Elephants with Guns

We just finished up our shows for the Indian Film Festival at the Supper Club and at the Arclight. Thanks to everyone who came out. Every crowd we played to was amazing. More news and pics and vids will be coming soon!

Phew… where was I? That right… So we were stuck with a song concept that needed dhol but no one in the band knew any dhol players. So I decided to post a question on facebook asking if anyone knew anyone who had a dhol and just as importantly wanted to play with us. I then waited, hoping that at best someone

Raskia suggested I contact some friends of hers, Jess and Malinder from the band Dhol Nation

We decided to meet up at a rehearsal studio in Hollywood to see what would happen and what happened was an amazing jam session. Everyone clicked almost instantly and they even had great suggestions about the structure of the song and so the song was rewritten yet again during that practice with their suggestions in mind. What started out as a 30 second jam piece had now become a full length 6 minute song!

Needless to say they really made the song sound great. We even wrote a sketch of a new song together during practice. So I dont think this will be the last of our collaboration.

The I Just Wanna Dance Show was a lot of fun and everyone played great. I think everyone enjoyed listening to the collaboration as much as we enjoyed playing and in fact we are planning to play with Dhol Nation again for the Indian Film Festival. Stay tuned for details!

It’s the night before the ‘I Just Wanna Dance’ show and it’s pretty late. I have to be at the venue early tomorrow morning to set up so I should probably be sleeping, but I can’t… so I figured I’d write about all the prep that went into this show and particularly one song that we will be playing on this show.

Last year, we played ‘Just When It Was Getting Good… I Woke Up’, a moody Indian influenced instrumental piece and ‘Agua’, a Latin rock song with Spanish lyrics. It was a diverse set which I caught everyone off guard because it was not like anything else at the show. For that reason I think it helped people remember us and we got a couple of great gigs as a direct result of that show.

With that in mind, I wanted to do something unique again for this show as well. We will be opening up with another instrumental piece called ‘Elephant March’ and a new song called ‘The Fight That Ends Bhangra Night’ which is a song that has gone through numerous changes since we started playing it and incidentally led us to some cool people along the way.

Initially ‘The Fight…’ was a quick minute bhangra-ish/metal-ish melody we would play at our shows to say goodbye with. We had a couple of these minute long songs we would play partly because we wanted to shake up our set, which could include 10 minute jam songs, and sometimes because we frankly just couldn’t come up with anything good after that minute was over.

Anyway, after a particular show a buddy got annoyed with our minute long song concept and suggested I try fleshing these songs out some more or our album would sound like a sampler cd. I figured she was right and I figured I’d try to flesh out ‘The Fight…’ song as much as I could which I had always wanted to play in some form or another for the ‘I Just Wanna Dance 2012′ show anyway, and which was right around the corner.

Since I knew I wanted the song to have a bhangra feel but hadn’t really heard a lot of bhangra up to that point I started asking my bhangra loving friends to borrow cds and send me youtube links of their favs so I could study the structure of bhangra songs. After a lot of listening, a lot of writing, a lot of erasing and writing again, and a lot of jamming with the rest of the band we all settled on a song structure that came out pretty good. I was pretty happy with the song so far but one thing was sorely lacking in our bhangra song… the dhol. We needed dhol.

To be continued…

So as exciting and interesting recording can be, it can also be very tiring and mentally draining. Luckily we were able to take the past couple weeks off and just rest and reflect. I went up to Oakland to hang out with some buddies. Omar went down to Texas to celebrate his brother’s wedding. Sagar and Maya relaxed in town.

Now that we are all back and refreshed and ready to go we have a sprint to the finish line. We are trying to finish up the recording of the album by January and still have about 6 songs left to record. I am pretty excited about the next couple of tracks we have coming up though, we recorded a polka-ish track on Saturday and finished up the touches on writing a couple of rock songs on Sunday. So it was a pretty productive weekend.

The most exciting thing that happened this weekend for all of us was that we were also able to hear a fully produced version of ‘Head In the Clouds’ which was the second song we recorded. Sammy worked some voodoo on that track and I think it sounds amazing. I wish I could share it with you… but you’re just going to have to wait.

