my pet projects I always want it to go well. I have also worked to add the alumni artist back into the event to give them some stage time to showcase their music.
This photo was one of my favorites from this night in November. You can see some of the many players that came and went performing various songs. Sometimes we spend the whole year trying to get certain players on this stage. We almost had Vaughn Cochran http://www.vaughncochranart.com this year. He was not able to make it at the last minute but he was on some of the earlier Buffett recordings and ironically Jimmy mentioned him from the stage on Thursday night.
We did have several special guests this year including the original Coral Reefer guitarist Roger Bartlett. http://www.rogerbartlett.com I have known Roger for a long time and was excited to get him down to Key West to help with our project. It was very cool to hear him perform on our celebration of the album “A1A.” I selected this one two years back because of the anniversary of the album being recorded.
Keith Sykes http://www.keithsykes.com was on hand to help a bit as well. More on that in a moment. Here is the photo I shot from the back of the stage during the Beachside Album Hour 2015 “A1A.”