Out of Print and Unavailable – Page 32

Band Forever: Live @ Perch Cafe (2011)

This is a movie of my first ever concert under the name Jesse Statman, which I released as a limited edition DVD for some of my early fans.

I’d been writing, recording, performing, and releasing music for awhile at this point, but none of my concerts had ever been billed as my own name – they’d always been billed as the name of a band I was in at the time – so this was something to celebrate!

“Band Forever” was the encore of this show, and it’s a song I wrote in 2003 for my first band, The Band Of The Land – the song is also about that band, and the original recording of it from our 2004 album Beach was later released on a Cannonball Statman album.

Beth, my bandmate from that band, came on stage to sing that song with me at the end of the show, which was a really beautiful moment – the place was packed, and some of the people there were fans of our band from back in the day, so it was really touching – some people even started to cry.

The Band Of The Land reuniting on stage in 2011

There were a ton of other really cool moments in this one actually – I invited a bunch of different guest musicians who I’d known in various times in my life.

I invited the poet Jane LeCroy, who I’d known since I was 6 months old, to do a surprise cameo where she improvised a poem on stage based on prompts from the audience, which is something she often did with her band TRANSMITTING – we’ve been friends and huge fans of each other’s work for pretty much as long as I can remember, so it was great that she could be part of the show. During her cameo, all the other musicians came on stage and improvised together behind her.

Beth played the “band box” for some parts of that show – which is a stringed instrument I made out of a box her friend built for us to store our Band Of The Land cassettes back in the early 2000s, with our band name printed on the box.

The Band Of The Land performing “Hawaii” in 2011

Jocelyn Medina and Gani Parrott sang some really powerful harmonies on a few of the songs – and Gani also played lead guitar on some of my songs and did one of his own originals during the show. I’d gotten to know Jocelyn and Gani much more recently – Gani was a musician and songwriter at my high school who I was playing in a couple bands with, and Jocelyn was also a musician and songwriter, who’d come in to teach voice lessons at our school. Jocelyn is from a jazz background and Gani comes from more of a rock, punk, and metal scene, and he was trying out some original songs of his at the time that were more in the vein of love songs and breakup songs – both super talented performers and songwriters.

acoustic performance of “F Train Over Brooklyn” with Gani and Jocelyn on vocals

rehearsal of the 3-part vocal harmonies for the song, with Jocelyn on piano

And Marc Grillo, who’d been my neighbor when I was growing up in Brooklyn and has always been an incredible drummer in dozens of different bands in NYC, joined in to play drums on my song “Stuck in the Mud”, which is a song I wrote when I was 11 – he’d actually joined me on drums to play that song at a school concert around when I wrote it, and he still remembered how to play it.

I had a lot of fun with the editing, bringing in flashbacks to the rehearsals we did with some of the musicians, but also to a lot of different times in my life, since I had a lot of raw video footage to play around with from making all these short films when I was younger – for “Stuck in the Mud”, I brought in videos of me getting stuck in the mud on my scooter in Prospect Park, Brooklyn right around the time I wrote that song – for “Tornado in Brooklyn”, I had a video I’d filmed out my window of the tornado in Brooklyn in 2010 – and I brought in a lot of different clips of me and Beth from the Band Of The Land days.

We also bought a couple really cheap video cameras for $30 that we handed out to people in the audience to get this lo-fi, fan-made multi-camera feel along with the more hi-fi footage.

I was really happy with how the whole thing came out – the only reason I haven’t reissued this one is because it’s a Jesse Statman project – and I haven’t figured out how that fits in with what I’ve been doing as Cannonball Statman since 2012, which took a very different direction from this. But I’d like to reissue it in the future.

acoustic performance of “Snow Globe”

from Out of Print and Unavailable Filmography (as Jesse Statman)
8PM in New York City (2011)
Band Forever: Live @ Perch Cafe (2011)
Cannonball’s Party (2010)
A Place That Doesn’t Exist (2009)
Exhibits 1-7 (2009)

(or, go to the beginning for the full list of out-of-print and unavailable projects)