Having played all the types of saxes show here from Soprillo to contrabass sax (thanks Jay) I can tell each come with their own idiosyncrasies and challenges. But playing the sopranino made the soprano easier to play. And playing the soprillo made the sopranino seem easy.  :o)

Interesting quote that caught my eye, “Unlike the last two recessions — earlier this decade and in the early 1990s — this one is causing much more job loss among the less educated than among college graduates.”  Read more.

I keep looking for indicators that we’ve reached the bottom of this recession/depression. But I’m not seeing anything that indicates the trend line angle is less steep or that we are bouncing yet. There is a lot of pain out there. I’m still getting two to three emails from friends on the unemployment rosters, some for the first time in their lives. Last week I learned one of my friends got hired with a good company. But most just have interviews so far.

Who would have predicted this two years ago. Actually there are always people who predicted correctly and in most cases incorrectly.

I often put things in my blog, okay like 90% of the time, that are all about me being able to find them in the future. So it is with this picture (GIANT SAXOPHONE IS SO LARGE PLAYER STANDS ON LADDER (Jun, 1924) from Popular mechanics in 1924. I followed this link from a note in Facebook from Terry Hummer, writing professor and saxophonist enthusiast.

Terry sez, “It did work. It required 3 players: one for the upper stack, one for the lower, and one to blow. Three of these instruments were made; they were melted down for the metal during the war, so no longer exist. They were a Conn company advertising gimmick, but they really did work. Accounts of witnesses report that “it sounded like an earthquake.” No recordings were ever made, alas.

There was an article about these instruments (double e-flat contrabass saxes) in Saxophone Journal years ago.”

To bad it was melted down for something as sax as a war. And to have made three of them is at the very least astonishing. Anyone else think the young lady looks like a billboard?

Reading Harri's (owner of SOTW) blog titled: Jam Sessions in USA and Greater Helsinki Area and was struck by the differences and indeed some of the sameness encountered at Jazz Jams overseas.

Alexei Zoubov, now an American jazz musician, writes in his piece titled Soup Kitchens and Jam Sessions, "Nevertheless, the image of a soup kitchen (or bread line) pops out in my mind at jams more and more often lately.

I guess that has partially to do with the present bad economic situation. There are less and less gigs, especially jazz gigs, less and less jazz clubs. And the expansion of jazz education produces more and more young players that just can’t find any spots to play jazz.

Except for jam sessions. These are the places where hungry for playing jazz musicians can get their “bowl of jazz soup” for free, or “at a reasonably low price” (see the definition of a soup kitchen above).

They sign up on a list, sometimes pay $5 or so (nothing bad about that, the money goes to the house rhythm section) and thus form a line to play a few choruses in a couple of songs."

Sometimes I wonder if the jazzers I run with know how lucky they are to know so many great musicians and play in so many bands. We conduct sessions about twice a year and talk about doing it more than that. It’s usually a potluck where invitees bring some food and drink. And usually we’re reading out of Real Books.

Sometimes there are so many musicians at a jam that I don’t play or play very little. My favorite jazz jam was one where very few people showed up. So those playing got more time on the ax and those listening got more food.  :o)

I was actually able to record that session and my favorite part comes at minute mark 7:35 where I’m finishing a solo and Doug on trumpet comes in behind me. I’m surprised at first and then play an accompanist role which turned out kinda nice.

Reading the Real Books is okay, but the cats I hang with don’t really do the four part harmony on the fly very much, so the protocol is to read the head, solo, solo, … and the close with the last reading of the head. If I’m on bari sax I will try to play an interesting bass line.

The success of any given jam session is usually based on the quality of the musicians and luck. But there are some down and dirty rules which if applied can almost always improve a session. Grant ‘King’ Koeller captured them in a blog post titled, Jam Session Etiquette.

My favorite is of course, “11. If there is more than one horn present don't all play the melody in unison. Use different harmony parts and chord tones to create interest.” Getting a like-minded group of in tune and alert musicians together can be a real challenge. But once you find these folks, you tend to invite them into your bands and back to the Jazz Sessions for just a little more jazz soup please.

The Microsoft Jazz Band got together for their first concert of the year. For the last five years we have only done the ‘Day of Caring’ gig in September. But last year there were a lot of people interested in doing more gigs. Our venue, the Third Place Books enjoys some status as for as gig venues so we were keen to add them to our portfolio.

Here’s a picture of the gang including our new vocalist Shaz.

The set list consisted of some of my favs:

And here is some YouTubeage with a montage of three songs:

If you want to videos from other performances of the bands I sit in with check out my YouTube site.

