(assumes gas is $3.50 and $0.12 per mile)

The II-V-I Orchestra recently performed Duke Ellington's
Sepia Panorama, with a famous Jimmy Blanton bass part. Here is the video, if only to humbly acknowledge that I crashed and burned in the last 8 bars. We were playing the piece from a "Jazz at Lincoln Center Library" transcription by David Berger. Here are PDFs of the 2 page bass part:

page 1
page 2

and here is a hastily scanned cut up of the "hard parts":

excerpt.

I think the transcription is wrong in the last eight bars. Here is their version of the last eight:



...and here's mine:



The only thing left to do is make PDFs of the part with my edit inserted. I'll do that in the next couple days but right now my kid wants on the computer and I'm gonna go run around Eberwhite Woods in the snow a couple times before my rehearsal tonite.

Saturday afternoon I got to play at the Scarab Club in Detroit with David Swain's Prez Society featuring George Bedard and Brian Delaney on guitars and a bunch of great sax players: Keith Kaminski, Bobby Streng, and James Hughes. The show was sponsored by hosted by R.J. Spangler and the Detroit Blues Society, and we received a very warm reception.



Playing with Dave over the years has opened the doors to a lot of wonderful places in Detroit that I would never have seen otherwise. If you get a chance to visit the Scarab Club don't pass it up - you've never seen anything like this Detroit cultural institution. And it's right across the street from the Art Institute!


I had just started learning a little about Bert Jansch when he passed away.

Here is a file for Odie.

Garrison Keillor says he'll finally stop in the spring of 2013. I would start a count down calendar but he's being coy about the specifics. He says first he has to find somebody who can muck up duets with good singers as badly as he does.

Anyway, here's some Brazillian jazz I've found lately. This is my first experiment with posting a link to a Youtube playlist.

Starlin Castro looks for something on the ground.

pix from Saturday's dog walk in Eberwhite Woods:

Hummingbird on line. I teased Joe by telling him I had this great shot of a hummingbird then showing him this where the bird is like about 12 pixels. I've seen this guy almost every time I go through the woods lately but before when the community garden was here you could sit for a few minutes and see several. They're pretty hard to pick out unless they're sitting on the wire.














I love this one. It's the only sassafras plant I've seen in Eberwhite Woods in 15 years of bushwacking. If anybody else knows where there is another sassafras plant in Eberwhite Woods I want to know.
















This is the meadow where the community garden was replaced with a detention pond, landscaping, bushes and local plants. There's a vine running wild and engulfing the grasses and the sumac.














Here is the vine. I tried dragging this image into Google Images hoping that it would magically be identified and it didn't work at all.
















Trail clearing in the woods after some big storms. This was an arch over the path until they cut it. 6 good size trees appeared to go down in one event.














Another trail clearing spot. This is actually where the tree trunk was broken 25 feet up and suspended horizontally from another tree for a year as documented in this Facebook album.














Here are some tunes to go with a walk in the woods:

Paulinho Nogueira, Sem Mais Adeus
Jean Sibelius, Idyll from the 10 Pieces Opus 24
Mily Balakirev, In the Garden

...and this addendum from the next weekend, when I was admiring the little sassafras
bushes in the shots above, this is what I would have seen if I had looked over my head:



Them're sassafras leaves. Turns out there are two main bushes about 15 feet high or so. You can see their trunks in the middle of this shot, sorry for the bad focus:

Click on the cover for a 46 Meg ZIP file of an Alvino Rey album I found at the Kiwanis Sale today. It is a nice set of ballads with orchestra and a vocal group.

Two iconic local signs that have vanished in the last few months:

When compressing classical audio files with Audacity to play in the cab, threshhold -24db, ratio 3:1, attack time 0.1 seconds seems to get good results.

"She Looked Very Pleased With Herself"

Mira swam for the first time last weekend on Saturday May 14 and I recorded this video on Sunday May 15. We have had a lot of rain and the pond is as deep and clean as it ever gets.



The Official Mira Swims Soundtrack Album is the full cuts of:

Horst Jankowski, "A Walk in the Black Forest" from a chewed up old copy of Mercury SR 60993, "The Genius of Jankowski". This takes me back to finally learning to swim at the Grand Ledge Country Club in 1965 or so.

