Jazz with Jerry Brabenec

2012-01-15T15:02:00.013-05:00

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.

2011-10-23T09:53:00.004-04:00

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.

2011-10-09T12:50:00.002-04:00

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.

2011-08-24T06:05:00.002-04:00

Starlin Castro looks for something on the ground.

2011-06-13T05:38:00.014-04:00

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:

2011-06-04T20:13:00.006-04:00

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:

2011-05-28T11:11:00.002-04:00

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.

2011-05-20T23:07:00.005-04:00

"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.

2011-04-22T21:09:00.002-04:00

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

2011-03-24T21:18:00.008-04:00

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".

2011-03-17T21:14:00.009-04:00

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.

2011-02-20T17:25:00.002-05:00

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

2011-02-06T00:04:00.005-05:00

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.

2011-01-31T05:35:00.005-05:00

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)

2011-01-15T19:12:00.006-05:00

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

2011-01-08T15:38:00.005-05:00

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

2010-12-11T12:43:00.008-05:00

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

2010-11-11T04:16:00.004-05:00

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.

2010-10-29T05:32:00.005-04:00

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.

2010-10-10T21:39:00.003-04:00

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?

2010-09-12T01:56:00.005-04:00

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.

2010-09-09T21:15:00.005-04:00

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

2010-08-28T17:58:00.004-04:00

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.

2010-08-22T00:57:00.003-04:00

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.

2010-06-20T10:50:00.002-04:00

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.

2010-06-07T21:48:00.005-04:00

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:

2010-05-30T12:44:00.005-04:00

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)

2010-05-22T11:36:00.007-04:00

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?

2010-05-15T23:16:00.008-04:00

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:

2010-05-05T05:32:00.004-04:00

Ernie Harwell, 1918-2010

from left, Howard Stitzel, George Kell, Ernie Harwell, 1961. Image courtesy of "Guy Incognito", MotownSports.com

I learned a couple of things about Ernie today. Current Tigers radio announcer Dan Dickerson read part of a poem that inspired Ernie's strikeout line, "He stood there like the house by the side of the road and watched that one go by". The poem is "The House by the Side of the Road" by Sam Walter Foss. And Ernie would quote the song of Solomon when he talked about spring and the baseball season starting and "the voice of the turtle is heard in the land", which means a turtledove. I don't think I ever heard him explain that.

2010-04-18T21:37:00.002-04:00

Stuff We Played Saturday Night

Johnny McGlaughlin - My Foolish Heart
John Coltrane - The Night Has A Thousand Eyes
Charles Mingus - Haitian Fight Song
Hank Mobley - This I Dig of You
Kenny Burrell - Chitlins con Carne

2010-03-31T21:58:00.009-04:00

Mozart in 5/4?

The rather skeezy looking Kiwanis Sale LP is London CM 9061, Mozart Piano Quartets K.478 in g and K.493 in Eb, performed by pianist Clifford Curzon and members of the Amadeus Quartet. The liner notes by Robert Boas contain this intriguing note about the first movement of K.478:

"...a theme in 5/4 time (not so written in the score) appears, to which Mr. Eric Blom has drawn attention..."

A theme in 5 would seem very unusual in Mozart, so what is this theme, and who is this Eric Blom guy?

Here is the Piano Quartet No. 1 in g, K.478, and may this be the worst LP rip you ever hear:

I. Allegro
II. Andante
III. Rondo (Allegro)

Well this morning I dug up the LP cover again and decided to find out who Eric Blom is.

Blom was a noted English music lexicographer, having edited the 5th edition of Grove's. Anyway, I went to MIRLYN to see if they had any works of Blom at the University of Michigan here in Ann Arbor, and I found his book on Mozart, and it is AVAILABLE ONLINE!

Here is a passage from the score that looked like it might be the one, just because when you hear it in passing it seems to go over the bar lines. It starts right at rehearsal letter "C":

Here is Blom's commentary:

Pretty amazing to be able to dig something like that up in 10 minutes or so, on the PC in my basement, at 5 in the morning!

2010-03-28T16:47:00.002-04:00

Here is more Mozart keyboard music from the Walter Gieseking recordings on Seraphim.

6 Minuets K.1-5 and K.94

12 Variations in C K.265 on "Ah! Vous Dirai-Je, Maman"

Suite in the Style of Handel

Sonata in A K.331 (including the "Turkish Rondo")

Sonata in Eb K.282

Minuet in D K.355

Fantasia in c K.475

2010-03-16T21:37:00.007-04:00

The band played tonight at the Music Hall Jazz Cafe in Detroit. Here are a couple of pix, in a small size because they are very fuzzy. It is a beautiful little jazz bar, very posh and intimate, and apparently situated where the concession stand once was, a few steps down from the main lobby of the beautiful Music Hall.

2010-03-10T21:31:00.012-05:00

Questions from cab driving today:

1) saw a kid in a T-shirt that said "Proud to be a Flying Pig Grunt". I told my next fare I was curious about the shirt and she said, "Oh, no, you don't want to know", but she didn't know anything about it. Turns out it's a volunteer's shirt for the Cincinnati Flying Pig Marathon.

2) I was telling everybody I saw the first forsythia blossoms of spring by the Ruthven Museums Building loading dock entrance. Later I was able to stop and snap a couple of pictures with my digital camera:

...and I said to myself, "this isn't a forsythia!" I mentioned this shortly after to a regular I picked up at a campus watering hole, and that I had to find out what the plant was. He got on his cell phone, and I heard:

"Hi, this cab driver wants to know what the flowering bush by the Ruthven loading dock is...stringy yellow blossoms...witch hazel? Ok, thanks."

So I asked who he was talking to and he told me it was the Chief Under Secretary of the University of Michigan Ministry of Grounds and Horticulture (or something like that). You just have to ask the right person.

Witch Hazel Update, 3/11/2010:

Today I found another witch hazel, at one of Ann Arbor's most prominent homes, the Christian Eberbach House.

Last word on the Natural History Museum witch hazel:

Hi Jerry,

The one you were looking at is actually a hybrid variety called Arnold Promise (Hamamelis x intermedia ‘Arnold Promise’). There is another variety planted right by called Diane. It has more of a copper colored flower and usually comes out a little later. With our temperatures it should be popping any day. These particular plants are always one of the first things on campus to flower in the spring and so they do catch your attention. I’m glad they catch your.

Kenn Rapp, LLA, ASLA
University Landscape Architect
The University of Michigan

I just emailed a query from the U of M Landscape Architecture "contact us" page, so I don't have the text of the email I sent. Thanks, Kenn!

p.s. a great online resource for viewing these shrubs is at the University of Delaware Botanic Gardens page...

2010-03-07T17:59:00.002-05:00

This weekend's find at the Kiwanis Sale is Seraphim ID-6047, Mozart Complete Music for Piano Solo, volume 1. The pianist is Walter Gieseking. 4 LPs, mono, just the way I like'em, for $3.

Gieseking is pretty interesting. He lived and performed in Germany through WWII and was not able to fully resume his international concert career until '53 or so. He was famous for his powers of musical memorization and concentration. He would prepare to perform a piece by studying the score and memorizing it, spending almost no time actually practicing the piano. In light of this I thought his comments on playing Mozart in the liner notes were interesting so I asked Joe to type them out for me:

This may sound paradoxical, but my opinion about Mozart's piano music is described best when I say that it is at the same time the most easy and the most difficult music to play correctly.

On the one side, it requires practically no particular effort. It is completely natural and easy to play Mozart. On the other side, it might be called very difficult for a musician to attain the stage at which technical command, musical feelings and all the mental and psychic faculties are so harmoniously coordinated that the fingers obey with the necessary amount of security the impulses of expression suggested by the natural flow and enchanting beauty of Mozart's melodic lines.

Of course, when I say "no particular effort," this means that the complete concentration on the task of performing a composition is taken for granted as the condition sine qua non, and that the utmost attention is given to every detail of technique, musical value and mood of expression, at every moment and without interruption. But not every composer makes it so easy (this is, of course, my personal feeling) to proceed from this concentration to the - shall I call it blessed and happy? - state of communion or identity, or at least the illusion of identity between composer and performer.

To Mozart, music must have been as normal and as instinctively natural as breathing. The easiness and perfection of his composing places his works above human frailty, above earthly laboriousness; makes them something that one is compelled to call superhuman, or metaphysical, or, simply, nature's beauty transcribed into sound!

Now the musician trying to recreate Mozart's inspirations to the fullest possible extent for his listeners must be also, as far as possible, above not only all technical problems, but also above the need of speculation, reflection, or any kind of cerebral work. There must not be any calculation of possible effects and a priori idea of interpretation.

The simple, natural beauty of Mozart's music which covers, in spite of this apparent simplicity (or shall we call it the masterful economy of a true genius?), such a wide range of emotion and expression, must be recreated in the simplest, most natural way, with no aim nor incentive than the feeling of admiration and, perhaps, happiness that springs out of such wonderful music.

I may confess that in the few works which were part of my concert repertoire before I made these recordings, the works which I should have known better than all the others, I experienced some difficulties. Having lost the complete freshness of approach, I could not immediately return to the spontaneous and inspiring pleasure, and the independence of feeling, which were such a great help in all the music that I had read and studied just enough to be well acquainted with every detail.

Mozart is technically no problem to sensitive fingers, to fingers that are accustomed to translating into sound the impulses given by the inner ear, fingers which know how to sing and breathe naturally in connection with the piano keys.

The listener may decide how far I was able to achieve my, or rather, Mozart's intentions. In any case, I hop that my recording will convey to others some of the spontaneous pleasure and deep joy that came to me out of Mozart's music.

Technically, I may mention that I scarcely touched the right pedal, because this device had not been invented, or was only so recently adapted to some pianos when Mozart wrote his music, that I feel he conceived piano music without taking the possibilities of the new pedal effects into consideration. The fuller sounding arpeggios or chords are held over with the fingers, often as long as the harmony doesn't change, this being the original meaning of playing legatissimo.

But let me repeat that these technical details are not the result of speculation or historical studies, though European experts confirmed my suspicion that Mozart used pianos without the pedal which we now call the right pedal. My desire for utmost clarity, which I felt was necessary for correct Mozart playing, was the compelling for playing without pedal; or, to be more precise, to use the right pedal only without making it conspicuous, without producing any pedal effects. To my ears, even one single note sounds different when it is played with pedal (with raised dampers), the resonance of all the strings tuned to overtones or to the tones of the same chord giving something veiled, something romantically overcharged (I won't say impure) to even a single, isolated note.

A pure, clear tone is not dry, even if it may seem so at first to ears accustomed to plenty of pedal. And I am not personally convinced that clarity of tone and beautiful expression are not incompatible just as the perfection of the classical form does not diminish the power of a composer's deepest feelings.