Question from a friend of mine: Melissa’s car is dying. Those b@stards want a ton of money to revive it (one more time). I need to buy her a reliable car for under $5000. Any advice on how I would go about finding a good deal? I looked at Craig’s list for cars sold by owners and although the prices were better than offered by the dealers, they were still a bit high I think.

My response:

AutoTrader.com came up with 2326 used listings within 50 miles of our zip for cars under $5000.

I’m sure you know this but once you find a car check:

1. Does the owner have maintenance record? If not, could be trouble.

2. Will the owner allow you to take to your mech (only give mech up to 2 hours). If no, walk.

3. Buy the April ’09 Consumer Reports auto issue on stands now and look at their best recommendations for cars under $5000. (This is something Andy taught me years ago.)

4. Check for lemon status based on the VIN in #3

Good luck.

Tip of the hat to TJonTheRoad of the Woodwind Forum for bringing this to my attention. Sheep, dawgs, LEDs… What more could you ask for?  :o)

There are so many great people to hear at my company as part of the Visiting Speaker Series. This is mostly for Dad who used to work here too. I know he misses going to many of these.

ABSTRACT: What enables us to innovate, problem-solve and be happy, smart, resilient human beings?

Our ability to play. We’ve all seen the happiness in the face of a child while playing in the school yard, or the blissful abandon of a golden retriever racing with glee across a lawn. This is the joy of play: purposeless and all consuming and most of all: fun. Yet play is anything but trivial, it is a biological drive as integral to our health as sleep or nutrition.

Beyond play’s role in personal fulfillment, its benefits have profound implications for child development and the way we parent; education and social policy and even the future of our society. From new research suggesting how the direct role of three-dimensional-object play shapes our brains to animal studies showing the startling effects of the lack of play: it seems that play might be the most important work we can ever do.

BIO: A medical doctor and a scientific researcher, Dr. Stuart Brown was the founding clinical director at Mercy Hospital and Medical Center and an associate professor at UC San Diego prior to founding the National Institute for Play. Dr. Brown first recognized the importance of play by discovering its absence in the life stories of murderers and felony drunken drivers.

His years of clinical practice affirmed the importance and need for healthy play throughout the human life cycle, and his later evaluation of highly creative individuals revealed the centrality of playfulness to their success and well-being. Dr. Brown was the Executive Producer of the three part PBS Series “The Promise of Play” and his research in this field has been profiled in cover stories from National Geographic to the New York Times.

I’ve tentatively signed up to attend this one. And I’ve sent Suzy an email titled, “Teach me, baby.  :o)” so that she can show me how to get the book on my gen one Kindle that she gave me when I bought her the gen two model.

Yup, that's Charlie Brown updated for the 21st Century in the Anime style.

This post is for family and friends who like me (ten years ago) didn't know about this song recently voted the most popular Brazilian song ever. I am listening to Susannah McCorkle sing Águas de Março and I found this lovely and thoughtful presentation in Wikipedia.

"All these details swirling around the central metaphor of "the waters of March" can give the impression of the passing of daily life and its continual, inevitable progression towards death, just as the rains of March mark the end of a Brazilian summer. Both sets of lyrics speak of the water being "the promise of life," perhaps allowing for other, more life-affirming interpretations, and the English contains the additional phrases "the joy in your heart" and the "promise of spring," a seasonal reference that would be more relevant to most of the English-speaking world."

You can read more about Susannah many places including this blog post of mine from 2007.

Is it Friday again?

A friend of mine was mentioning learning to make what her family calls monk’s gruel in preparation for the hard time ahead. I said to myself, self, that’s an interesting idea. Imagine my surprise when I found out it was simply oatmeal or a malt-o-meal kind of thang.

Gruel is a thin porridge made by boiling groats (the crushed grain of various cereals) in water or milk. It was commonly eaten in the Middle Ages. In more recent times gruel has often been recommended as a food for invalids, frequently with the addition of lemon peel, nutmeg, wine, port or spirits. This is a typical medieval gruel recipe.

Ingredients
! tablespoon of groats or oatmeal
2 tablespoons of cold water
1 pint of boiling water

Cooking Instructions
First put the oats, together with the cold water, into a saucepan and mix together until smooth. Then, over this, stirring all the time, pour one pint of boiling water. Now stirring frequently boil for 10 minutes. Serve.

Bon appétit.

Pattie Maes & Pranav Mistry unveil the “Sixth Sense” game-chaging wearable tech gear. This video was taken at TED at MIT.

This shows how possible a toolset, much like what was hinted at in the movie “The Minority Report”, will be for everyone ten years from now. At one point in the presentation the speaker talks about being able to access a Word Cloud about the person you are interacting with. Well, I provided that in my blog post here.

How’d you like your word cloud to be accessible by others? I found this tech talk to be fascinating. Enjoy.