Aram Khachaturian, "Trio for Clarinet, Violin, and Piano". This LP, Melodiya C10-08783, leapt into my hands from a bin at Encore Recordings. The performers are Rafael Bagdasarian, Victor Pikaizen, and Arnold Kaplan.

This is a Bentley, southbound on Thompson by the Fleming Administration building on Thursday. I'm thinking it's Mr. Taubman's.

Over the last couple days I have discovered THREE MORE WITCH HAZELS on Central Campus. Imagine my excitement.

Rackham Building, NW corner:
































Mendelssohn Theater, north along Fletcher:















Student Activities Building:














so here to go with this is a favorite Sandy Denny demo of Dark the Night, and here is the Propellerheads' take on Romeo and Juliet, "Star Crossed Lovers".

day after the Ides of March. Maybe that's why the film unit down on central campus for George Clooney's upcoming movie "The Ides of March" seemed to be breaking camp this afternoon. Here's the front of the Michigan League from earlier today while they still had the big lights set up.


If there's a scene in the movie of a room full of light from stained glass windows you'll know it was the League Ballroom and these big floodlights on cherrypickers outside. The real reason for picture taking was to document this year's bloom of the witch hazel by the Natural History Museum. We first saw it on the 16th but my camera batteries were dead so the photo is from today the 17th, St. Patrick's Day.

thanks to colder than expected temps today the snow, sleet and rain forecast turned out a quick 3 inches of snow and after being in the 50s this week Mira the snow dog and I got to XC ski for the fifth weekend in a row! Had the honor of doing some casual music videotaping yesterday afternoon at Dave's with an all star band: Jerry Brandell, Pete Klaver, and Ben Jansson on tenors, Dave on bari, Brian Delaney and George Bedard on guitars, and Andy and me. We were doing Lester Young, here's "Lester Leaps In":
Sad that you can't even see George.

This week's el cheapo classical special is Mozart's Quintet for Horn and String Quartet K.407. Performers are Sebastian Huber on horn and the Endres Quartet, whoever they are, from Vox DL 1000. From the notes: "Like the four Horn Concerti, it was written at the request of the composer's rather picturesque friend, the cheese-handler Ignaz Leitgeb, who was also one of the supreme virtuosos of the French Horn in Mozart's time. Mozart always treated his friend in a truly familiar and even jesting way, always inventing new practical jokes at the expense of the horn-player, who was willing to submit to any of Mozart's whims in order to receive a new composition from him." Mozart supposedly once marked the orchestra part in one of the horn concerti "Allegro" and Leitgeb's part "Adagio".


1st movement
2nd movement
3rd movement

Mira the snow dog (old picture) and I went skiing again today, this time out on Tubbs Road northwest of town at Paul and Jackie's place. Snowed harder and harder all the time we were out - I think we got more than 3 inches in just a few hours. Here is the C.P.E. Bach Cello Concerto in A WQ 172, in three movements:
I. Allegro
II. Largo
III. Allegro assai

This recording is MHS 3219, with cellist Robert Bex and an uncredited chamber orchestra conducted by Pierre Boulez. Kloppman had this record back in high school at Interlochen. It's a wonderful concerto but what always struck me was the long cadenza in the third movement. I've heard at least a couple other recordings of this piece and none has a long cadenza like this. Some performances don't have a cadenza here at all. And this cadenza quotes or at least paraphrases J.S. Bach's Partita No. 3 for Violin:

partita excerpt
cello concerto excerpt

J.S. Bach himself reused the Prelude from the Partita No. 3 in the well known Sinfonia from the Cantata No. 29.

From last weekend:

Mira the snow dog and I went cross country skiing twice this weekend, Sunday in Eberwhite Woods and Saturday at the Fox Science Preserve, formerly known as the Peters Road Gravel Quarry (a onetime local skinny dipping spot).

The parking lot was snowy and I was afraid the Charger would get stuck but a guy in a tractor with a plow I waved to on the way in pulled in behind me and plowed the lot for me! I offered him a few bucks and he waved it off, saying, "I live right down the road. All I ask is you respect the place." Cool or what?

