Adrian Cox warms up before tracking “Fish”

On Sunday, June 10th the music got deeper – or should I say lower – as our buddy Adrian Cox came in with his tuba to play on an eclectic little song called “Fish”.  Adrian is a bass player extraordinaire who just happens to play tuba once in a while.  Now, I don’t know about you, but I think the tuba is one of the more unusual horn instruments, and probably one of the most difficult to play.  After watching Adrian blow into that horn with all the air he could muster, reaching these almost off-the-radar (and probably off the staff) notes, I have profound new respect for both instrument and player.

Things were in strumming mode as Shep, Mikel and our good friend Howard Markman laid guitar tracks on June 13th.

Howard Markman with his acoustic

Howard Markman is one of my favorite acoustic guitarists.  He’s intuitive and brilliant and has released a wonderful bunch of CDs of original music.  Although it’s not categorized as “Kid Music,” my daughter loves his tunes.  Mikel, Cord and I recently performed some of our own original “adult music” with Howard at a songwriter’s show here in Baltimore. Our kids were there and it was great fun. Check out Howard’s music by visiting his site.  We asked Howard to add his great picking to a song called “Workin’ Kid Blues” and two instrumentals Mikel had written that are absolutely beautiful. Although we’ve never included instrumentals on our CDs, in this case I think they’ll be refreshing amuse bouche in between all those songs.

photos by good friend and photographer Bill Auth.