I'm going to post more music from this but for now here is the Kleiner Trauermarsch k453a, written according to the liner notes as an entry in the autograph album of Babette Ployer.

2010-03-03T21:32:00.003-05:00

open testimonial email from Jerry to WCBN:

From: jbrabenec@comcast.net
Subject: WCBN: always there when I need something completely different
Date: March 3, 2010 8:49:20 PM GMT-05:00
To: testimonials@wcbn.org

Hi.

I listen to WCBN for great reggae, country and western, blues, and jazz with collector-performer DJs who invest their lives in the music they broadcast.

I listen to WCBN for historic absurdities like broadcasting "It's My Party" to lament the election of Ronald Reagan (it helps to have Czech ancestry to appreciate absurdity). WCBN is a goldmine of absurdity.

I listen to WCBN to hear some students who really care about it yell about a U of M hockey game.

I listen to WCBN to hear local music.

I listen to WCBN to see what it will do that nobody else does.

I listen to WCBN to see what it can become.

There are other more prominent "free" radio stations in the country (think WFMU), but conquering the world is exactly NOT the point. A place to hear what local broadcasters can contribute is the point. Every town should have a WCBN.

- Jerry

Now write yours and send it to testimonials@wcbn.org

2010-03-03T05:27:00.003-05:00

THIS JUST IN...

Temblor Tilts Earth by Inches

By GAUTAM NAIK

The earthquake that struck Chile was so powerful it shifted the planet's axis enough to make it spin slightly faster, meaning our days will be shorter by 1.26 millionths of a second, according to preliminary calculations by scientists at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

"This is an esoteric effect that physics says has to happen," notes David Kerridge, the British Geological Survey's head of natural hazards, who studies earthquakes. "It's interesting, but it has no particular consequence on anything."

2010-02-17T21:35:00.000-05:00

LINDSEY WON THE DOWNHILL!!

2010-02-14T01:58:00.002-05:00

Watched some of the 2010 Winter Olympics opening ceremony. I was reminded of this famous Molson ad:

2010-02-11T20:24:00.002-05:00

Just to show how clueless I am, a couple of symbols that I often wondered about driving about in my cab:

This is the Service Flag, now more commonly known as the Service Banner, displayed by the families of members of the U.S. armed forces in harms way. Blue stars are for family members on active duty "in harm's way", gold stars are for family members who died in service. I felt pretty ignorant not to know that. No links on this topic because finding an authoritative reference will take some time.

This one is the flag of South Carolina. There are many variants.

2010-02-06T14:00:00.009-05:00

**update 2/22/2010 the rock is gone. Bye-bye, rock!

Here are exclusive pics of the BIG ROCK that appeared last week when an old apartment building at approximately 980 Maiden Lane was demolished, rubble removed, and the lot graded. The pictures were taken with an old Olympus D380 digital camera that I picked up at the Kiwanis Sale for $5 this morning along with some Mozart string duos and some Purcell Fantasias for Viols.

In this shot my tracfone is resting on the rock for scale. That sucker must be close to 7 feet high!!

Of course Deb wants it in our front yard. If it is there long enough next week I'll scrub off part of it to see if I can tell if it is igneous, sedimentary, or metaphoric. My guess is that it is a Canadian glacial erratic, granite or something similar.

As musical accompaniment as one regards the BIG ROCK here is the "Fantasia upon One Note, 5 Voices, in F Major" of Henry Purcell. This comes from the LP MHS 1767, Henry Purcell: The Fantasias for Viols. The performers are the Concentus Musicus, directed by Nikolaus Harnoncourt. Denis Stevens tells us in the liner notes that the piece is "so called because the middle part sustains the note known as middle C throughout the composition". Think of the middle C as a BIG ROCK.

To go with the music and the pictures enjoy a Bell's Hopslam, a very strong seasonal brew with a prominent grapefruit-like tang. This stuff is expensive but you can pick up a single bottle at Arbor Farms Market for $3.25 or so. It's worth a try. I wouldn't serve it real cold, it's got a lot of flavor. The glass, by the way, is a souvenir from a local venue where the big band had a long presence.

2010-01-27T21:12:00.003-05:00

For Mozart's birthday (he would have been 254) here is the "Turkish Rondo" performed on an antique keyboard with special "Turkish" add-ons.

The recording is from my cruddy old cassette copy of a CD from the AADL:

"Keyboard collection" [sound recording] : virginal, spinet, clavichord, harpsichord, chamber organ, historic pianos
Author Burnett, Richard.
Published Badminton, Gloucestershire : Amon Ra Records ;
New York : Qualiton Imports, distributor, c1982.

2009-12-19T03:17:00.003-05:00

Here are the files that have been requested for the upcoming show.

file 1

file 2

file 3

file 4

file 5

file 6

file 7

file 8

file 9

Sorry for being so mysterious.

2009-12-03T20:34:00.002-05:00

Orange Door Hinge plays Friday, December 11 at the Club Above. This will be some pretty serious funk music.

2009-11-22T11:14:00.001-05:00

They in it which discovers quickly got an injustice with the first time the thing: Toledo is incorrect and always to belonging in Michigan.

2009-10-18T21:59:00.002-04:00

I flipped on the tube just before leaving for my big band rehearsal tonite and was shocked to hear that 3 runners had collapsed and died during the Detroit Free Press/Flagstar Marathon.

I'm thinking of the families and friends, and how difficult a loss this must be to bear, and I pray for them.

The three men were all running the half marathon, according to the official race results site at Active.com. Almost 7000 people finished the race today. Millions probably finish comparable events every year, so this tragedy is very unusual.

As a two time finisher of the Detroit Free Press Marathon I can attest to the excellent support and organization of the event. It's a world class marathon.

Why do people run, anyway? Well, I'll tell you. It's because running is a primal human activity, something we've been doing thousands of years more than we've been blogging, working nine-to-five, or making tools, for that matter. When you go run, for whatever reason, and whatever you make of it personally, you're getting back to real basics and real life, with all its risks and rewards.

We should take running seriously as I'm sure these men did. Sometimes the stress test of a race reveals physical conditions that can go years undetected otherwise. Perhaps in a wellness-oriented system of health care this could have been avoided. Perhaps not.

That said, I keep thinking of the friends and families of these three men. I'm so very sorry for this terrible loss.

- Jerry

2009-04-05T10:42:00.004-04:00

John McLaughlin / Chick Corea Five Peace Band
Hill Auditorium, Ann Arbor
Saturday April 4 2009

Jazz/Rock Fusion is a much maligned musical genre, for which some of the blame must be laid at Chick Corea's door for his "Hymn of the Seventh Galaxy" dreck. But the Corea/McLaughlin Five Peace Band had a cohesion and spirit that Joe Lovano's recent show, for example, did not approach.

Back in the 80s at a Detroit concert of McLaughlin's Shakti band, the acoustic Indian ensemble was buzzing along and everytime McLaughlin cut loose with another bristling virtuoso acoustic guitar run, a member of the audience behind me would yell out, "DEAL wid'it!" There was a little less of the guitar hero gunslinger mood this time around. But McLaughlin writes small group arrangements with a wonderful combination of primal rock and blues vamps, time shifts, suspended and exotic harmonies, and intricate unison lines that sound really fun to play. He combines great vamps and great licks. And he LOVES to trade fours, or sometimes fours/twos/ones/2 beats/1 beats/eighth notes/sixteenth notes...

The heart of the band is the cross generational connection between McLaughlin and bassist Christian McBride. Just watching them comp behind other solos was entertaining. McLaughlin, 67, has a slender, hawkish, silver haired profile, and McBride, 36, is a muscular, shaved headed black man with a sunny, expressive stage presence. The rich contrast is something to enjoy. They were having a lot of fun.

The other side of Fusion music is the inclusion of classical influences. Corea's suite, "Hymn to Andromeda", represented this aspect of fusion with abstract melodic motifs and sounds produced from inside the concert grand. Mostly Chick filled a supporting role, filling in harmonies and accenting with the bass and drums.

During the first number Corea had an entertaining gesticulated dialogue with the sound crew in the wings. He finally stood up, turned to them and pointed up in the air with both arms to make his point. Later during somebody else's solo he walked over and appeared to make up with them. Our seats were main floor center 7th row, so for us the mix favored the bass, drums and sax. The guitar and keyboard went out through the mains which weren't really directed at us. The balance seemed to improve during the concert. At least overamplification wasn't a problem as it can be with fusion music, especially in Hill.

The most distinguished alumni of the Ann Arbor based II-V-I Orchestra, Kenny Garrett has a true, powerful alto sound and his solos spurred the energy of the rhythm section and the crowd.

Drummer Brian Blades was very busy most of the time, grinning, laughing, hunching over and launching witty and bombastic fills. But what struck me was the restraint and precision of his playing when he was backing up bassist Christian McBride's stunning solos. In a band of virtuosos, McBride topped everybody, if only because it looks so hard to fly around the neck of an acoustic bass like that.

McLaughlin reminisced about a picture of John and Miles from 1970 in Ann Arbor. There was a little much of mutual admiration in the early introductions, but from the standing ovation that greeted their taking the stage, John and Chick seemed to appreciate the crowd.

For this reviewer, the concert reaffirmed that jazz fusion was the music of my times. Great show.

Here for a taste of John McLaughlin's artistry is his tune "Trilogy", recorded at the 1988 Montreux/Detroit Jazz Festival. This features bassist Jonas Hellborg and percussionist Trilok Gurtu. I recorded it off the live WDET/WEMU radio broadcast and later transferred from cassette to digital. For me this always brings back memories of a rainy day in Teton National Park, driving out to Moose in my brother's beat up Mazda. Enjoy!

2009-02-15T17:29:00.004-05:00

Played last night at the Washtenaw Country Club. The conversation turned to the tune "I've Got News for You", credited to Ray Alfred, most notably recorded by Ray Charles. Here is the Edgar Winter's White Trash version, and for good measure their song "Keep Playin' That Rock'n'Roll".

2009-01-24T14:34:00.006-05:00

Jerry's sci-fi reading list:

Philip K. Dick: VALIS (1981), Radio Free Albemuth, etc.

Dick's stories are the basis for the movies "Blade Runner", "Total Recall", and "Minority Report".

Dick is the Sun Ra of science fiction: prolific, original, influential, but also sort of sloppy. Dick is a master of plots that subvert reality. In "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" a policeman chases renegade androids who are indistinguishable from real people. In "Total Recall" characters buy artificially implanted memories of dream vacations instead of the real thing.

Much of his best writing is in his short stories, but the VALIS trilogy is his greatest accomplishment. In these novels an alien satellite orbiting Earth transmits signals to an Orange County science fiction writer in an attempt to awaken and free humanity from the illusory, Nixonian dictatorship in which we are all trapped. These books have autobiographical elements - Dick once experienced a near mental breakdown during which he learned that his son had a painful undiagnosed medical condition that was later confirmed by doctors. The revelation he experiences is rooted in early Christian gnosticism, and Dick makes this subject fascinating.

Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon the Deep (Hugo winner), Marooned in Realtime, etc.

Vernor Vinge has been around forever. His short story "Bookworm, Run" was published in 1966. I read it in an Analog SciFi anthology I bought at Interlochen while attending All State Intermediate Band Camp in the summer of 1971. It's about a chimpanzee named Norman who's given a computer interface in a secret military lab in an abandoned copper mine in Michigan's UP. He memorizes all the information on the military computer network then flees, fearing punishment.

Vinge's novels "A Fire Upon the Deep" and "A Deepness in the Sky" are space operas first and foremost, very enjoyable to read, with heroes, villains, spaceships, exotic aliens, and lots of drama. He's an old master.

William Gibson: Neuromancer (Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick award winner), Count Zero, Virtual Light, etc.

This 1984 book is considered the first major cyberpunk novel. Cyberpunk is the SciFi school whose writers invest the virtual reality of cyberspace with the cynicism and criminal attitude of noir detective novels. Gibson is quite the prose stylist and is well known for namedropping trademarks from the computer tech, media, and fashion worlds into his near future world to add realism.

In Gibson's near future transnational companies and machine intelligences employ computer cowboy internet hackers and secret agent ninjas in ruthless corporate conflict. His main characters are drifting freelance consultants combining the skills of computer hackers, spies, and special forces operatives or they are castoffs from the lower rungs of society trying to cope with the rapidly changing world.

In his later books Gibson is a bit the victim of his own success - his plots get a little thin and his writing style a little precious, but he's still really good and his influence is enormous.

Jack Womack: Random Acts of Senseless Violence, Heathern, Ambient, Terraplane, Elvissey, and Going, Going, Gone

Jack Womack's fiction is highly influenced by the works of Charles Fort, the early 20th century researcher of paranormal phenomena. The above six novels comprise the "Dryco" series, in which a sinister corporation takes over a chaotic, violent America after a financial crash in the early 2000s. Researchers for the corporation travel to an alternate Earth and a 1950s United States that is a grimly racist and fascist version of ours.

His focus is on the depiction of bent societies, his characters' attempts to cope, and their unique languages. These are consistently dark and violent books.

Womack invents systems of slang rather as Anthony Burgess did in "A Clockwork Orange". In "Random Acts" the language evolves from schoolgirl diary confession to ghetto gangster slang as a New York City family's life collapses. In "Terraplane" a clipped, condensed conversational shorthand is infused with Russian slang. In "Ambient" the language of a community of underground mutants in New York is super Goth, Byronesque.

Neal Stephenson: Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, Cryptonomicon, etc.

Snow Crash (1992) is widely considered the most influential SciFi novel since Neuromancer. Originally conceived as a graphic novel, it's the story of a virus that spreads simultaneously as a drug in the real world and as a computer virus in cyberspace. The main characters are a high-tech skateboard riding courier and a computer hacker/ninja. The setting is a near future LA that is fragmented into balkanized communities. As the real world becomes more and more hostile, people spend more of their time immersed in the networked virtual reality of the MetaVerse. As Stephenson says, in the near future the only things Americans excel at are pop music, computer code, and delivering a pizza in 30 minutes.

Stephenson's "The Diamond Age" is even better, I think. It's about a young girl from a broken family in the near future who is raised and educated by a subversive interactive children's book that molds her into the leader of a social revolution.

"Cryptonomicon" is very impressive in a different way. It's a massive novel with two parallel story lines, one about a theoretical mathematician's adventures in crypography and special ops during World War II, and the other about his grandson, a California computer guy involved in the search for World War II gold caches in the Philippines.

Charles Stross: Iron Sunrise, Accelerando, Singularity Sky, etc.

Stross is Scottish. I first read Stross on Infinity Plus, a UK SciFi website.

He's contemporary and prolific. He has a nice webpage at Charlie's Place.

His prose reads clean and fast. It's spontaneous and humorous. It's also dense - he doesn't explain passing references much so you're skating on thin ice sometimes as far as knowing what he's talking about goes. That doesn't bother me, I like Thomas Pynchon too.

A lot of his fiction is based in the next hundred years, but he anticipates enormous change in everyday life as people interface ever more seamlessly with computer networks. He's dystopian in that Vernor Vinge's "Singularity" theory shapes his concept of the future. This is the idea that machine intelligence and capabilities could soon outrun human understanding, rendering humanity obsolete.

2009-01-11T10:28:00.003-05:00

Friday happy hour, as a snow storm engulfed Ann Arbor, I performed with Orange Door Hinge at the Old Heidelberg. ODH is a 10 piece horn and rhythm band playing 70s cop show themes, disco and funk instrumentals. Among the selections we performed was Frank Zappa's "Sofa", as arranged by Ed Palermo, who was nice enough to email us his charts as performed on his album T.E.P.B.B.P.T.M.O.F.Z.. Here is a low rent mp3 rip of Sofa #1, from my rather chewed up copy of the Zappa/Mothers 1977 album "Zappa in New York". Actually this is the whole LP side including the "Black Page" medley, in a 19 meg MP3 file.

Terry Bozzio - drums
Patrick O'Hearn - bass
Eddie Jobson - keyboards
Ray White - rhythm guitar, vocals
Ruth Underwood - percussion
David Samuels - percussion
Randy Brecker - trumpet
Mike Brecker - tenor sax, flute
Lou Marini - alto sax, flute
Ronnie Cuber - baritone sax, clarinet
Tom Malone - trombone, trumpet, piccolo

John Bergamo - percussion overdubs
Ed Mann - percussion overdubs

2008-11-01T18:13:00.002-04:00

My black lab ran down the path and I stepped from the soccer field into Eberwhite Woods, engulfed in the golden yellow of autumn maples. I've been cab driving long hours during football season and hadn't taken my regular walk with Mira for a few weeks.

There were new deadfalls in the woods. Down where the path is a wooden boardwalk, a fallen treetop used to impale the hillside like a hand palm down with bony fingers plunged into the soil. Looks like another dead tree fell across it and smashed the whole thing to earth.

Up the hill just south of the upper pond there was a fallen tree, the trunk suspended above the ground at one end where the trunk fractured seven or eight feet up. My son and I walked on that trunk for years while Mira ran around below us but today the trunk lay flat on the ground, chainsawed into sections.

The woods are calm and still, and a daily walk or run is uneventful, but all around are landmarks of sudden destruction.

These landmarks in turn take on a deceptive permanence.

For Dave, here on Mediafire is the Curtis Fuller album "Bones & Bari", a 1957 quintet date on Bluenote with little known Detroit baritone saxophonist Tate Houston.

2008-07-28T20:35:00.004-04:00

I had a real treat last week performing at Zingerman's Roadhouse with
5 Guys Named Moe, subbing for their regular bassist Erin. There was a tune in their book (thanks for the book, Erin!) called Tuttles, so maybe the tune above is it. I found it on an interesting site called The Session.

The main reason for this post is because I have been putting off re-upping the Raybeat's "It's Only A Movie". Here it is on Mediafire. Enjoy!

2008-07-05T13:01:00.003-04:00

Click on the Bud Powell pic for a WinRAR archive of the Bud Powell Trio at Massey Hall in Toronto, May 15, 1953. Along with the quintet recordings from the same concert, my pick as the greatest live jazz recordings ever made.

The sound quality is really awful and four of the trio tunes are actually a session from New York with George Duvivier and Art Taylor, according to the Jazz Discography Project.

But you can hear what's happening, with the musicians muttering and calling to each other, a crazy sounding crowd, and a performance by this pickup band that is absolutely telepathic. It's like a cryptic, condensed interstellar transmission of jazz DNA.

My favorite thing is the misterioso intro to "My Heart Stood Still".

Upcoming gigs:

Wednesday July 9 at Zingerman's Roadhouse with the Treetown Swingtette.
Wednesday July 23 at Zingerman's Roadhouse with Five Guys Named Moe.
Thursday July 24 in Canton with the II-V-I Orchestra.
Sunday July 27 at the Creekside with the II-V-I Orchestra.
Thursday August 14 somewhere in downtown Chelsea with Trio Indigo.
BTW I posted the Bud Powell tunes on Megaupload but when I went to test the link I got pictures of "girls to date in Ann Arbor" on the download page so I switched to Mediafire.

2008-03-29T14:59:00.003-04:00

For a gig this evening at an Ann Arbor church, here is a quick PDF piano chart to Ellington's The Mooche.

2007-07-15T12:01:00.000-04:00

Back from a trip to Colorado. I'll be performing with Andy Sacks' Trio Indigo at the Taubman Center "Gift of Art" concert series at noon on Thursday, July 19. More Info here.

2007-05-09T05:41:00.000-04:00

An Alarming Development: Garlic Mustard in my backyard! Local efforts have been pretty successful in eliminating this stuff from the 20 acre woods over by my kid's school, but look at this! Mean looking, isn't it. Supposedly you can make salad out of it.
On an unrelated subject, here for reference is an MP3 of Glenn Miller's version of "Kalamazoo".

2007-02-23T23:27:00.000-05:00

My mind is grappling with the concept of half price day old Pazckis.

2007-02-06T01:13:00.000-05:00

The II-V-I Orchestra rhythm section will appear at Cranesbill Books in Chelsea, Michigan on Friday February 16 at 7:30. This is free and open to
the public.

Or if any of you are lucky enough to occasionally schmooze with the Chelsea, Michigan Chamber of Commerce, you're in for a treat next Thursday because Trio Indigo will be providing tasteful background music at their Annual Meeting at the Chelsea Comfort Inn, Thursday February 15 at 5 pm.

Did you notice that up above - the II-V-I Orchestra now was a WEB PAGE!! I've just been getting the basics up there and am anxious for some feedback. We already have a couple of MP3s, our schedule, and contact info. I'm thinking about putting up a separate blog for the Orchestra, if only because it would boost us in the web browsers...

Finally a minor musical goodie, "Nothing to Lose", a melancholy bossa for Claudine Longet from Henry Mancini's soundtrack to the 1968 film, "The Party". I got this off the web but I can't remember where and I may have to repost the whole soundtrack album because I like it almost as much as "The Pink Panther". Here are PDFs of the sheet music to this nice little tune from the "Henry Mancini Songbook", courtesy of the AADL: page 1, page 2, page 3, page 4.

2007-01-25T12:51:00.000-05:00

I'd have to say my two passions are playing jazz and distance running. My brother and I have been comparing notes on Google Gmaps Pedometer, a web based route mapping and measuring utility that incorporates detailed streetmaps, USGS topographic data, and satellite imagery.

