Original Garage a Trois @ Howlin Wolf NOLA 5/1/13

This was worth the entire trip to New Orleans.  Charlie Hunter is an original member of the band.  He's a phenomenal guitar player who was playing the 8-string guitar back at the time.  That means he had 2 bass strings on his guitar.  One of Charlie's approaches to keep his music fresh is to continue to change his musical partners.  A few years or so after Garage a Trois (GAT), Charlie changed to the 7-string guitar, so now he has 1 bass string instead of 2.  I really like this version.  I suspect it's more because I appreciate him even more than ever before as I've grown in my musical tastes.

Anyway, we all love GAT w/ Charlie.  Soon after Charlie decided to move on, GAT was using different guests to fill out the band.  I remember the jazzfest time with John Medeski on keyboards.  I don't remember who else they might have played with, but I think they quickly ended up with Marco Benevento on keyboards.  That meant we still had a phenomenal band even though most of us preferred how it went with Charlie. 

They do this Megalomaics Ball every year at Howlin Wolf on the Wed before 2nd weekend of jazzfest.  Last year, they shared the show doing the first half with Charlie and the 2nd half with Marco.  This year, they did the show with Charlie and had Marco in for most of the 2nd set.  Phenomenal!  They had Mike Dillon the percussionist come in and out. The original was Charlie, Skerik and Stanton.  Mike was added after 1-3 years I think.  This show was very awesome for me.