The Woodinville Jazz Ensemble was my jazz home for a number of years. But this year my friends and I split that band into two to create the all-new Woodinville Big Band. More about the Big Band later. Yesterday the WJE had their annual Ballard Locks gig. It was a perfect day and we had the biggest audience ever with between 75 to 100 enthusiastic listeners at any given time. Kudos to the Corps of Engineers for making this happen. I know it isn't an easy thing to set up every year. But we luv you for makin' it happen.

   The Brass Sections                                        The Rhythm Section

Greg the Director                                            The Sax Section

Suzy and I luved the way Greg, the bari sax player would stand up at the end of a song and direct the band to a close. It was not only cool, but in places rather complex. Greg Cagle (aka Mr. Honk) made it look easy. I missed being in the band, but you can only be in so many bands. I'm down to three right now and things are much easier as a result.

Way to go WJE!  :o)

Crank up the sound, turn to 1:30 minute mark, sit down, and shut up.  ;o)

Tip o' the cap to Brit Alan over in C Melody Land. Oh my!

Does anyone not know who Wall•E is? I've been listening to the Wall•E soundtrack and thinking can a Broadway show be far off?

Andrew, one of the Lead Writers where I work is a LEGO enthusiast with some serious creds. Today's Friday fun post covers his Wall•E interview with Pixar animator and LEGO fan Angus MacLane. But his whole blog is very interesting and one you might want to pass to the LEGO enthusiast in your family/friend circles.

Suzy and I are planning to go to the Wall•E movie, but this weekend is really busy with prep work for the WPC event in Houston fast arriving and two band gigs. And then there is a way cool BBQ with the temperatures in moderate Seattle expected to top 90.

So if you can't wait for the movie the official site is at http://disney.go.com/disneypictures/wall-e/ and from this quick picture excerpt you can see there are some activities to tide you over. My grandson is already all over this stuff.  :o)

What, where you not just reading? I'm listening to the Wall•E soundtrack.  :o)

An update from Benedikt: I did not expect it at all but my bass saxophone has been found in a second hand jewelery store in Munich. The store had bought it for 1100 Euros. They thought the price was too high, so they researched and found the stolen bass announcement on the Internet only a few days later. So they reported it to the police. I thank you all for your support!

Benedikt Eppelsheim, a very good friend of mine reports:

"<name removed> borrowed my Eppelsheim bass saxophone and did not return it. The engraving on the bell is "Eppelsheim Munchen" and the serial number (stamped in the bottom of the main tube) is "52". If someone finds it, the reward of $1500 will be paid when I have the bass sax in my possession in Munich, Germany.
Anyone who buys or sells this instrument is guilty of fraud. Lawful ownership of this bass saxophone #52 is not possible at this time."

Benedikt has made a report to the Munich Polizei and they said we could publish Johann Pohl's ID card. I've blocked out the signature.

Please feel free to contact the Munich police or drop me a note if you hear or see anything that will lead to the return of this instrument to the rightful owner. Do not try to do anything yourself as the police report this could be very dangerous, especially with this fellow.

I personally can't imagine the pain that Benedikt is going through. I've lent horns to friends of mine but I've also not done so because I didn't know the fellow well enough. The world of music is one big happy fellowship and an occurrence like this can ruin it for the rest of the many honest musicians.

This song, Moanin' by Mingus, is the kind of song that we used to play in the Jazz Ensemble. Now having moved on to the Big Band, I will miss these kind of songs. And when you add Jimmy Smith to the mix, all I can say is, "Smokin'!"

JB and Greg, you catching the killer sax section in the back, especially the bari sax?  :o)

The Woodinville Community Band is sponsoring the second annual Seattle and surrounding areas Community Band Festival. Maybe I'll see some you there to sample the music and enjoy the Shoreline Arts Festival crafts and goings on. Cheers.

Poster by Suzy, of course.  :o)

Neil Proff, my sax instructor, handed me an excerpt chapter from the "The Art of Small Combo Jazz Playing, Composing & Arranging" by Horace Silver. I has spurred me on to purchase the book which I have only be able to find in USED markets. From the book:

What should the aspiring jazz player practice: In my opinion, when practicing each day, time should be devoted to standard practice procedures such as reading, tone, breathing (long tones), scales, harmony, and finger exercises (technique). Time should also be devoted each day to acquiring a greater harmonic knowledge and a greater improvisational ability. Learn as many songs as you can. Learn the correct melody, harmony, and rhythm to these songs. Practice improvising on the chord changes to these songs. Tape yourself while improvising these songs and play back the tape to find where you're making mistakes.