Paul is using it to map hiking routes near Steamboat Springs, Colorado. I'm using it for running routes in Ann Arbor, Michigan. This route is my standard training run, which they say is 7.047 miles. The route goes through city park land in the Huron River valley, and the satellite imagery revealed many of the foot trails I follow. The map also gives a linear graph of elevation change, which looks pretty accurate except at one point out in the middle of the woods it seems to show me falling into and climbing out of a 110 foot vertical pit.

If that had happened I'd remember.

Nob Hill/Pioneer High CC/Eberwhite Woods route

Nichols Arboretum Hill

The API for this utility is apparently publicly available because the Houston Area Road Runners Association has hosted a version of it since August of 2005. Kudos to the HARRA and to Google!

p.s. I'm probably going to map more routes for my own reference but posting a route from your doorstep might not be a good idea. I thought of placing the start and stop points at a nearby intersection, but since I live in a cul-de-sac the map would still provide a big clue about where I live. Just something to think about.

2007-01-15T13:21:00.000-05:00

Michael Brecker (born March 29, 1949 in Philadelphia - died January 13, 2007 in NYC)

Alice Coltrane (born August 27, 1937 in Detroit - died January 12, 2007 in Los Angeles)

I confess my ignorance of the work of Alice Coltrane. She was a respected woman in jazz, a pioneer in the expansion of the jazz spirit, from Detroit. I personally lost interest in John Coltrane's work after the quartet, pretty much. I guess I'm due to go back and listen to her - friends say her fall concert in Ann Arbor was excellent.

The New York Times called Michael Brecker the most influential tenor saxophonist since Wayne Shorter. I can go with that - I'll say, "Michael Brecker created a seamless jazz/rock/pop saxophone style of optimistic, powerful tone and unsurpassed virtuosity".

I saw his quartet performance November 12, 1998 at the Ark in Ann Arbor. Pianist Joey Calderazzo was playing over a cold, Jeff "Tain" Watts was on drums and probably James Genus on bass though I don't remember. The crowd was a little sparse but it was a very good humored set, in a great setting - the Ark hardly does jazz anymore and it's a shame because the sound and atmosphere are everything you could want. It can be overpowering to witness that kind of virtuosity but with the mood Brecker's group brought it was elating. I think that is key to Brecker's appeal - he made outrageously difficult playing fun to listen to.

Here is an example, the Thad Jones slow blues "Sho' Nuff Did" from the 1976 A&M album "Mel Lewis & Friends". The band is Brecker, Greg Herbert on alto, Cecil Bridgewater (1st solo) and Freddie Hubbard on trumpet, Hank Jones, Ron Carter and leader Mel Lewis. Here is Brecker's solo as transcribed in the LP notes

From the concert video "Shadows and Light", Joni Mitchell performs "Free Man in Paris" with a backup band of Brecker, Pat Metheny, Lyle Mays, Jaco Pastorius and Don Alias, recorded September 1979 at the County Bowl Bowl in Santa Barbara CA. Brecker solos.

In my own lo-fi rip from LP to cassette and thence to MP3, from the December 1976 concert recording "Zappa in New York", Frank Zappa performs "the Purple Lagoon", a solo feature for Mike, Frank, Ronnie Cuber on bari, Patrick O'Hearn on bass and Mike's older brother Randy on ring modulated trumpet.

Finally, from his eponymous December 1986 debut LP, here is "Original Rays". Michael begins the tune on the EWI, a reed instrument / synthesizer interface.

Anyway, Michael was one of the great instrumentalists of my generation and I'm sad to see him go. There is a Michael Brecker home page with statements from the family but it has this big honking high bandwidth introduction that didn't work too well on my doggy old P3. Anyway, the family has requested that donations in Michael Brecker's memory be made to The Marrow Foundation's TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE FUND.

2007-01-08T16:27:00.001-05:00

The "Jingle Bells" project is turning into a BIG production. I should have known. Most recently I read on WikiPedia that Gemini astronauts Wally Schirra and Tom
Stafford performed "Jingle Bells" during the Gemini 6 spaceflight, the first known musical broadcast from space. That has to be recorded somewhere. Anybody know where to find a recording of that?

Here is the original sheetmusic from the American Memory Project. Four verses!

"Many Jingle Bells", an 8 meg MP3, as it currently stands, with more than 120 versions of "Jingle Bells" incorporated.

Here are links to RAR archives of my "Jingle Bells" collection as of 20070107.

Acknowledgements:

Lee at Music You (Probably) Won't Hear Anyplace Else for his 5 part Jingle Bells spectacular. I got more versions from him than anywhere else and they were interesting ones too because Lee is a record collector and rips at least most of these himself, I think.
falalalala.com is about the best all around Xmas music source on the web.
Senses Working Overtime is another amazing blog come Christmas time.
Echo Nest features a really good Jingle Bells MegaMix, and have laid a bunch more versions of Jingle Bells on me that I haven't even got to yet! I finally posted my collection to pay them off in return.
Recycle Ann Arbor's ReUse Center, where I get a lot of the LP's I rip for cheap.
Ann Arbor Kiwanis Sale, the best source for cheap classical LPs.

Here is a good forum thread about the lyrics to "Jingle Bells". The verse about the bob-tailed nag raises a lot of questions. They seem to be describing a very fast racing horse, and there is even speculation that the song was considered risque at one time because it basically dealt with horseracing. Well, I don't know, if sleigh riding was good enough for Laura Ingalls Wilder it's good enough for me.

Only problem with the Jingle Bells project is I didn't think that much about how to do it when I started and now I think I'm going to have to do it over again. A fairly random pastiche was the idea but I'm not satisfied. I think we should hear all four verses fairly coherently, and I think styles, tempos, and keys should be coordinated, and I think transitional material from some of the arrangements would be good, too, not to mention that funny little tag the French version has.

I'm certainly open to advice. I'm going to pick this up and continue it next Christmas season.

2006-12-29T19:25:00.000-05:00

Once there was a girl who was plagued by excess static electricity. Through no fault of her own, it seemed that anyone she touched suffered a painful static shock. Her parents were concerned and asked a child psychologist for advice.

The child psychologist said, "If she were my daughter, she'd be grounded!"

BTW, I recently finished "Singularity Sky" and now I'm into "Iron Sunrise" by Charles Stross. I found his short story "Antibodies" several years ago in the British online SciFi magazine Infinity Plus and it is the best damn short SciFi story every written. Now a lot of his fiction is online but the best way to find it is through WikiPedia. Singularity Sky was good, Iron Sunrise is really REALLY good so far. The last SciFi author I got this excited about was Vernor Vinge, and it's funny, because I hadn't read any VV novels until I read "A Fire Upon the Deep", but eventually I figured out he wrote the great short story "Bookworm Run!", which I read in an Analog SciFi anthology when I was summer camp at Interlochen in eighth grade. First scifi book I ever bought, I think.

Anyway, Vinge and Stross are the berries. Now if I could figure out the origin of this phrase about things "going pear shaped"...

2006-12-24T16:51:00.000-05:00

Here just in time for Xmas is "Jingle Bells", as a medley by 78 different artists. See if you can find YOUR favorites! 8 meg MP3

In order:
1 Arthur Godfrey & All the Little Godfreys "bell intro, chorus 1"
2 Ferrante and Teicher
3 Count Basie
4 Gisele MacKenzie
5 Slovak State Philharmonic Orchestra
6 Gene Krupa verse 1
7 Glenn Miller
8 The Gypsy Hombres
9 Joe Williams DJ Riko mix
10 Sammy Davis
11 Prissy Reed & Margie Singleton chorus 2
12 Tammy Faye
13 Morton Gould
14 Sammy Kaye
15 Dinah Shore
16 Les Paul verse
17 Wayne Newton verse 1
18 Duke Ellington
19 Santo and Jonny
20 MROLI Christmas Megamix chorus 3
21 Toni Harper
22 Unknown Country Male Vocal
23 Duke Pearson
24 Maynard
25 Diane Krall chorus 4
26 Jingle Dogs
27 The P
28 Spokane Area Children's Chorus
29 Johnny Mercer
30 Three Suns
31 Peter White
32 Bootsy Collins verse 2
33 George Jones
34 Blues Magoos
35 Smokey Robinson / DJ BC
36 Ferlin Husky chorus
37 Barbara Streisand
38 Bob Ward chorus
39 Herman Apple extra long
40 Peter Cetera
41 Starland Vocal Band
42 Mitch Miller
43 Wilson Pickett verse 1
44 Vaclav Hybs ????
45 Crazy Frog
46 Dolly Parton verse 1 extra long
47 Fats Waller chorus
48 Sufjan Stevens
49 Rev. Horton Heat
50 Chuscales
51 Dean Martin remix
52 Peggy Lee
53 Paul Mauriat verse
54 Herb Alpert
55 Clark Chambers' Klingon
56 Pig Latin
57 The Simpsons
58 Artie Shaw chorus
59 Andrews Sisters
60 Williams Brothers
61 Platters
62 Joel Mabus verse
63 Al Caiola
64 Sanborn Singers verse 1
65 Jimmy Smith
66 Soulful Strings chorus 4 bars
67 Floral Pops 70
68 Jim Nabors
69 The Roy-Cliffs
70 Guy Lombardo
71 Kate Smith
72 Shannon Quartet verse 3 1st half
73 Gene Autrey verse 3
74 Kitty Wells chorus 1st half
75 Toots Thielmans
76 Julie Andrews
77 Frank Sinatra 1946
78 the Beatles

...I figure with 400 or so versions I could make this go on for an hour, but as I found more this year I started using smaller excerpts instead, so for instance you hear Bootsy, Smokey Robinson, and the Blues Magoos in pretty quick succession. In almost every case I used an excerpt from a complete MP3 of the tune I have, so I'll post a link to an archive of 75 or so versions of Jingle Bells shortly. This archive should be an invaluable tool to those who come after.

2006-11-29T16:27:00.000-05:00

November 27 is Jimi Hendrix's birthday, and it is also my birthday. On pretty much any day my first choice would be to play a gig, and I got to play with a jazz trio at the Chelsea Chamber of Commerce after work schmoozefest at the Clocktower complex. Pianist and photographer Andy Sacks leads "Trio Indigo", and Eric Nyhuis played drums.

Some jazz musicians dislike playing in front of a crowd that is largely ignoring them, but among many of my musical colleagues, "furniture music" is not something to be scorned. It is, after all, a gig. I find that jazz often stimulates people to talk anyway. I would as soon have them dancing, talking, and having a good time as staring slack jawed at me as I play.

My other trio, the Dean Solden Trio, performs a blues that Dean calls "Hamp's Blues". The tune is from the album Hampton Hawes Vol. 1: The Trio. I obtained the LP at Encore Music (at a very reasonable price) and it turns out the tune is not "Hamp's Blues", it's "Blues the Most", also a Hawes composition. Some sort of head chart for this tune can be found in the "Library of Musicians' Jazz" fakebook, and I will upload that page shortly. Here is the LP, complete with BIG cover images, in a 60meg RAR download from Rapidshare Hampton Hawes Vol. 1: The Trio.

