I've been packing my nights with shows lately for reasons I'll get into later on, and it's been great for seeing lots of great bands. The downside is that all my free time is spent working on photos and lately it's been invading my dreams. I'm starting to have nightmares that I get to a show only to not have any media cards on me. Or that I shot everything in lo-res JPG mode. I really hope I don't have that dream where I show up wearing nothing but my camera bag and underwear.

I found out about Horse Latitudes playing this show by chance on MySpace. It was an early show and would only take an hour, so it looked like fun.



From left to right, this band is Nathan Hubbard, Jason Robinson, and Nazo Zakkak.



I'm not even sure this is an actual band. Nathan has a pretty wry sense of humor, so it might just be a band and name he threw together quickly. Or it might be exactly what he said during the band introduction- that Horse Latitudes started as a Credence Clearwater Revival cover band. In 1958.



Being 7pm on a Wednesday night, this was a very sparsely attended show. I was the entire audience until some guys showed up for the jam session that was taking place afterwards. This is bad news for the band, but great news for me, since it afforded me the opportunity to get nice and close without being in anybody's way.









Jason and Nathan form half of the excellent Cosmologic, and I picked up Nathan's big band double-CD, Skeleton Key Orchestra which features Jason, Gabriel Sundy, Danny Weller's mom Ellen, and Justin Grinnell. It takes the free jazz concept and expands it to a dozen players. There's collective improvisation, electronic breaks, spoken word, multiple basses, found and manufactured instruments, even an interlude of what seems to be studio banter between various musicians. It's a very ambitious project which works for the most part. If pared down to a single CD, it would be truly stellar.



On that CD and at this show, Nathan paints with many colors.