Here for a late observance of Mozart's Birthday January 27 is "Don Giovanni", arranged for wind ensemble by Josef Triebensee, performed by the Athena Ensemble, from MHS 4544. Arrangements like this one were apparently quite popular in Mozart's time and he did some of his own.

part 1 (40 meg mp3)
part 2 (41 meg mp3)

We've got a good 5 inches of snow on the ground, haven't seen 32 degrees in a week, Mozart's birthday is coming up, Yellow Cab's ride counter turned over 3 million, my cab 60 rolled over 100k, it's been a big week. The Bell's Hopslam is out again which is the 2011 midwinter equivalent to the yearly production of Stroh's Bock back in the 70s except the Stroh's was cheap. Anyway, speaking of cheap, here are Haydn's last six piano sonatas, from MHS Orpheus LPs from the Kiwanis Sale.
Sonata No. 57
Sonata No. 58
Sonata No. 59 mvt. 1
Sonata No. 59 mvt. 2
Sonata No. 59 mvt. 3
Sonata No. 60
Sonata No. 61
Sonata No. 62 mvt. 1
Sonata No. 62 mvt. 2
Sonata No. 62 mvt. 3

Uke Chords for "Sweet Talkin' Guy" by the Chiffons . Here is a quickie version of what the chords sound like when I play'em. (The recording is in the key of 'B', these chords are in the uke key, 'G'.) Of course the problem I run into over and over with ukelele is I can figure out great chord voicings but I can't play well enough to play them in rhythm. Ukeleles are just so hard to even hang onto when you're playing!

From the ridiculous to the sublime, here is Guiomar Novaes performing selections from Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words, from Vox STPL 512.000, courtesy of the ReUse Center. The sound engineer for these recordings was Rudy Van Gelder of Blue Note Records fame.

Side 1 (27 meg MP3):

1. #1 Opus 19 #1 Sweet Remembrance
2. #6 Opus 19 #6 Venetian Gondola Song #1
3. #42 Opus 85 #6 Song of the Traveller
4. #40 Opus 85 #4 Elegie
5. #29 Opus 62 #5 Venetian Gondola Song #3
6. #30 Opus 62 #6 Spring Song

Side 2 (31 meg MP3):

1. #12 Opus 30 #6 Venetian Gondola Song #2
2. #45 Opus 102 #3 Tarantella
3. #22 Opus 53 #4 Sadness of Soul
4. #18 Opus 38 #6 Duet
5. #34 Opus 67 #4 Spinning Song
6. #25 Opus 62 #1 May Breezes
7. #20 Opus 53 #2 The Fleecy Cloud
8. #47 Opus 102 #5 The Joyous Peasant

The II-V-I Orchestra holiday show Sunday December 26 at the Creekside Grill will feature Duke Ellington's classical adaptations: Tchaikovsky's NutCracker Suite, and Grieg's Peer Gynt Suite. The second set will be our usual dance set with featured vocalists Patty O'Connor and Jim Paravantes.

The show starts at 6:30 and we anticipate a good crowd so get there early!

Here are sound files for study purposes:

Nutcracker:
track 1
track 2
track 3
track 4
track 5
track 6
track 7
track 8
track 9









Peer Gynt:
Morning Mood
In the Hall of the Mountain King
Solvejg's Song
Ase's Death
Anitra's Dance

Remember when astronomers trumpeted the discover of "dark matter"? Here from the NYT is another discovery of that magnitude. An astronomer used to live down the block from us and I loved to tease him: "Gee, you guys just discovered you know 90% less than you thought you did before. Now that's progress!"

Here is Schubert's Allegretto in c, D.915 as performed by Detroit classical pianist Edmund Battersby from MHS 4024, a Kiwanis Sale special.

I drove a gentleman home from the VA to the foot of Mt. Trashmore, the restored landfill in Riverview, Michigan. Sadly the ski lifts are gone and it is just a golf course now. Next to Riverview Highlands is this unusual building, which turned out to be transmitters for WJR.


From WJR's webpage:

"The station switched from NBC to CBS in 1935 and constructed a fifty-thousand-watt transmitter in Riverview, 16 miles south of Detroit (the 733-foot tower later fell in November of 1940 due to strong winds and was replaced with a 700-foot tower)."

The station has quite a history, but I think the late J.P. McCarthy must be spinning in his grave if he is picking up the constant pseudo-political invective that comes out of the station now.

Today's musical selection is Lalo Schifrin's Scheherazade Fantasy, from the 2001 album Intersections, thanks to Imitonios. This is a medley of themes from Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade arranged from orchestra, big band, and jazz soloists.