Nothing here should be new to even the most casual music performer. And now we record, vice "tape" ourselves. Another thing that Horace encourages a musician to do is jam whenever you can. Go to sessions to sit in and improvise. If you can't find a place to do this start your own sessions as there are other musicians like us who will want to do this.

A new band I worked very hard to set up is struggling now. After two years of working with the board of a community band I was, with the help of the president and the Jazz Director, able to convince the band to split one overly large Jazz Ensemble into two bands. At one time we had 15 saxophones in the original band. But building the new band has been difficult as I look for at least one soloist per section, leaders to own the sections, music that the new band can play so that we can get our first gig. This has taken more time than I care to admit.

I'm approaching week two of my study hard enough to impress Neil when he gets back from his summer masters program and yesterday I only picked up the clarinet, futzed with mouthpieces, reeds, and barrels. So I lost a day and another chance to get better on sax, my primary instrument. A friend of mine, JB is working scales and the last I heard he'd practiced at least an hour a day since Neil left! He is an inspiration to me. Today Suzy and I will do at least an hour as we prepare for a gig next weekend.

It has been said that you can manipulate statistics to show anything that you might want to demonstrate. I was reading an article in one of the newspapers about how the Bush administration continues to manipulate statistics on terrorism. Um... okay, no surprise there. Let's move on to some statistics that are interesting from an educational viewpoint. 

We'll start specific and move to global interest. I often get asked how many people work at Microsoft and sometimes it's hard to keep up. Today SeattlePi.com reports:

Microsoft had 89,809 employees worldwide at the end of May, a company spokesman said Thursday. That compares with 78,565 in June 2007, the end of its previous fiscal year.

That works out to the biggest annual growth in the company's history -- even before the current fiscal year concludes at the end of this month. The past record was in 2006, when Microsoft added about 10,000 employees.

Another statistic that come up every once in a while is how large is Seattle. Turns out that isn't an easy question to ask. If you are talking about only Seattle and not the surrounding 'burbs, you get this rather dated statistic from the 2000 census:

• Population: 563,374
• Households: 258,499
• Median household income: $45,736
• People in poverty: 64,068
• Adults with college degree: 53.6%
• Median rent: $721

I'm guessing the population is now just under 600,000 but I have no way of substantiating my hypothesis. Here is another guess:

Seattle and Surrounds Population (July 2006)^[1][2]

• City -582,454
• Density - 6,901/sq mi (2,665/km²)
• Urban - 3,263,497
• Metro - 3,919,624

If my math is right, over half of the population of Washington state resides in the Seattle Metro area!

And of course there is the inevitable question about our weather answered rather handily by the Wikipedia entry on Seattle under there Jet City entry. (I thought we were the Emerald City.):

Note how little rain there is in the May through September aka Summer months. Shhh... don't tell anyone!

My final statistical search is one to answer that perennial question, how many people are there on this blue marble, aka the third rock from the sun. Jay Leno was joking about if a girl made it with a movie star all her friends would be told. If a guy make it with a famous movie star, all 6 billion people on the planet would know. Checking with the U.S. Census Bureau's World Population Clocks we get this info:

U.S. 304,390,296
World 6,704,743,622
15:17 GMT (EST+5) Jun 20, 2008

Hey, Jay was only off by 704 million souls. Have a great weekend everyone!

Merlin was talking on the Woodwind Forum about a rather influential flute method omnibus by Trevor Wye with the unassuming title of, "Practice for the Flute". I was able to pick up from Amazon.com's used book service for the cost of just one of the five books covered. Upon opening the book for a quick review with Suzy I found this little gem that has been said so many times and so many ways.

"Regular practice is most important to progress in technique. Time lost cannot be made up the next day. If an athlete misses two days of training, he doesn't try, in one day, to make up for all the time he has lost. He would soon pull a  muscle. Work regularly at technique. Work for longer at the keys you find most difficult. Whatever time is a to you for practice, about one third should be spend on these exercises. Work hardest at the weakest fingers. When a difficulty arises, repeat the difficult bar four more times."

