A contemporary jazz band featuring the music of Dan Rubright

History

The WirePiots
Ted, Dan and Ric at Sip Salon.

Many years ago Dan and I tried playing as a duo in our basement. We were both in college and home for the summer. I played my old Rogers drums and he played his Stratocaster. I was studying classical music and somewhat rusty on the drum kit. Dan was deep into jazz performance and learning the great jazz standards. In hindsight we didn’t have a lot of common musical ground that we could stand on so we continued on our separate ways.

For a while I was an orchestral musician living out of town and Dan was teaching jazz guitar in St. Louis so we didn’t really do much music together. A few years later I moved back home and we thought we would try our hands as jingle composers. We did some fun projects the but arc of history wasn’t kind to local production companies; it migrated first to the coasts and eventually to the web.

Red Weather 1993
Red Weather circa 1993

At one point we decided that being rockers was an fine idea so we formed a band called ‘Red Weather.’ I wrote most of the lyrics and Dan wrote the music and it worked fairly well, though building a fan base proved challenging. After several enjoyable years working with great friends and players like Tommy Fulton, John Taylor and Lisa Campbell, our band split up and Dan formed other groups to play an eclectic mix of his music: some Tango, some jazz, some pop/rock tunes with vocals and more. Meanwhile, I was playing often as an extra musician with the St. Louis Symphony, which was very enjoyable and required almost no lugging of equipment, which was an added bonus.

One of Dan’s projects was called ‘The Flying Tortoise Band.’ It had Dan Eubanks on bass, Pete Ruthenberg on keys and me on a nascent hybrid kit. We used to do a lot of art fairs and eclectic gatherings. An exciting development was the ‘Crossings Concerts’ series that Dan created with his then wife Melissa Brooks, associate principle cellist of the SLS. They started out producing house concerts and that expanded into other venues around town. The series specialized in putting together disparate pairings of genres and having them play off of one another and the series garnered a devoted following.

Another very successful venture was Dan’s CD “Avenue X.” It had two ‘sides,’ of original music: a pop flavored side which looked back to the Red Weather days and a more jazz/world side which looked ahead to future endeavors. He hired great players such as Jim Mayer on bass (who also recorded and mixed), Roger Guth on drums, symphony string players and others equally notable. Tommy Fulton played some tracks on guitar and Jim Owens played acoustic piano. I played percussion and sang some backing vocals.

When we finally we decided to try to play together as a duo, we had a lot more experience to draw upon. This time around I was using many world percussion instruments and techniques which I had learned in the intervening years. Knowledge is power and in this case made for a more satisfactory collaboration. The new techniques and Dan’s expanded range of musical styles and abilities worked well together. We decided to call our new venture “The WirePilots.” The wires would be his guitar strings, though I have some trailing off of my electronic gear as well.

We played several concerts, looked upon our venture and lo, it was good. But we kept having “the bass conversation.” This was a perennial thing with us and went something like this:

Dan: “That sounded good.”
Me: “Yeah.”
Dan: “You know what would be great?”
Me: “I think I do…”
Both: “A BASS PLAYER!”

So we decided to look for a bass player. Happily, we didn’t look far. Dan and Ric Vice had played for many years in concerts at Webster University. Ric had always enjoyed playing Dan’s music and was eager to collaborate regularly. Having the bass player is artistically satisfying but Ric is also great guy to have a around, like a surrogate older brother. The next step is recording our trio and I’m happy to report we’re working on it!

Ted R.


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