Sad to say the turntable connected to my computer is on the blink so I had to record the LP onto a cassette and then play the cassette and record on the computer's line in. It's a good album though.

2006-11-15T09:06:00.000-05:00

The Raybeats, "It's Only a Movie", reposted per reader request, complete with crummy looking but large scans of the cover art. This is a hard record to find. I had to lean on my brother in Wyoming for about 16 years before he would give up his copy, and I gave it to him in the first place. Here is a good link for Raybeats info.

BTW, the other great lost audio artifact my brother used to have was a cassette recording of Ernie K-Doe doing a radio show from New Orleans. All through the show he's promoting obscure R&B singers on his record label and telling listeners to call in for a free haircut and free breakfast, only it sounds more like "Fwee Bwekwuss". It was a lot like Detroit's Famous Coachman only more flamboyant. Click on the picture for a good Ernie K-Doe obit. If anybody has any audio of Ernie K-Doe radio shows, post them!!

One invaluable thing when you're playing a gig is to have a master of between tune banter. Just little things like "We had a request for this next tune" (usually a lie), or my favorite, "This next tune is based on a true story".

2006-11-11T09:12:00.000-05:00

The White House resubmitted (recess appointed UN Ambassador John)
Bolton’s nomination again today, but outgoing senator Lincoln
Chafee still won’t cave.

“I am not going to endorse something the American people
have spoken out against,” Chafee said today. This guy lost just
because he was a Republican — despite the fact that he voted
against the war. He has some good reasons to be pissed off
today. Yet he’s still going to take Bolton down with him.
That’s what you call class.

This from Wonkette, a very
sarcastic and sometimes funny political blog.

I'm wondering if there could be such a thing as a bipartisan
government contract that candidates and elected officials would
endorse and try to adhere to:

in debates, speeches and all political communications, statements
of fact must include references from an impartial source. This could
just be a statement like "My staff will post references and citations
for everything I say in this speech at my website, along with a
transcription of my remarks with footnotes. We encourage comments
and corrections from anyone."
legislation will be on one issue, not an omnibus. As it stands now
bills have provisions for dozens of different issues so claims that
"My opponent voted against equipping our troops" are meaningless.
legislation will be introduced with adequate time for debate and
review
legislation will be written by congressional personnel, NOT
lobbyists. No legislation will be sent from committee to the floor
without bipartisan review in committee.
No major change to the content or intent of legislation will be
made in conference committee.
Investigation of the K Street project. Telling a constituent they
have to fire Democrats and hire Republicans should be illegal. Obviously
requiring campaign contributions to pass legislation, or extorting
contributions with the threat of damaging legislation should be illegal
and should be prosecuted.

I dunno, I'm just thinking out loud, what are all the things the
Republicans have been doing for the last 6 years that I don't want the
Democrats to turn around and start doing?

2006-11-01T00:08:00.000-05:00

Dave Swain runs the II-V-I Orchestra, the big band I play bass with, and I was telling him the other day, "You know, there's 2 kinds of horn players in the world, horn players that are good enough to play in rock bands and horn players that are only good enough to play in big bands, and you know it's true because every time we get a big band arrangement of a rock tune that's in the key of 'E' they always transpose it to the key of 'F' even though there were horn players on the record playing it in 'E'. They were ROCK horn players!!"

And of course transposing to 'F' completely hoses up the bass part. For example, here is the Tower of Power's "What Is Hip?" . It's in 'E'. Here are PDFs of our big band arrangement page 1, page 2, page 3 . This is a fairly accurate representation of the bass line, but it sure is awkward to play in F. As near as I can estimate performance tempo is about 108 beats per minute.

We've got a couple of Steely Dan tunes and it's the same thing. "Josie" in F instead of E. Yuck.

2006-09-27T13:14:00.001-04:00

A little about this "Magic Number" thing. The magic number for the Tigers to clinch the American League Central championship is any combination of Tigers wins and Twins losses that makes our winning inevitable.

The formula is (games remaining + 1) minus (2nd place team's losses minus 1st place team's losses).

If there are 12 games left, the first place team is 95 and 55 and the second place team is 87 and 63, then 12 + 1 - (63-55) = 13 - 8 = 5. Both teams go four and one, making their records 99 and 56, and 91 and 64. Now the first place team is 8 games ahead and with 7 games left, hence the first place team has clinched.

Immediately before game 1 of the season, everybody's magic number is 163 because there are 162 games in the season and the formula assumes an outright win, not a tie!

BUT!

MLB now says state if the division race ends in a tie, the championship goes to the team that wins the season series!* So the Tigers need only tie the Twins because we went 11-8 in the season series. So the magic number is REALLY just games remaining minus (twins losses minus tigers losses). 5 - (63-62) = 4. If we win three of the last 5, the Twins have to win all 5.

I'm sure everybody's glad I got that cleared up.

*there are playoff scenarios in the event of a multiple tie, more info at MLB. This press release has good info but is out of date for the AL Central because the Sox were not yet eliminated.

Do you use WinRAR and Rapidshare? Here is the soundtrack from the film "Good Night and Good Luck", in a RAR file on Rapidshare LINK.
Very choice small group jazz with big soft tenor sound, a great set of standard, lesser known, and original tunes, well tailored arranging details, and the wonderful Ms. Reeves sounding like sort of an understated Sarah Vaughan.

2006-09-15T18:12:00.000-04:00

Lalo Schifrin's "Gone with the Wave" soundtrack - this is early 60s West Coast jazz. In some ways the most interesting tune is the 5/4 tune, this being a fashionable gimmick at the time. Only thing is Paul Desmond's "Take Five" actually had a nice swing to it. I remember playing "Take Five" with a jazz combo of high school kids at a city park in Big Rapids, Michigan in the late 70s, and the locals enjoyed it. You could see their heads bobbing away and they didn't quite know what was different about it but they liked it. The 5/4 tune on this album is pretty lame. The rest is OK though.

This LP rip is from Scorebaby Annex. I got asked to repost it.

The Dean Solden Trio with Surry Scheerer performs Wednesday September 27 from 9:30 to 11:30 at Swing Ann Arbor's Wednesday Lessons at the Michigan Union in Ann Arbor. Drop-in Swing dancing lessons, $4, no partner required.

The II-V-I Orchestra performs Sunday September 24 from 6:30 to 8:30 at the Creekside Grille. We've been getting great support for these last-Sunday-of-the-month performances.

The Dean Solden Trio with Surry Scheerer performs Saturday October 7 from 10 to 1:30 or so at Goodnite Gracie's in downtown Ann Arbor. It's a real jazz gig in a martini bar!!

2006-08-25T12:36:00.000-04:00

RAR archive of my vinyl rip of the album "Nancy Wilson/Cannonball Adderley", (including front and back lp cover scans that are actually big enough to read). This is one of my favorite vocal jazz albums. For me the highlight is "Sleepin' Bee", with lyrics by Truman Capote! I've gotten a couple of other Nancy Wilson albums and found them a little bit heavy and melodramatic, not very jazzy. The promotional cigarette lighter image is from cannonball-adderley.com .

2006-07-30T13:54:00.000-04:00

Having plowed through Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, I was fascinated by the depiction of the England of that era and so I picked up Dicken's "A Tale of Two Cities". I hadn't read Dickens since being assigned "Great Expectations" in high school. I think when we see the news of the violence in the Middle East that Dickens speaks to us when he says of the killing of the French Revolution, "Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seed of rapacious license and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind."

Or in modern terms, political window dressing and "regime change" will not bring peace to the middle east, only raising the standard of living and encouraging civil society will. Western governments seem unwilling to accept that the Palestinians embrace Hamas and Hezbollah largely because they help the common people. What are we doing for the common people of Afghanistan and Iraq? Not much. We would probably be better off to step back and assist indigenous organizations in providing social services.

But back to Dickens, this is a great book. The early scene of the stage coach travelling at night in fear of robbers and brigands, stopped by a solitary rider for an exchange of mysterious messages, is intriguing and atmospheric. I think Stephenson would have been proud of the gritty reality of the scene. The later descriptions of the French revolutionary woman watching and knitting is frightening in its evil and impressive in its literary restraint. The description of the Doctor's regression into a cringeing cobbler is also very modern, a moving evocation of the trauma of solitary confinement.

You really ought to read this book if you haven't.

2006-07-04T09:28:00.000-04:00

...one of the most concise directories of fake book pdf files I've found is at eleonorengland.

2006-05-23T15:35:00.000-04:00

That's Lindsey Hunter of the Pistons. I love interviews with Rip Hamilton because he usually says smart things. After Sunday's game he was asked "you had a big early lead then Cleveland caught up and it was tight until the middle of the third. What happened in the third quarter?" and Rip and I both said, "Lindsey Hunter!" You could argue that Lindsey made the difference in the series because the series was hanging in the balance when he came in and the Pistons went on a 9-2 run to open up a lead.
That's Nate Robertson of the Tigers. Sunday he pitched 7 innings of 3 hit shutout ball, the Tigers scored a run in the bottom of the eighth on an error, and won 1-0 to maintain the best record in baseball. Only thing I worry about with the Tigers is I did some calculations last night and they've only played 2 teams all year that currently have a winning record.

Good weekend! The quartet played at Goodnite Gracie's, the big band played in Utica, the Tigers are kicking everybody's butts and the Pistons came through to finish off the Cavs. Here to celebrate is my LP rip of Ella Fitzgerald's "On the Sunny Side of the Street", a 1963 Verve recording with the Count Basie Orchestra and arrangements by Quincy Jones, all zipped up with BIG DETAILED cover scans in an RAR file from Rapidshare.

The II-V-I Orchestra show featured the great vocalist Al Jacquez. Al was a member of Savage Grace, so he is a certified SE Michigan rock star, but he can sing Frank Sinatra like nobody's business. Check out Al's band Measured Chaos at their webpage.

2006-05-11T01:04:00.000-04:00

We note with sorrow the passing of Jazz Pour Tous. This weblog was an amazing resource for jazz education. It has been replaced in the last few days by a notice about some hotel industry executives getting promoted. What's going on with that? Check out this article for somebody to ask about it.

2006-05-06T12:14:00.000-04:00

A couple of piano duo gigs coming up for benefit functions around town: for the Ann Arbor Academy Saturday night at the school, and Monday evening at WCC for a local women's advocacy organization or something. We'll be playing tasteful background music; here for that purpose is Alter and DeLange's "Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans?", sheet music page 1, sheet music page 2, and as performed by Victoria Williams MP3, courtesy of Subterranean Distribution and Mailorder. I don't agree with some of the chords in Victoria Williams' performance, but I've always gotten a real kick out of her performances. She's really got a lot of personality.