I was posting some pics to Flickr.com for a group of new friends, sax players all when I saw this stunning piece of photography, nay art. I struck by the beauty and at the same time strangeness that is Europe. You don't see pictures like this of the US. It just made me feel like I was back in Europe.

The owner is EssieP and according to his profile a single male in the UK. A little further sleuthing turned up his blog with the weather from Birmingham, England displayed. And he sez he is a teacher; from his displayed art, I can believe it.

So was the damage here done by the ravages of time or by the big one, a World War? Look how clean the grounds are. Surely this is a park cared for by a civil servant? I know that in Germany, the parks were kept clean mostly by the citizens.

Enjoy more at http://www.flickr.com/photos/essiep/.

Suzy and I are usually up for new experiences so we thought we'd try the 13/8ths, eight-beat whole notes, and 5 sharps or 6 flats world that is graduate-level classical music. Now truth be known, I had the imitable Paul Woltz on my left side, so I could hardly go wrong right? Ah, it was not to be as I got lost many times and struggled with the behemoth that is my bass sax. Still all in all it was a fun and interesting experience.

Bill Stickney hosted the event in his music studio and I felt a kinship with him immediately as I've hosted so many gigs in my own music studio in Redmond. By time all the players showed up, there was one contrabass sax, two bass saxes, two bari saxes, three altos,  and two soprano's. Besides Paul, there were such sax world luminaries as Jay Easton, Ward Baxter, and Scott Granlund. As polite and quiet as these people were when a sax wasn't in their mouths, there may have been some more famous people, but I didn't catch everyone's name.

I didn't catch the first fellow's name in the first picture, but that Scott Granlund next to him sporting the silver sop and soul patch. The middle picture is my wife Suzy, a returning after a break sax player named Jason, and another fellow who I don't recognize. In the last picture above is Ward Baxter and Fran.

On the contrabass is Marcel, then me on the Eppelsheim bass and Paul on the Buescher. In the middle picture is Paul, our host Bill, and Jay Easton. At one point we had the too-high guyz with Jay joining them on a curvy sopranino. As we were sight reading and I was getting up every once in a while and trying to catch some goodness to video, here is some excerpts that were interesting.

After two hours we packed up and walked out into near blizzard conditions with cars stalled on hills and visibility reduced to a few feet in front of the car. Fortunately for us, en route to a party, we drove out of the worst of the storm. It was a very interesting experience playing with this group, our first sax choir, and one Suzy and I won't soon forget.

Suzy and I went to the movie Watchmen yesterday. Heck, I'd been waiting for it for over a year. And the pundits said it could not be done well. Some of the Watchmen faithful said it shouldn't be done.

We found the music to be excellent, the story well told, and the art so true to the original pulp that we felt some frames were direct lifts from the comic books. "Watchmen takes place in an alternate history United States where superheroes emerged in the 1940s and 1960s, helping the United States to win the Vietnam War. The country is edging closer to a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, freelance costumed vigilantes have been outlawed and most costumed superheroes are in retirement or working for the government."

Prepare to have most of your media cultured opinions about superheroes, male and female challenged. Alan Moore starts the movie with a death of a superhero and then deconstructs most of our preconceived notions about what a superhero should be.

It used to be went a certain male appendage was shown in the movie, the movie was automatically rated X. But scenes with Dr. Manhattan's (a shower, not a grower) was littered throughout the movie. And along with a rather graphic bedroom scene, the movie was rated an R. Times they are a changin'. So for those who ignore ratings and bring their kiddies to the movie, maybe you should think twice.

Our rating for the movie is R and 4.5 out of 5 stars. Just under 3 hours, there was only one part of the movie that made you wish it'd been edited a bit more brutally. And that was a long fight scene near the end.

As is our custom Suzy and I head to the Crossroads of Bellevue mall to have lunch with Josie and her family. One of Nicky, my grandson, and my favorite activities is to watch the chess players and some times even play a speed match ourselves if no one else is there. I took some pictures last weekend and captured this picture which I like on a number of levels:

It has so much happening in this picture, it could be a Where's Waldo picture book page. First there are the young lovers in the top right, and then you might notice the Dad holding his child, followed by the two lovely and entranced girls watching the action. That's Bert taking a seat after making a chess move. And the chess clock is on the right. This chess action brings a lot of people and draws from a huge pool of diversity goodness.

Here are some more select pictures from the weekend at the Mall.

               Josie & Amber, Nick likes to watch, Suzy, Amber (with the bunny ears) and me

Hanging out at the mall on the weekend has become a great American past time. And the malls aren't just about selling anymore. They are filled with libraries, free concerts, and chess games like this. Be well.