I probably get at least 15 minutes in a day and have at least two days a week where I spend more than two hours and two more where I spend one hour. But still I need more time and feel guilty about not spending more time on the things that are challenging for me. I keep telling myself that if it was easy, everyone would be doing it and that it probably would bore me.

Some of my favorite flutists include Tim Weisberg, Herbie Mann and Greg Vail. I have been trying to play flute on and off for three years, but I don't even spend an hour a month on average on the instrument. It will be interesting to see if I spend more time on my music when I retire in seven years or so.

An intermediate sax player like me can only play a new instrument by spending a lot of time working on the voicing of the new instrument. It took me, at that time an alto and bari sax player, over a year to find my sound on the tenor sax. From everything I've read, the tenor and actually the soprano can be very difficult to get comfortable with for musicians who primarily play the alto and/or bari sax. I don't know if it is the Eb versus Bb thang; I suspect there is much more to it. And I know some stellar professional musicians who won't play anything but their main instrument because of this voicing challenge.

I did discover once I'd made progress on the soprano sax that certain tricks, if you will, can make your adoption process faster and smoother. For example; the high end of the soprano sax range was difficult for me until I started playing soprano clarinet and sopranino sax. Then the high notes were hard on the sopranino until I started trying to get the high notes on the soprillo to speak. Kinda makes sense doesn't it.  :o)

So when it comes to the bass sax, I struggled mightily on the Buescher TruTone that I had tweaked by Paul Woltz of Kennelly Keys. After a year or so of struggling with the intonation challenges that plague intermediate player (such as me), I finally sprung for an Eppelsheim bass sax. Oh the sound is sublime and the whole range of the instrument was available to me from day one.

I am now excited about two performances that I am planning. At Christmas (2008) I hope to play Ward Baxter's "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch" which is a concert band piece featuring the bass sax as the solo instrument. This will be performed at Seattle's Center House 6 December at 5 PM.

The other performance will be recording of a New Year's song TBD that I will get a rhythm section to provide background for. I'll post this on Microsoft Soapbox (this link is of the Dissonance my jazz xTet a number of years ago) and YouTube. I got the idea for the second project when listening to some rather weak performances on YouTube that were probably weak because of some of the limitations associated with using a vintage instrument and I suspect the musician did not spend the time working on voicing.

The last thing I'd like to do is get some of my sax playing buddies to record a sax quartet piece that includes a bass sax. But that's a stretch goal for this year.  :o)

We moved over the weekend to a new campus. It's taken a few days to get used to the new Advanta campus. And the new phone system is full of gadgets and gizmos including a headset that hooks into your primary computer instead of the phone itself. The old delay when someone answers is gone too. I used to have to guess when someone outside the corporate network answered the phone because I could not hear them at first.

The company has been feeding us lunch as the cafeteria and one of the other buildings are not finished. I'm on the north side of the building and there is a city park. Well, it will be a park after the construction guys finish. Right now you can't get to it because they have trailers blocking the way. But when I groused about the park not being finished, some of the ladies on my team said they like watching the busy construction scene. It is interesting.

Here are some pictures:

This is how dark and cloudy it was Monday morning when I arrived. The promotion picture of course shows the building in a sunny, cloudless day. ;o)

The space is state of the art with lots of space to meet, collaborate, and share a cup o' joe. But the offices are smaller. Still, in my first day I'm not getting headaches from the off gassing that happened in other new buildings I've moved into. That's probably because this is a 'green' building which takes advantage of materials and floor covering that don't use as much chemically active stuff as in the past.

The theme of our building will be Marvel comics. So there is a naming contest going on to name the conference rooms. I've submitted Captain America, Spiderman, and the Hulk as my nominations and I have this Marvel Comic poster on my hallway window.

Oh, and I'm on the fifth floor so I'll start doing the stairs again. This morning I've walked up and down twice so far. Maybe by time the next conference comes around I'll be in better shape, Marvel superhero shape.  :o)

How many of you reading this title would immediately think of the last eight years of of politics in the US? Because I am so depressed about those years, I try not to grouse about them too much. But when Eolake, a blogger/friend from Finland and the owner of DOMAI (not linked here because it is the premier site dedicated to pictures of beautiful women sans clothing), penned a short blog at http://eolake.blogspot.com/ on June 6th it got me thinking.