Of course we were all deeply moved by the tragedy of the flood of New Orleans but the song title in the form of a question always inspires a lot of goofy answers:

"I don't know, why don't you ask her?"
"No but if you hum a few bars I can fake it."
"It means you end up about 30 miles out in the Gulf of Mexico."

2006-05-01T12:46:00.000-04:00

Busy weekend! Saturday night our Dean Solden Trio with Surry Scheerer played Goodnite Gracie's to a good house. The first set was our best ever, and my brother Paul and his friend Debbie were in from Colorado to see it. That was particularly fortunate because then they left and the second set was a train wreck.

Sunday night was the II-V-I Orchestra at the Creekside, and another one of those alarmingly talented high school jazz pianists sat in. Sorry I can't remember his name right now but he was good. He did clutch up on the end of Count Basie's "JaDa" because the Count Basie Ending wasn't quite as he remembered it.
Here is my approximation of the Count Basie ending, in Db because it seems like so many of the great big band charts are in Db, and here is a low-fi audio example in MP3 format, Neal Hefti's "Splanky", from the classic 1957 album "Atomic Mr. Basie". Neal Hefti is of course most famous as composer of the Batman theme, as well as the Odd Couple theme, but also wrote several bonafide jazz classics, including "L'il Darlin'", "Kid from Red Bank", "Cute", and "Cherry Point".

He is the author of the first tune I ever learned on bass guitar. I was in eighth grade in Reed City and the band director, Jerry Thornton, announced we were going to have a big band for the spring concert and who wanted to play bass guitar. As the bull goose tuba player at the time I was the logical choice. We got out the skeezy Italian hollow body bass guitar, he put the sheet music to Neal Hefti's "Cinnamon Kisses" in front of me, and said "This is a Bb. This is an Eb. The frets go up half steps, and if you go up four frets you're up to the next string". I memorized the part, took the bass home for the summer, and sat around trying to play along with my brother's Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper records.

For all of us here at "Jazz with Jerry Brabenec", it gives me great pleasure to announce that we have earned certification as an official Hosta Free Web Page. We will display this symbol with pride and continue in our efforts to protect the World Wide Web community from undesired exposure to hostas when browsing the web.

Tigers fans: TV20 will broadcast the following sixteen (15) regular season Detroit Tigers Baseball games:

Monday April 10, vs.White Sox 1:05pm

Thursday June 1, vs.Yankees 7:05pm

Saturday June 3, vs.Red Sox 7:05pm

Thursday June 8, @White Sox 8:05pm

Saturday June 17, @Cub 4:05pm

Saturday June 24, vs.Cardinals 7:05pm

Friday June 30, @Pirates 7:05pm

Thursday July 13, vs.Royals 7:05pm

Saturday July 22, vs.Athletics 7:05pm

Saturday July 29, @Twins 7:10pm

Thursday August 29, @Devil Rays 7:15pm

Saturday August 5, vs.Indians 7:05pm

Friday August 11, @White Sox 8:35pm

Saturday August 19, vs.Rangers 7:05pm

Saturday August 26, @Indians 7:05pm

Friday September 1, vs.Angels 7:05pm

2006-04-24T22:43:00.000-04:00

Dick Wilson's Jazzbones performed at Kerrytown Concert House Sunday night and as usual it was a very good time, with a large, appreciative crowd and a nice relaxed vibe. Thanks so much to everybody who came.

Too bad we didn't get through either of the Bach fugues all together, but that's how it goes sometimes. Here is Fugue VII from the Well-Tempered Clavichord Book II, in a MIDI file and a PDF, page 1 and page 2. I was supposed to make up a bass line, leaving the actually low voice to the bass bone. We did crank through a lot of Thelonious Monk, Tadd Dameron, and other boppers, with the requisite Kai and JJ arrangements.

Upcoming performances:

Saturday April 29, 10pm - Dean Solden Trio with Surry Scheerer @ Goodnite Gracie's
Sunday April 30, 6:30-9pm - II-V-I Orchestra @ Creekside
Saturday May 20, 10pm - Dean Solden Trio with Surry Scheerer @ Goodnite Gracie's
Sunday May 28, 6:30-9pm - II-V-I Orchestra @ Creekside
Sunday June 4, noon-5 - II-V-I Orchestra @ Taste of Ann Arbor

Finally, a reward for anybody who read the rest of this - 80s Neo-Surf band the Raybeats, in their second LP (never released on CD), "It's Only a Movie". This is a really good instrumental album and you should check it out. If you play it for your hip friends a certain percentage will fall over and go Omigod I don't believe you have that album.

2006-04-21T00:16:00.000-04:00

When I was in high school at Interlochen I had an LP of the Vaughan Williams Tuba Concerto and Pastoral Symphony that my girlfriend brought me from far off Ann Arbor when she was down there performing with the orchesta. The symphony became a favorite of mine because I've always been into melodic, melancholy sounding stuff. Recently I found a better LP, Sir Adrian Boult with the New Philharmonia Orchestra, recorded in 1968, doing the Pastoral Symphony and "In the Fen Country", which is very much the same kind of thing. Here is my MP3 rip of the LP in an RAR file on Rapidshare. There is also a little text file with some notes on the LP. If you really like it email me and I'll post a scan of the LP cover.

2006-04-11T11:51:00.000-04:00

There's a new raptor in the neighborhood, I think. Today at 10:20am as I left Eberwhite School I saw a crow chasing a small hawk from tree to tree in sort of a desultory fashion. They would swirl around a little bit and perch on a couple of nearby limbs before flying off again. The hawk could be mistaken for a mourning dove except for the banded underside of the tail. Yesterday as my dog Mira and I were returning from our morning walk we heard a bunch of jays in our back yard. When we walked into the yard the jays took off chasing a bird that rose from the ground and flew off away from my on a low straight line. I just saw its' bluish gray shoulders and back, and it seemed a little bit larger than the jays. There was a big patch of jay feathers in the grass.

Here are some performances I've got coming up:

Sunday April 23, 8pm - Jazzbones @ Kerrytown Concert House
Saturday April 29, 10pm - Dean Solden Trio with Surry Scheerer @ Goodnite Gracie's
Sunday April 30, 6:30-9pm - II-V-I Orchestra @ Creekside
Saturday May 20, 10pm - Dean Solden Trio with Surry Scheerer @ Goodnite Gracie's
Sunday May 28, 6:30-9pm - II-V-I Orchestra @ Creekside
Sunday June 4, noon-5 - II-V-I Orchestra @ Taste of Ann Arbor

Finally, I stopped by the U of M Music School Library the other day and copied a few pages from Jamie Aebersold's book "Countdown to Giant Steps". Here is John Coltrane's "But Not For Me" MP3, PDF.

2006-04-07T09:51:00.000-04:00

Click on the bunny and duck to peruse this year's "April is the Cruelest Month" survey, a compendium of hackneyed or bizarre web references to the famous poem.

2006-04-06T14:44:00.000-04:00

To copy CDs with Windows Media Player

Start Windows Media Player (I have WMP version 10)

Verify settings for copying CDs - go to Tools/Options.

In the "Devices" tab, make sure the system sees your CD drive and CD burner. The "Properties" box is where you can see that your CD drive will read AND write.

Steps 4 and 5 are necessary in order for WMP to query the Internet and retrieve CD artist, album, and song name information. If you don't do steps 4 and 5, the music will copy will show up in the media library under "Unknown Artist", "Unknown Album", and the songs will just be called "Track 01", etc.

In the "Player" tab, check the "Connect to Internet" box.

In the "Library" tab, check the "Retrieve additional information from the Internet" box.

Select the tab marked "Rip Music"

Verify the destination directory in "rip music to this location". If you have more than 1 disk drive and a drive has a lot of space, specify a directory on the drive with a lot of space.

Make sure "Copy protect music" is NOT checked

If you check "Rip CD when inserted" every audio CD will be ripped to the media library on your computer when you insert the audio CD in the CD drive. I would recommend you check this box when you wish to rip a CD, and then UNCHECK the box after you have rip the CD. Otherwise everytime you insert an audio CD it will be ripped, consuming lots of disk space and processor time. You can do other things on the computer while a CD is ripped but response will be slower.

Check the "Eject CD when ripping is complete" box.

Look at the "audio quality" slide bar and note how much space will be required for each CD. If you have a lot of disk space go for higher quality.

Exit WMP. Restart WMP to use the new options you have specified.

Insert your audio CD in the CD drive. You should see the cursor replaced by a CD symbol while the computer scans the CD. Then WMP will start and begin to rip the CD. To monitor, select the "Rip" tab in WMP. Monitor the rip process in the "Rip Status" column - depending on CD length, quality selected and your system hardware, it could take up to an hour or more.

The CD will eject when ripping is complete.

Insert a blank CD in your CD burner. The computer will scan the CD, determine that it is blank, and a dialogue box will appear. Select "Burn CD with Windows Media Player" and click on "OK".

WMP will start. Click on "Edit Playlist". A display of the library will appear.

Select "View by Album" and a list of album names will appear.

Click on the album you ripped. The individual tunes will appear.

Click on each of the tunes you wish to burn to the CD in the order you wish them to be burnt. You can drag tunes up and down in the burn list, or by right clicking on a tune you can get a menu to remove a tune from the list.

Click on "Start burn" and when it's done you've got a CD you betcha.

When your CD burn is complete, I recommend you go back to "Tools/Options" and DESELECT "Connect to Internet", "Retrieve additional information from the Internet", and "Rip Music".

Text file of these instructions...

2006-04-05T10:25:00.000-04:00

This is a re-post of a bunch of MP3 and PDF files that are up on the site mainly
because I want to do them with my band.

Sarah Vaughan doing Tadd Dameron's
"If You Could See Me Now" MP3 , Realbook PDF,

Bill Evans Trio doing Tadd Dameron's "If You Could See Me Now" MP3, Tom's chords (PDF)

Jerry's leadsheet for Holly Cole's arrangement of "Get Out of Town" PDF

Jerry's leadsheet for Bud Powell's "Dance of the Infidels" PDF

Satie's Gymnopedie Number 3 PDF

Jerry's leadsheet for Wayne Shorter's Jazz Messengers arrangement of Ernesto Lecuona's "The Breeze and I" PDF

Jazz Messenger's performance of Ernesto Lecuona's "The Breeze and I" MP3

Miles Davis's performance of Frank Loesser's "If I Were a Bell" MP3

Miles' arrangement of Frank Loesser's "If I Were a Bell" PDF page 1, PDF page 2

John Thulin Trio performance of "Sweet and Lovely" MP3

Jerry's leadsheet for John Thulin's arrangement of "Sweet and Lovely" PDF

Jerry's leadsheet for Jobim's "O morro não tem vez" (MP3, PDF page 1, PDF page 2) by Tom Jobim and Vinicius De Moraes.