Big cabbie weekend for the UM-MSU football game. This may be the perfect cab trip:
I dropped off at the stadium and started to do a u-turn to go north on Main and a lady flagged me down. She jumped in the cab and told me to take her to an address on Plymouth Road, but then she said, "Wait, I don't have the keys - never mind!", handed me $5, and jumped out of the cab. I said to myself, "it doesn't get much better, people wave you down, hop in the cab, hand you money and jump back out."

Here is Andre Previn with the Shorty Rogers Orchestra from RCA Victor LPM-1146, "Lullaby of Birdland, 12 DIFFERENT Interpretations by 12 Modern Arrangers Played by 12 Exciting Jazz Groups", playing "Lullaby of Birdland". The personnel is:

Andre Previn - piano
Shorty Rogers - flugelhorn
Bob Cooper - English horn
Bud Shank - flute
Jimmy Guiffre - Baritone saxophone
Milt Bernhart - trombone
Jack Marshall - guitar
Joe Mondragon - bass
Shelly Manne - drums

the question is, who is the alto sax soloist?

Today I finally found what I was looking for at the Kiwanis Sale: a complete edition of E. Power Biggs' "Golden Age of the Organ". This 2 LP boxed set from Columbia is a tour of organs built by the master baroque organ builder Arp Schnitger in the last half of the 17th century. Biggs plays mostly Bach, and included is an informative booklet with photos and a nice essay by Biggs advocating Schnitger's organ design over that of more modern instruments, for performance of organ music from any period.

This LP was a huge influence on me. My mom was a church organist and I really liked church music. I was in the choir and my first paying job at about 12 or so was sweeping a church, where I often used to waste time playing spacey pedal chords on the piano in the empty sanctuary. At that time I was also getting acquainted with Bach fugues at Blue Lake band camp, and of course I was really into Iron Butterfly. The tiny Reed City Public Library had a small LP collection, and I remember 2 that really made an impression on me: Jefferson Airplane's "After Bathing at Baxter's" and "The Golden Age of the Organ". If you just think of organ music as stale and churchy you should really check this out.

Here is a scan from the booklet with our new scanner/printer and:
Johann Sebastian Bach - Prelude and Fugue in D Minor Number 2
Bach - selections from the Anna Magdalena Notebook
Bach - "Fanfare" Fugue in C major
Bach - Antonio Vivaldi - Concerto in D Minor "l'estro harmonico", arranged for organ by J.S. Bach.

Labor Day Camp 2010 was last weekend at Camp Skyline and it was a big success. However, contrary to popular belief, the hill behind the lodge with the USGS topo marker at the top is NOT the highest point in Lapeer County!! Here are images from online top maps.

Camp Skyline, near Hough Road at Sandhill Road, Almont, Michigan:




Mount Christie, near Davison Lake Road at Baldwin Road, Metamora, Michigan:




topo images from Topoquest.com

Lately when I'm driving the cab my lunch of choice is 2 Burger King Spicy Chicken Crisp sandwiches, with no mayo, add lettuce and pickles. $2.12, reasonably filling and tasty, and not very sloppy to eat on the road. Picked by McFat's Blog! as the Best Value Menu Item. The other day down by Monroe I picked up a couple and was headed back up I-275 when I realized there was an extra sandwich in the bag. At first this seemed like a pleasant surprise. But when I started to unwrap the sandwich it was really heavy and sloppy with sauce, and I'm not sure what it was, some kind of chicken I think, but I decided it would be a bad idea to eat it so I got rid of it.


Here is one of today's Kiwanis Sale specials, Mozart's Trio in Eb Major K. 498 for Piano, Clarinet, and Viola, the "KegelStatt Trio", which was supposedly composed during a party at a bowling alley.


And here is Beethoven's Little Trio in Bb, WoO.39, for Piano, Violin, and Cello. Again according to the liner notes, this one-movement trio was dedicated to Maximiliane Brentano. She was the daughter of some close friends, and the notes tell us that once when Beethoven was visiting she "unexpectedly poured a bottle of ice-cold water over his head." Both these are from MHS 963, "Mozart and Beethoven: Clarinet Trios", for which I paid ten cents.

Two Beethoven String Trios from the Opus 9:

Number 1 in G
Number 3 in c

Jascha Heifetz, violin
William Primrose, viola
Gregor Piatigorsky, cello
RCA Victor LM-2186, lp rip by yours truly from another Kiwanis Club special.