What a weekend! Show day was basically a 24-hour day which started when Maya finally arrived at our hotel at 8am. From then on we started with the pre-show preparations like discussing speeches, wardrobe, tuning our instruments, checking of props, and putting in our final practices before we started on the long trek to the Sounds of Brazil (S.O.B.) in Manhattan.

Between the 4 of us we lugged around 3 guitars, 4 djembes, and a flute from our hotel near JFK through buses, subways, and long walks until we finally reached the venue at S.O.B.s for the sound check at 4pm. (Special thanks to all the New Yorkers who helped us navigate the way!)

And then came the waiting game, with about 7 hours of time left between sound check and the actual show, we had quite some time to ourselves. Quite a lot of time…a lot of time…time.. a… lot. One of the more boring aspects of being in a band is the long waits between sound checks and the actual show. You can’t walk off too far from the venue, party, or drink, or do much of anything in that time gap because everyone is focused on the show…and so you wait…a lot.

We were able to kill some time by walking around a little to grab some sushi and then coming back to play football with maracas, eat nachos, and explore the basements and backstage areas of the venue. It was a very historic place as concert posters of Sounds of Brazil performers from past years lined the walls featuring greats like Tito Puente, Celia Cruz, and Gil Scott Heron. Everyone felt lucky to be here.

All the effort was worth it though, the venue was great, the people we met were great, and most importantly the show itself was great. The 4 of us were able to relax a bit after the show at which point Maya and Omar had to get to the airport for their 5am flight back to Los Angeles. Sagar and I, who were staying in New York an extra day, finally made it back to the hotel at 6am. Everyone was happy.. but beat. Sunday was made for rest and that’s pretty much all we did that day.

It was quite the adventure all in all. Thanks to the organizers from SAIFF and Rukus for the invite and the people of New York for the party.

Good times…

We just got out of our final practice before the SAIFF show and things are looking good. Everyone has got the set down and we’re all ready to go put on a great show in New York.

So, now comes the hard part… getting to New York.

The plan is that Omar, Sagar, and I (who have the day off for Veterans Day) will be leaving together from Los Angeles on Friday afternoon. Maya (who does not have the day off for Veterans Day) will be leaving later in the evening. Between the 4 of us, we will also be travelling with 4 djembes, 2 guitars, a bass, and a flute and the hopes that everyone and everything ends up in New York on time and in one piece.

They say getting there is half the adventure… we’ll see.

Follow us on twitter where we will be tweeting extensively throughout the journey and the adventure this weekend.

Tomorrow is the 10th annual “Walk for Hope”, an event that holds special meaning for us because it was really the catalyst for starting this band in the first place.

In 2008, Kristeen, a friend of mine who was in charge of putting on the entertainment for that year’s Walk for Hope asked if I could perform a solo act. I said “no”, she put me on the bill anyway.

After some more prodding from Kristeen, her boyfriend (and my good friend) Adnan “The Mad Guru” suggested I reach out to other musician friends of ours to see if anyone was interested in performing at the event with me as a band. So I did, if someone said yes, I’d play. If not, I wouldn’t.

Two people, Omar (our current djembe player) and Andy (a former guitarist/rubob player) responded with a “yes”. So after some jam sessions that went extremely well, less than a month later we walked onto the “Walk for Hope” stage and were first introduced as “Elephants with Guns”.

(I’ll explain the name later… maybe.)

Now three years later, we return to “Walk for Hope” with a new lineup, some extremely talented new members (Maya and Sagar), new songs, and on the verge of our first album with Rukus Avenue Records.

Life is funny…

Hello, we’re a band based in Los Angeles that plays music from all over. We recently joined Rukus Avenue Records and are in the process of writing and recording material for our debut album scheduled to be released in early 2012.

On top of providing info about the band and upcoming shows, we’re going to use this site to let you know about our progress on making the album and let you in on the process.

We’ve never done this before so we don’t know whats going to happen either… stay tuned.