Gabriel Sullivan's Blog: Special Tucson Nights...

It's been a very busy couple of weeks. I've been playing, composing and arranging so many different styles and forms of music lately. It'd been a blast.

The last couple weeks I've been working out my first string arrangement for a string quartet and contrabass as part of Chris Black's Chamberlab I. The concert was held Saturday May 8th at The Screening Room. It was a lot of work seeing as how I hadn't written out music in almost 8 years. After a couple of days of correcting notation errors, I finished my piece entitled "Danza Del Torero (Dance of the Bullfighter)." It was a 3 and a half minute song in the key of melodic Cm and was inspired by the Balkan music of Southern Romania.

We took Chamberlab to KXCI Radio for a live performance...

That week was also Salvador Duran's 60th birthday. We did the only thing we knew how to do and threw him a party at Che's Lounge. We played songs of my own, Y La Orkesta, Calexico, The Jons, Brian Lopez and even some of Sal's. Everybody pitched in and got him a Bud Light pinata, 4 cakes, and a shit load of candy. Definitely one of the most special nights in Tucson I've had in a while.

Playing Brian Lopez tunes...