The Bis Key Chronicles

The Woodinville Community Band DVDs for the Fall 2009 presentation of “The Story Tellers” came out this week. Thanks goes to Jeff Keith who does a stellar job of creating, editing, and tweaking the final product. Leah MacDuffie is our director and we luv her to bits. Sometimes I wonder how a community band could ever have a director as good as this one.

We had a lot of work with this concert and I think this was the easiest number on the program. I try to put some more video up as time allows as right now Suzy and I are off to lunch and then to the Issaquah Village Theater to see their production of Neil Simon’s “Lost in Yonkers”.

The winner of four Tony Awards, including Best Play, and the Pulitzer Prize, Lost in Yonkers is a remarkable coming of age story. Two young brothers are forced to enter a dysfunctional household consisting of their formidable grandmother, their dim-witted aunt, and their Uncle Louie, a small-time thug. As comical as it is poignant, this Neil Simon masterwork is an examination of lives in an oppressive household, with a dramatic climax that is certain to leave us spellbound. Or so the literature goes…

How much do we luv this story and hope that he gets away with it.  :O)

                      NPR: Is That A Castle You're Hiding Behind That Haystack?

A British farmer who secretly built a castle and hid it behind haystacks to avoid trouble from local planning authorities was ordered by a court Wednesday to demolish it.

Farmer Robert Fidler built the mock Tudor castle in Surrey and moved into it with his family in 2002.

He says he had applied in 1996 to build a house on his farmland, but the authorities wouldn't grant him permission. So, when he and his wife were feeling "desperate," they found a loophole in the British law.

Read more…

More and more of my friends are using the TripIt platform/service. You can use it privately but share out individual schedules to coworkers, family and friends or use it privately for you own tracking.

I don’t travel us much as I used to, but when I do I often end up cobbling some info for the other people involved. This service pulls hotel, airline, and rental cars info all together into one report. I started using this a year ago, or more. It is one of those rare services that I have continued to use amongst the many sites I sample and then forget.

  I was in the restaurant yesterday when I suddenly realized I desperately needed to pass gas. Fortunately the music was really loud, so I timed my gas contributions to the atmosphere with the beat of the music. Always trying to find non-standard ways to practice I thought to myself, I wonder if this counts as practice time? And after a couple of songs, I started to feel better.

As I finished my coffee I noticed that everybody was staring at me...

Then I suddenly remembered that I was listening to my Zune.

So, how was your day?  ;O)

Those of us in the sax world who frequent sites like the Woodwind Forum or Sax on the Web know Jason from way back. His engraving work is legendary. Some of it can be seen on JayDumar’s Photostream on flickr.

Yamaha recently reported on this on their blog post titled “More Beautiful Engraving…”. Just imagine one of these on the band stand.  :o)

I caught this Monday showing finally last night. I record them but you can see it online at http://www.thedailyshow.com/full-episodes/mon-january-25-2010-bill-gates. I luv being able to record through the Verizon set box rather than having to purchase a set top box and then having it go bad three or more years later. That’s actually happened to us by the way.

It would appear retirement doesn’t mean the same thing to Bill as it does to most people. He’s only 54 and apparently kickin’ butt in the world of charity. The Gates foundation is continuing to bring innovations in health and learning to the global community.

Bill Gates reminds me of Thomas Edison who hired many, many scientists, paid them well, so that they could enjoy the fruits of their labor. Through Microsoft, we have many scientists working on interesting projects that most likely would not have seen the light of day for years to come. And now in Bill’s retirement, we see heath initiatives for poor countries and education programs for the United States that would not be funded otherwise.

Taken from the Sources of Insight blog of the same title:

“A few years back, two men, a paralytic and a man with a terrible lung disease, were confined to a hospital room.  Each day, the medical staff would help the man with the lung disease sit up for an hour and, during that time, he would gaze out the window and describe what he saw to his paralyzed roommate whose bed was on the side of the room away from the window.

He’d describe children running and playing, a father walking with his child, a bluebird in a tree across the way, how the wind moved the clouds, how the rain washed the sidewalks and roads clean, and two little boys playing catch.  His descriptions gave the paralyzed man a sense of hope, a will to live.