2006-03-27T15:50:00.000-05:00

The II-V-I Orchestra had a good crowd for our last-Sunday-of-the-month show at the Creekside Grille this Sunday, and we even got out "In the Mood" because there were several couples dancing. Thanks to all for coming, especially the dancers!

Here's a photo by Popsie of the Miles Davis Nonet "Birth of the Cool" recording session. This is the January 21 recording session in NYC. The ii-V-I Orchestra performed the "Birth of the Cool" arrangements at Kerrytown here in Ann Arbor a couple of years ago after David Swain, the bandleader, (legally) obtained scores to the arrangements and wrote out the parts for us. Here is "Boplicity" - MP3, and the bass part PDFs page 1 and page 2. (Boplicity was NOT recorded at the session pictured above, unfortunately. I scanned the photo from a library book.)

2006-03-16T00:41:00.000-05:00

Ernesto Lecuona was the composer of "Maleguena", "Siboney", and "Andulasia (the Breeze and I)". Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers perform "the Breeze and I" on the album "Meet You at the Jazz Corner of the World Vol. I". Here is my minimal lead sheet for the Art Blakey version in PDF format.

I've taking a trio into a background-music-before-dinner situation this weekend and one good thing about it is that it was a kick in the butt to finally write out this tune. I'm going to make the pianist play the tune straight also, from sheet music I picked up at the Kiwanis sale. If you want the piano arrangement (or some of the files from earlier posts that I deleted to make room for this one) email me.

2006-02-24T13:32:00.000-05:00

Here's Lindsey Kildow after a tough slalom run in the combined. She was hurting. We can't know what they're thinking at such moments, and it must be pretty strange to be standing on the ski hill and know the TV camera next to you is a window through which most of your loved ones and friends are watching (as well as millions of the bored, ignorant and callous). Props to Lindsey for toughing it out as much as she could.

Julie Mancuso takes the GOLD in the Women's GS. I sort of hope she didn't put on the tiara 'til after the race, though I have to admit I enjoyed Resi Stiegler's teddy bear ears on the helmet bit. "You're not going to win or lose a slalom race because of ears on your helmet," she says of the perceived aerodynamical disadvantage. "If I start wearing capes, then someone can step in and tell me to knock it off."

I gotta say overall the U.S. team was kind of melodramatic and underachieving.

The folks at Jazz Pour Tous have been getting into some Ornette Coleman and were looking for an album I actually have stashed away in the crates in my basement, so I dug it out and stuck it up on Rapidshare. Here is Ornette's 1968 album New York Is Now, complete with cover art. I still haven't listened to the whole thing.

2006-02-15T09:07:00.000-05:00

Here is my jazz quartet performing January 14 at Goodnite Gracie's here in Ann Arbor. My wife took the picture (thanks, Deb!) and Surry's red dress definitely makes the picture. Dean unfortunately can just barely be glimpsed behind Surry. That's me on bass and Rob on drums. There are 3 more pix at the band webpage. I also updated the previous posting with more links and info on the Cheney hunting accident.

2006-02-12T14:39:00.000-05:00

Are these folks friends of yours? Tobin Armstrong passed away last October, may he rest in peace. He was the grandson of John Armstrong III, a famous Texas ranger. The Armstrong Ranch is a 50,000 acre (78 square mile) ranch in Kenedy County, Texas, "purchased from owners of a Spanish land grant in 1852" according to Texas Cattler Raisers. Kenedy County, Texas, has a population of about 500 people, or 3 per square mile, according to Tobin Armstrong in testimony before a House subcommittee on Immigration and Claims. (For comparison, the King Ranch in the same part of Texas is more than 15 times as big, almost 1300 square miles.)
Daughter of aristocratic New Orleans coffee merchant Armant Legendre, Anne Legendre Armstrong was appointed Ambassador to the United Kingdom by Gerald R. Ford and was the first woman to chair the Intelligence Advisory Board. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1987 by Ronald Reagan. A member of the board of Halliburton. Gerald R. Ford considered Anne L. Armstrong as a possible running mate for the 1976 presidential campaign.

Anne and Tobin's daughter Katharine Armstrong is a Texas lobbyist and co-owner of the ranch, which is some sort of family holding. She is a former head of the Texas Department of Parks and Wildlife. Of the shooting Saturday, she said, "Harry was about 100 yards away, looking for a lost bird. The vice president and another hunter had moved on toward another covey of quail.

"But Harry came up behind the vice president's party and didn't announce himself," she said. "The vice president was following the birds as he swung around and hit Harry. It's just good hunting protocol to let the other hunters know where you are."

I don't know a thing about hunting so here are a couple of germane quotes from the Texas State Rifle Association:

"Texas hunting accidents in 2004 decreased to the lowest amount since statistical records began in 1966. The number of people injured in hunting accidents in Texas decreased from 44 in 2003 to 29 in 2004..."

"The primary reason for Texas hunting accidents remains swinging on game outside a safe zone of fire. This happens when a person points a firearm at another hunter while following a moving target, such as a flying game bird. Hunter education teaches people to set up safe zones of fire where a gun can be safely pointed whether the target is moving or stationary."

Cheney apologists will claim that the shooting victim erred by walking into a free fire zone.

Quail hunters discuss hunting safety in the Kansas City Star.

Texas Parks and Wildlife Accident Report (PDF)from the LA Times.

Statements since the weekend on VP Cheney's website make no mention of a hunting accident. The February 13th statement is an explanation of the upland game stamp violation (see the LA Times story) and the February 14th statement says he has spoken with Mr. Whittington, is monitoring the news, and sends his prayers. Here is an essay from TIME by a Walter Kirn that tries to be pretty deep and does pretty well.

I've really been enjoying Claude Thornhill recordings from 1947 as posted on Bastet & Corwyn's Music, an excellent blog I just discovered. Here's an MP3 of Gene Williams' vocal on Hirsch and Rose's 'Deed I Do, and the sheet music: a color JPEG of the cover and black and white PDFs of pages 1, 2, and 3. I'll probably add a PDF of a fakebook version from Lee Evans' "The Professional Pianist's Fake Book", but right now I just got done watching some French guy win the Olympic men's downhill and now I've got to take the kids to the sliding hill.

2006-01-27T00:52:00.000-05:00

The II-V-I Orchestra resumes our last-Sunday-of-the-month show at the Creekside Grille this Sunday the 29th from 6:30 to 9:00 .

Saw the AACT production of "Guys and Dolls" last week, then the guy over at the charivarious section posted ALL this Miles Davis, so now I have the tune "If I Were a Bell" going around in my head and I want to try to get Surry to sing it so here it is: MP3 of the Miles Davis recording, MP3 of the 1992 Broadway revival featuring Josie de Guzman, and a fakebook version of the Miles Davis arrangement, PDF page 1, PDF page 2.

2006-01-20T14:59:00.000-05:00

We sadly note the passing of Wilson Pickett and our prayers are with his family, loved ones, and all whose lives he touched. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1991. Here is his obituary
from the Washington Post. (Might seem kind of funny source but he had lived in Reston, Virginia for years...). There's a slideshow at the Washington Post site that looked good but I had trouble getting it to work right.

As a sort of tribute I respectfully submit an MP3 of my old band, the StratoLoungers, performing "Funky Broadway" in 1992. The StratoLoungers were an 8 piece bar band with horns based in Adrian, Michigan, and we mainly played at a wonderful roadhouse out in the Irish Hills called Jerry's Pub. Jerry's is still going strong and is about my favorite bar in the world, and they have good Italian food too. On race weekends over at Michigan International Speedway the place was jammed. They'd have all these goofy checker flag pennants hanging up, and boats would pull up out in back on Wampler's Lake. Sweat dripped from the rafters, my microphone would wave back in forth in front of my face because the floor was shaking from the dancers, and Big Barb the imposing bouncer would come up and sing "Town Without Pity". Barb saved me from getting beat up in the parking lot one night.

I was one of the last people out of the bar and my '90 Civic was sitting out in middle of the gravel parking lot. I picked up my antenna, which somebody had broke off, and muttered "***hole!" From the other side of the parking lot some crazy local came tearing over and asked me what I called him. I tried to avoid him but he was pushing me around, and all the sudden Barb came busting out and grabbed us both, me on one side and him on the other. She was about a head taller than either of us and quite a ways around, too. She told the guy, "Jerry here is a friend of ours, don't you be beating him up! Now apologize and shake hands!" and the guy mutters an apology and we shake hands like a couple of fourth graders. It was great.

For me the original inspiration was to play "Soul Finger" by the Bar Kays and "Last Night" by the Mar Keys but we ended up doing Steely Dan, Was Not Was, Gary Glitter, Traffic, and all kinds of good stuff. Wilson Pickett tunes were the motor of the band, though - I think we did about six.

Boy those were the days. I just can't believe looking back how much arguing we did and how much time we put into it.

BTW the URL for the Dean Solden Trio with Surry Scheerer has changed to http://home.comcast.net/~soldenscheererjazz. Right now the next gig we have scheduled is April 29, but I'm sure stuff will come up.

2006-01-17T19:31:00.000-05:00

It was good times at Goodnite Gracie's Saturday nite - our first set was mostly nerves and breakneck tempos. By night's end it was pretty mellow judging by the slow dancing in front of our little stage. Thanks so much to all our friends for coming out and we'll let you know when we're back there. We'll be enhancing our song list.

To that end, here is a lowfi MP3 of the band from Michael Feldman's "What Do You Know" performing "Sweet and Lovely", the Gus Amheim/Jules LeMare/Harry Tobias composition. The band is John Thulin on piano, Jeff Hamann on bass and Clyde "the Funky Drummer" Stubblefield. Here is my leadsheet of the tune as a PDF file.

Elsewhere in the news Jack Abramoff has been trying out a variety of hats at his various court appearances; he's still fine tuning, trying to find "the look". My recommendation is the lovely fruit sherbert colored Easter Bonnet.

Al Gore made a big speech about Bush 43's executive branch threatening the checks and balances of the federal government. Text of the speech is at: Liberty Coalition. I think the speech is rhetorically over the top at times, like the part about, 'if Bush can do the stuff he has already he can commit genocide', but it is still a good policy wonk speech and Gore is right. Ask yourself if Bush has abused the presidency. Of course he has.

I'll bet you forgot what a good policy wonk speech is like. I saw Clinton on Letterman last year and Bill went off with this big elaborate reply to Dave's question and you could see Dave kind of sit back, smile, and go, "Man, remember when the President knew how to Talk?" The Bush administration doesn't really try to lay out convincing arguments. They go exclusively on fear, trust, and the illusion of sincerity. Anyway, the argument, which I think Gore makes at about a B grade level, is that Bush 43's general strategy has been to enhance the power of the executive branch wherever possible and that he has crossed the line of accountability - there is no way to know if the executive branch abides by the Constitution any longer.