I often mention the Kornbluth's The Marching Morons in talks about the voters in American. But I drew parallels to the voting for president for the last two years to the Country of the Blind. It is easy to be bitter but the sadness associated with smart people voting for a party who's primary issue is about big business, money, and saving the rich from paying high taxes... Well, like I said, I try not to dwell on the climate of the country that proudly brought us Georgie (as my MIL called him).

I often talk to friends who are stanch republicans and they are so wrapped around the axle about fighting the good war overseas to protect ourselves from the God-less heathens and reducing the amount of taxes they pay for people who can't or won't take care of themselves. Sigh... how'd this get to be about politics again. Peoples, the two short stories mentioned herein are good reads. Enjoy. I'm gonna take Suzy out to lunch now.

I luv maps, maps of all flavors and types. So http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/ is on my RSS and periodically I get a stunner like this map aptly titled: Holmes, Sweet Holmes.

Know how my my son loves Sherlock Holmes I sprang into action. With my trusty friend Mrs. Suzy at my side the intrepid sleuths deduced a way to secret the map to my son.  :o)

It's bigger and more readable here: Holmes, Sweet Holmes: A Floorplan of 221B Baker Street.

Tally ho and off with you to check it out. The game's afoot. (Kinda reminds me of the Clue game.)

Update: I recomment The Italian Secretary: A Further Adventure of Sherlock Holmes, a new Sherlock Holmes tale by Calib Carr. Last year I bought it for my son, but read it first.  :o)

I've inadvertently trained my indoor-only cats to come running whenever I open a window. I train them to come when I call them by either playing with them or now by opening a window. Most times when I call them they come running. It's simple behavior reinforcement 101. The other day I caught a break and got this loverly picture of (from left to right) Thelonius, Dharma, and Macy twittering at the birds. Those of you with cats will know what I'm talking about; it's that weird sound they make when they want to "play" with the birdies.

The cats are almost two years young, full of energy, and quite active. I can't play with them enough. Theo can leap about six feet straight up. The girls leap pretty high too. And when I open the kitty toy cabinet doors... Well all I can say is watch out.  :o)

As I monitor my fellow blog posse's sites I see that this year appears to be a rather good one for plants and wildlife. So in that spirit I thought I'd take some shots of the very happy, healthy plant life around Casa du Glassa.

The new gnome was purchased to get little Amber (4 years old now) started in gardening. The purple bushes are so happy this year I couldn't resist including a picture of them. And the weather vane has survived another year. (There's a funny, okay not so funny story, about me installing that a number of years ago.) It's crooked now but I'll be damned if I'm going up there again.

The lilacs are sooo happy this year. This picture is after I've used many cuttings to bring the lovely fragrance into the house. The miniature Japanese maples (middle picture in purple) grow like weeds here. And the bushes with the white flowers grow with no irrigation or fertilizer. The carriage post flowers were added three years ago after the heather died because the kids kept trampling on it. This stuff grows like a weed too and needs no attention from me.

The lawn will go dormant in a month or so as I don't water the yard. The months of July - September are very hot and dry which is often described as a Mediterranean climate. I have a lawn guy who is very good BTW. I will often tweak the yard by pulling weeds or trimming beyond what the lawn guy does, but I don't really do that much to the yard. And the back yard is still a work in progress as in eight years I've tried various experiments and gardens to no avail. But there are five fruit trees back there.

At the urging of some of my favorite blog posse members, I'm finally getting around to posting some pictures of Suzy and my trip to Utah to visit our son's family including little 2 month old Addie, our third grandchild. We took a flight on Delta by the way that was less than satisfactory. The gate change 30 minutes before the scheduled departure. Then the flight was canceled for three hours. The staff never told us what was happening until we got on the plane. And then they made a lame excuse about needing to fly a replacement from Salt Lake City to Seattle. I suspect that they had such a small passenger list that they merged two flights to save money.

Once in Utah there was rush hour traffic which we had tried to avoid by scheduling an early flight. Then there was an accident so that the going got even slower. Fortunately our experience at the Marriott in Provo was excellent complete with employees who took the service with a smile to heart. So firstly some picture of Addie and family. (You might want to click on the title of this post to see just the post and then the pictures will be laid out as I formatted them.

Now some obligatory picture of the Pleasant Grove and surrounding area. Since we went to Salt Lake City the last time we visited there are no pictures of those highlights here.

All in all it was a great trip. We can't wait until our son finishes college and returns to the great Northwest. Wendy and Aaron were such nice hosts. We really miss them now.