One day, the man with the lung disease died.  The paralyzed man asked to be moved close to the window and, when the nurses obliged, asked them to help him sit up so he could see out.  Again the nurses obliged, but all that could be seen from the window was a wall.

Shocked, the paralyzed man told the nurses about the wonderful things his former roommate had described and about how those descriptions had given him hope.  The nurses were a little shook up by this and told the paralyzed man something he didn’t know about his roommate.

"He was blind," they said.” as told by Michael Michalko author of Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative Thinking Techniques.

The point is, the world is largely in your mind.  It’s how you think, how you dream, that determines how you see and perceive things.  Life is not about waiting for storms to pass, it’s about learning how to dance in the rain.

Read more…

I got a email from a Sax Professor and repair tech asking for playing opportunities for an adult returning to music performance. I thought I’d capture my response so that I can point to it again (rather than redraft it) as I get these requests many times a year.

The groups I play with in the Redmond (Eastside part of Seattle) have *long* sub lists that can be both frustrating at first blush and interesting as to the possibilities. The number of people wanting to join got so big a couple of years ago that we had to institute an audition process. But all is not lost. Consider these options and from a hobbyist like me who mans the 2d alto and tenor chairs mostly:

1. The complete list of Community band in the US and around here is at http://boerger.org/c-m/commother.shtml. I search on the string ‘WA’ and then work my way through the list. With over 1100 community bands listed, that’s the most efficient way I know to search. I know that Monroe and Shoreline were looking for clarinets and saxes last year. I joined the community band to start networking with other hobbyist musicians. Concert band isn’t my thang, but it catapulted me into jazz in a big way.

2. Create your own sax quartet. I did this and now have ~12 people who rotate in during the year. Last year we actually gigged three times. Here is one of the videos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udy4n8ggWys All I had to do was procure the music and start pokin’ around for sax players in my part of town. I actually converted my wife into a sax player from her primary instrument of clarinet. My collection of sax quartet charts is now over 100.

3. Create your own Big Band. I did this a number of times and now run the Microsoft Jazz Band at work performing 4 times a year and the Pacific Cascade Big Band performing at swing dances monthly. These groups have the longest sub list of anything I do. And my personal library of jazz charts is over 200.

4. Start playing to Aebersold Jazz play-along books if you aren’t already. Great for developing those solo chops. If you’ve never done this start with the ‘Maiden Voyage’.

5. Open mics are around town like at Crossroads of Bellevue in this part of town. I don’t do this kind of thang because I prefer to play an hour or more of music to playing one song a night.

6. Just start taking lessons and see if your instructor can hook you up with playing opportunities.

It may take you some time to get into the network of fellow musicians interested in the kind of music you prefer. But I believe it’s more about the journey to where you want to be than getting there. Along my trip I’ve started up jazz combo like the Dissonance that gigged about 8 times a year. After three years I gave up on it even though we were getting gigs. I am sooo an intermediate player, but there are a lot of us out there. And if you have organizational and networking skills like I do, it can be easier.

BTW, I’m taking two lessons a week and have for the last three years or so. I started playing after a 29 year hiatus and found out that I probably never was a very good player even though I played first chair throughout high school. If you are pretty good on your instrument, start with the Community band list (item 1 above) to find a community band in your part of town and work it from there.

Kamran points to this 1 of 111 YouTube video of the Ken Burns “Jazz” DVD set. I started watching Ken Burns Jazz series on NetFlix this year. It’s fascinating with a lot of eye-opening info like the story of saxophonist Sydney Bechet.

I wonder how soon the need for a dedicated TV will be necessary. Most new TVs for purchase today come with a VGA connector to hook it up to your computer. And more TV shows and movies are becoming available on the Internet. Still I like having the news on in the background for a half hour on the TV while I’m surfing the Web.

I’m drafting a post about installing security camera around the the exterior of the house that I’ll try to post next week. Suzy and I are headed to Crossroads for our Sunday lunch and walk.