Kal Zone • Music

With Lunar Glee Club 1984

The Lunar Glee Club, a nine-piece instrumental ensemble, was founded by bass players Dan Bilich and Dan Ladizinsky in 1983. Later rebranded as the Lunar Octet, the group performed and recorded around the Ann Arbor–Detroit area through the mid-1990s. I was with the band through 1984, and appeared on the recordings below. Additional unreleased material is available at More Lunar Glee Club: Live at The Blind Pig and Yet more Lunar Glee Club: Live at the Ann Arbor Art Fair.

Lunar Glee Club, a 1984 cassette release, recorded and engineered by Edward Moon at Livonia Sound, Livonia, Michigan, except (*) recorded and engineered by Tom Bray at the Blind Pig Cafe, Ann Arbor, Michigan. Tracks marked (**) are bonus studio tracks not available on the original cassette.

The following tracks were recorded from a live WEMU radio broadcast from Depot Town, Ypsilanti, Michigan, at the summer 1984 WEMU jazz competition.

Audio recordings copyright 1984, Lunar Glee Club. Personnel on all of the above tracks:

Technical notes on the Live at Depot Town tracks: These are in chronological order of performance. "Fix My Idol" was a "sound check" track — you can hear the sound engineer tweaking levels throughout. The two basses, the drum set, and percussion don't seem to have been miked directly — they sound like they are being picked up through the horn and conga mics, at least in the house mix that was recorded here. In the audience you probably would have heard more bass direct from the onstage bass amps and the drums and percussion acoustically. (At the beginning of "Sitcom Paramedic" you can hear someone yell "Turn the bass up!!!") In mastering these tracks I applied some multiband compression and EQ to try to balance the mix, but in the first several tracks there really isn't much bass there to work with. Another problem was that the cassette tape ran out near the end of "Subway Tension", so I had to patch in a segment of the written melody from the beginning of the tune — with adjustments to match the tempos. (If anyone has a complete tape of this track, I would love to be able to copy it.) But technical issues aside, the energy of the performance and crowd response comes across. Please let me know if you have any suggestions on this rendering.

Lunar discography

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