2006-01-09T13:53:00.000-05:00

Come out and see us play jazz this weekend!

The Dean Solden Trio with Surry Scheerer appears Saturday the 14th from 10 to 1:30 at Goodnite Gracie's in Ann Arbor.

We'll do our take on a variety of standards and some of Dean's original tunes, most featuring Surry's vocals. Surry's singing is sure footed in an uptempo jazz trio context, and her tone and range are similar to Ricky Lee Jones but Surry's style is cleaner and more understated.

Dean Solden plays piano and organ and sings a few numbers too, including some of his own. Drummer Rob Hejna stokes the rhythm and I am responsible for the underpinnings of the ensemble on acoustic bass.

There are MP3s of our group and Dean's CD over at the band webpage.

We played Gracie's back at Halloween and it went OK but they had pulled out most of the tables, brought in a DJ between sets, and charged a cover because it was a big party weekend. This time will be the real jazz club setting, with no cover charge and some nice sofas to settle back in if you show up early. Hope to see you there!

2005-12-31T16:01:00.000-05:00

...my pianist friend Andy was wondering about the bridge to "What Are You Doing New Year's Eve" (PDF file here) at the New Year's Eve Eve party last night. My copy of the tune is off the Chenille Sisters' xmas CD. I tried to dumb down the changes as much as possible. They got one of those PKO-nese arrangements (which is very nice but I just get tired of seeing the same guys on EVERY local record...) with a few extra chords that probably aren't needed when the tune is being deployed in a party context.

The song is by Frank Loesser, who also wrote "Slow Boat to China".

Hope you find it useful, Andy, I'll be taking Debbie, Joe and my bass to a party at Eduardo's.

2005-12-26T14:57:00.000-05:00

Check out Alex's take on Sly Stone and "There's a Riot Goin' On" at MOISTWORKS because this is what popular music criticism is all about. One of my favorite LPs and I agree with most everything Alex says except he is deep and I'm not.

Thinking about Sly made me think of "Pain", by the Ohio Players. The bassist is Marshall Jones. I first heard this in about ninth grade in the middle of night in a school gymnasium in Baldwin, Michigan.

I was from the small, rural, very white town of Reed City, Michigan, and had just joined a summer marching band called the SuperCats. The SuperCats were based in Baldwin, the county seat of Lake County, which was roughly half black and half white and even poorer and more rural than Osceola County. The SuperCats were very cool: they were all brass and percussion; they didn't march, they just strode along in time; they wore simple navy slacks, blue shirts and berets; and the percussion section's cadences often became extended jams as they marched. I think I had gotten recruited for the band because I played tuba in the district all star concert band over at Ferris with some kids from Baldwin, but I wasn't cool.

One of the first trips I took with the band we sacked out overnight in the school gym the night before we left for some little town's summer festival. Maybe we were leaving early the next morning. "Pain" by the Ohio Players came over the gymnasium sound system. I wasn't sure about the singing and flute solo but the rhythm section was fabulous and I wanted them to play the same groove all night. I always remembered it and sought out the recording years later, cranking it out over our R&B band's new sound system during sound check in some VFW hall in Dundee.

One of the girls in the SuperCats showed me around her neighborhood in Idlewild, with the lake, the undeveloped streets cut out of the oak and hickory woods, and the deserted nightclubs. It was years later when I learned that this village on a lake near Baldwin was for a generation one of the most important African American summer resorts in the Midwest. The Flamingo and Paradise clubs hosted Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, Della Reese, Louis Armstrong, B.B.King, Jackie Wilson, and Aretha Franklin. I believe the Four Tops and Sarah Vaughan spent formative summers of their early careers there. No doubt the parents of some of the kids in the SuperCats had some stories about partying with these international stars on a summer night in the Michigan woods.

There's an annual jazz festival in Idlewild now.

About all I had ever heard about Lake County was a story my dad told me once or twice. He was a state policeman at the Reed City post. He said during deer hunting season the troopers would dress in hunting gear and drive over to roadhouses out past Baldwin in the Pere Marquette State Forest. In the bars the troopers were propositioned by prostitutes from Grand Rapids, up for a couple of weeks to work the deer hunting crowd. They'd walk them outside, put them in a patrol car or a bus or something, and go back in for more. He said one trooper came out with a woman on each arm.

2005-12-17T18:13:00.000-05:00

KILDOW CHOOSES COW OVER MONEY AFTER WORLD CUP WIN

VAL D'ISERE, France (Reuters) - Lindsey Kildow could have pocketed an extra 1,000 euros ($1,197) from her World Cup downhill victory in Val d'Isere on Saturday but the 21-year-old American decided against it.

Kildow, who won her second downhill of the season in the French resort, was handed 23,000 euros and a cow for her victory.

"Someone wanted to buy (the cow) from me for 1,000 euros," she said. "But I'm keeping her anyway."

Kildow said she had no exact idea of what she do with the gift.

"However, I'm not having a barbecue. I'm not eating my cow," she said. "I thought of sending it to Maria Riesch who knows someone who has a farm but a guy from the FIS said he could take care of the animal."

Elsewhere in the news I picked up a sixpack of Bell's Wheat Eight Ale and I didn't especially like it. It has a strong flavor that I don't especially enjoy. Stick to their Two-Hearted Ale, my favorite beer by far.
I'll add an audio clip to this posting shortly.

2005-12-11T23:07:00.000-05:00

Gil Evans and Miles Davis are pictured, credited together as composers of the tune "Eleven".

So you know how this works, this Sunday like most every Sunday I drove out to Dave's place in Loch Alpine for our big band rehearsal, and the last tune we did was called 'Adios, au Revior, Auf Weidersehn'. Dave was saying, "there, that's a better set closer than 'Bubbles in the Wine'" and I said, "How about 'Eleven' for a set closer like Jaco did with his big band?" Dave promptly whipped out the parts to Eleven and then we had to try to play that. It's not easy, so to help out other bassists here is the bass part, here is Jaco's big band performing Eleven, and here is Gil Evans' big band performing Eleven.

The Jaco recording is from a Japanese import LP I got from my little brother and though I ripped it about 2 days ago I can't find it now. It seems to be the same live recording as is found on Warner Bros. WPCP-4932, Jaco Pastorius - Invitation. The Gil Evans recording is from Koch Jazz 8518, Gil Evans - Svengali. I was listening to the Gil Evans stuff back in high school because I was a tuba player and I read in Downbeat magazine that the Gil Evans record had a tuba solo on it by Howard Johnson.

This whole garbled posting started out to be about Jaco, mainly just to point out the great postings that Taxi Driver has put up on Xanax Taxi, a moving and informative posting about Jaco and substance abuse on shrimplate, and especially see JACOP.NET, a family website.

2005-12-03T18:46:00.000-05:00

Since the Real book lead sheet to Tadd Dameron's "If You Could See Me Now" doesn't seem to have the melody quite right, here is a Bill Evans Trio performance that seems closer to me. This is from the Riverside OJCCD-434-2 CD, "Bill Evans Trio - Moonbeams" with Paul Motian on drums and Chuck Israels on bass, recorded in New York in May of 1962, but I edited the version here, down to 2:24 from 4:30 or so.

Elsewhere in the news, for all you political junkies, Tom Delay's initial statement about his indictment is already considered a classic of political invective, but it could still use some tuning.
If you want to help I've provided a webpage with a "Madlibs" style fill-in-the-blanks form that you can use to tighten up Mr. Delay's statement to the press. You, too, can be a Press Secretary!!

Today I turned to channel 99, CBC, because it was time for my favorite thing to watch on the tube, World Cub downhill ski racing. They were at Lake Louise up in the Canadian Rockies. There was one shot of the course where you would see the skier go flying over a shoulder of the mountain and in the background a couple miles away was the silhouette of another precipitous ridgeline, cloaked in clouds that changed every time another skier hurtled past. Halfway through, this young lady from Vail named Lindsey Kildow up and wins the thing, but only after plunging through a near whiteout that suddenly wrapped the middle of the course. It was pretty darn exciting, and as you can see here she is quite a scope also. Way to go Lindsey!

2005-11-21T23:49:00.000-05:00

Saturday nite Debbie Joe and I went to a party that was sort of a Latin American jam session. Enio played bossas (he's Brazillian and does the whole nylon string guitar singing and whistling bit to a tee), a Venezuelan lady sang and played the quatro, and there was Argentinian music as well.

It was so much fun. First of all a lot of times when I am playing in an ensemble I'm self conscious about eye contact, but the fact I couldn't understand the words and didn't know what chord was coming next seemed to obviate that problem, or maybe it was the beer, and then after awhile I began to guess what the lyrics might be about and that was really funny.

Here is "O morro não tem vez" (MP3, PDF page 1, PDF page 2) by Tom Jobim and Vinicius De Moraes. The performance is by Deodato from his 1964 debut solo album "Inutil Passagem", reissued as JSR 8482702 in 1998. Enio scanned the lead sheet from one of his library of Brazillian songbooks. I can almost play it on guitar! and the voicings are very cool.

This is a wonderfully catchy and simple tune that every jazzer should know so they don't have to allatime do the same three bossas.

2005-11-17T20:57:00.000-05:00

A GOOD BEBOP TUNE GONE BAD

We performed Hollyween weekend at Goodnite Gracie's here in Ann Arbor and a highlight of the evening for me was ripping through the number Dean refers to as "Chick Corea". I poked around on AllMusic.com and figured out the tune is Chick Corea's "Got a Match?" MP3, PDF. This recording is from 1986 or so and the electric bassist is John Patitucci.

There's actually a lot I don't like about this. It seems sort of gratuitously fast (which may be sour grapes because I can only play this at 180bpm or so and they are up around 300), Corea's synthesizer sound is kind of whiny, the bass sounds like it is sped up because it is so high, and the whole sound is really compressed and processed - synthetic you might say. I guess that is an "elektric" style like a smooth quiet maglev train. I always associate "electric" with hot tube amps, Wurlitzer electric pianos and Fenders.
There's a Blue Note twofer LP called "Chick Corea" that has a 1968 recording of this tune, but I don't know who's on it. It's probably more like real jazz.

2005-11-11T21:59:00.000-05:00

The prototype webpage for the Del Kellog Trio with Sylvia Simone is actually online now but I'm already working on a new one because this one is obviously much too silly. When we played Halloween weekend at Goodnite Gracie's we played a tune that Dean identified as "the Chick Corea tune". It is in fact entitled, "Got A Match". Coming soon is Rob's requested LP rip, former Manhattan Transfer vocalist Laurel Masse's album, "Alone Together". Don't say I didn't warn you.