I thought I heard the tail end of an NPR report that estimated the BP oil gusher rate in olympic swimming pools. Rather than look up the news story I did my own estimate.

A minimum size olympic pool holds 2,500,000 liters of water according to Wikipedia. I've still looking for an official number. An oil barrel is 158 liters, so an OSP is 15,700 oil barrels. The BP oil gusher rate is currently estimated at 35,000 to 60,000 barrels a day, or 2.2 to 3.8 OSPs a day. This has gone up recently because they cut the top off the broken pipe.

Here is the NPR story. Illustration is from the Christian Science Monitor.

Here are some Dizzy Gillespie tunes we'll be doing on June 27 at the Creekside:

One Bass Hit -part 2
Our Delight
Ray's Idea
That's Earl Brother

These are originally from Savoy MG-12020. They were reissued very nicely on CD with a facsimile of the original cover in 1992 as SV-0152. I of course got this at Encore.

Dizzy Gillespie - Groovin' High (Savoy MG 12020)
5500 That's Earl, Brother
Dave Burns, Talib Daawud, Dizzy Gillespie, John Lynch, Ray Orr (tp) Leon Comegys, Charles Greenlea, Al Moore (tb) John Brown, Howard Johnson (as) Ray Abrams, Warren Lucky (ts) Pee Wee Moore (bars) Milt Jackson (p) Ray Brown (b) Kenny Clarke (d) Alice Roberts (vo)
NYC, June 10, 1946
5550 Our Delight
Dave Burns, Talib Daawud, Kenny Dorham, Dizzy Gillespie, John Lynch, Elmon Wright (tp) Leon Comegys, Alton "Slim" Moore, Gordon Thomas (tb) Howard Johnson, Sonny Stitt (as) Ray Abrams, Warren Lucky (ts) Leo Parker (bars) Milt Jackson (vib) John Lewis (p) Ray Brown (b) Kenny Clarke (d) Alice Roberts (vo)
NYC, July 9, 1946
5609 One Bass Hit, Pt. 2
5610 Ray's Idea
Dave Burns, Dizzy Gillespie, John Lynch, Matthew McKay, Elmon Wright (tp) Taswell Baird, Al Moore, Gordon Thomas (tb) John Brown, Scoops Carey (as) Bill Frazier, James Moody (ts) Pee Wee Moore (bars) Milt Jackson (vib) John Lewis (p) Ray Brown (b) Joe Harris (d) Kenny Hagood (vo)
NYC, November 12, 1946

I'm still looking for my copy of a couple of the bass parts. If I find them I'll put them up; Dave isn't giving me new copies because he says, probably correctly, that he's given them to me a couple of times before. Harsh.

Here's the head to "Ray's Idea" according to some Jamey Aebersold page:

A couple of days ago in the cab I picked up a gentleman from Mexico, attending a symposium on radiation measurement. Making conversation in my usual mindless manner, I said, "I don't know much about Mexico and I don't speak Spanish but I've enjoyed in translation the novels of a famous Mexican author, Carlos Fuentes." The gentleman replied, "I know him. I used to work for him when he was an Ambassador."

3 more Beethoven piano sonatas, performed by Wilhelm Kempff, in MP3 format of bad LP rips by yours truly.


Sonata No. 1 in f Opus 2 No. 1 (25 meg MP3)
Sonata No. 5 in c Opus 10 No. 1 (25 meg MP3)
Sonata No. 6 in F Opus 10 No. 2 (18 meg MP3)

Allatime I'm seeing these signs at the haircut places that say "Get Your Hair Cut to Sop Up the Oil Spill!!":


So now I'm reading that they aren't using hair to sop up the oil spill. Imagine how that makes me feel! Before and After:



Beethoven, Piano Sonata number 2 in A, Opus 2, number 2. 32 meg Mp3. Wilhelm Kempff. Bad LP rip. Need I say more?

Debbie and I went for a walk in Eberwhite Woods on Mother's Day to look at wildflowers. I put the photo album on Facebook, but here are a few pix of wildflowers I could use help identifying. There' a bunch of different kinds of trilliums, it turns out. And here is an mp3 of Walter Gieseking doing Beethoven's Piano Sonata Number 18. As always it is a lofi, noisy LP rip from a Kiwanis Sale Angel LP.

Wildflower pix: