Hey! Yesterday was a happy day for us. We entered Yamaha's Band Jiman contest, and won both prizes available. One was for being the crowd favorite, and the other results in us doing a concert at the Nagoya Bluenote on July 13th. And if they like us again at that one, we will advance to the Tokyo final in Ebisu. Wouldn't that be nice.
Anyway, the funny thing for me is that the whole contest is judged on cover songs. For the 13th, they actually state "no originals". Weird, because any contest I have entered previously has always said "no covers!" But in the final judgment they said that they really liked how we changed the cover songs to fit our style while still making them work. I will admit I got a charge out of that comment because I have always been a big fan of a musicians who can bring out a new interpretation of an old song that makes it even better (Holly Cole singing "I've Just Seen a Face" comes to mind).
The song we won with was Joni Mitchell's Big Yellow Taxi. I'll put our performance up on our youtube page later if you want to see it. (http://ca.youtube.com/user/fatblueman)
I also forget to mention that we got a really good full page write-up in Japanzine this month. I sat down and had a great chat with their reporter, and the result is posted here: http://www.seekjapan.jp/article/jz/1663/Fatblueman