Fire Sale

My original plan for financing my grand piano purchase fell through. The stamp collection that I have kept and fostered and insured and cared for over the last forty years turned out to be worth far less than I thought it would. The buyer, who was very professional, knowledgeable and courteous told me what I already knew: the hobby is dying. Kids have Facebook, Nintendo, X-box, and their phone, and many of them have never seen a piece of mail with a stamp on it. No surprise then that young people are not taking up the hobby and there is not market for stamps, even for some as nice and relatively rare as mine.

I dove into Craiglist and it wasn’t long before I found a Yamaha C3 (very nice piano, that) for $2000. After two days of fervently trying to contact the seller, I finally heard back from them. Unfortunately, I quickly realized something was amiss, and a cursory search with the text showed up number one on a website called scamdex.com. No C3 for me!

Speaking of C3's: Here's a C15 stamp, one of many I will be selling soon.

I’ve been watching two pianos in the north Alabama area on ebay. Both are Yamaha’s under six feet. Both are being sold by families with some kind of vague need. Both have a disclavier attached (not something I want). Both are at least one hour from my house. So far, I’m just watching those.

A trip to the Steinway Piano Gallery in Nashville turned up a relatively affordable new piano made by Samick. I wasn’t impressed with its feel, but it looks and sounds good. Still, something about, “What’s a Samick?” and “Well, it’s a German company, owned by a Korean company...I think.” Then, “So it’s a Korean piano?” “No, Indonesian.” I don’t know. I mean, Yamaha makes pianos in Indonesia, too, no big deal there, but, nobody’s going to ask me about my Yamaha.

Next phase: Try one more time to sell my ginormous, semi-refurbished square grand piano, start piecing out my stamp collection on ebay, and use the proceeds to buy a nice Yamaha baby grand, used. Wish me luck. Or better yet, buy my piano and stamps.

Core Collection – A Picture

When I first became interested in jazz, I picked up the Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings and decided that acquiring the entire core collection – 187 (in that edition, the eighth) “must have” historic jazz recordings – would be the best way to learn about jazz. So I went through the book and made a spreadsheet and then set about finding all the recordings. Some of my efforts over the years have already been documented in this blog. In March of this year, I was able to track down and purchase three very hard to find, pretty expensive CD’s and announced to Mrs. S that I had completed my collection. The next step was to photograph it.

Several times, I stutter-started the project (much like my piano restoration effort), usually giving up due to lack of space, lack of time, or general resistance to the huge effort it would take to lay out that many CD’s so that they would be more or less visible in one photograph. But after the tornadoes rolled through Alabama last April, I’ve sort of been on a mission of getting rid of “stuff”. “Stuff” is nice, don’t get me wrong, but if a tornado blows it all away, you won’t have any “stuff” and you won’t have much of a way of getting it back. So, I thought it prudent to lighten my load. And now that I’m much more mature and knowledgeable about jazz music and my likes and dislikes, I decided that I should sell off the CD’s that I’m never going to listen to. Before that, however, I needed to make a concerted effort to take a picture of the collection as evidence that, at one point in my life, I did in fact have possession of the entire core collection, all at one time. Here’s what it looks like in chronological order:

Me and the core collection: CD's are in chronological order

This was actually the second layout I did, and it’s good that I did, because the first layout was missing three CD’s. This was due to working from a bad list and oversight on my part, but the chronological list was complete and accurate. So, with the initial layout and this one, I was invested for about two hours of my time. Even though I was sweating bullets for all the bending and moving around without stepping on CDs, Mrs. S still talked me into rearranging them once more, to get the original shot that I set out to take: an alphabetical shot with me in the middle of them. So, here’s what it looks like in alphabetical order in five blocks of 36 CD’s, with some sets pulled out so as to not block the view.

Me and the core collection: Alphabetical order

Let me put that picture in perspective now: three years of collecting, three hours of arranging, one photo. This is, I believe, also the first time all the CD’s of the core collection have been photographed together. That is “photographed together” and not “PhotoShopped together”.

Although I am tempted to keep this collection together, simply because of the achievement, but also because I might fancy updating it with the selections from Penguin’s current edition, I believe I have proved all I could hope to prove by assembling this collection, once, and so now, for many of the reasons I mentioned above, I’m comfortable just liquidating this and getting rid of what I don’t want to listen to and trading them for some that maybe I do.

If you fancy you want to have your own core collection, you need to go to amazon.com and ebay right now and buy up the CD’s I’m selling there. Some of them are really hard to find.

Days 84 and 85 – Saturday and Sunday, May 14 and 15 – Andddd...........next!

Goals: Finish the piano

Music: Gerry Mulligan’s “Original Quartet with Chet Baker” (both discs); Bennie Moten’s “Band Box Shuffle” (both discs); Paul Motian’s “The Sound of Love”, Fats Navarro and Tadd Dameron’s “Complete Blue Note Recordings” (both discs).

With jazz improvisation class finally over, I have nothing but time for working on the piano. And after my trip to Memphis where I saw Francis Scott Key’s square grand piano and the non-functional shape it was in, I’ve been feeling a little inspired to get my piano back into operation. So I set to work.

Needless to say, there’s nothing left but a lot of little jobs, most everything cosmetic. I just take each job as I think of it and in whatever order necessary to complete the work properly. I obviously needed to get the key and hammer assembly back in, which meant repairing the one broken hammer and fabricating the missing one. Using spare parts that I bought on e-bay, I started with repairing the one broken hammer. It just needed a new pivot head (I’m calling it – I don’t know what it’s called). Not knowing how much of the shank goes into the pivot head, I decided to split the old one to see for sure. Here’s what that looked like: 

Bottom shows pivot head in mount assembly. Those pieces are the old pivot head. Uppermost is the original hammer and shank.

After that, it was an easy enough job to remove one of the old pivot heads from the spare parts, drill and scrape out the old shank bits, and sand and shorten the actual shank to fit into the hole. Wood glue and a little eyeball measuring next to the other hammers, and it was ready to install:

Repaired hammer ready for installation.

Manufacturing the replacement hammer for the one that was missing was a bit trickier and time consuming. Because the hammer has to fit between a bunch of other hammers, it needed to be sized correctly, but all of the parts I got off the internet were for the larger hammers at the other end of keyboard. I thought about sliding all of the hammers down one, but I was worried doing so might create fit issues down the line, especially with the felt pads that catch on the wippens. I didn’t want to deal with that , so I decided to see if it was possible to use my Dremel tool to whittle down the size of the felt on one of the big replacement part hammers to make a small felt head hammer. 

What I started with (left), and what I hoped to finish with, approximately (right)

I found that it was an easy enough process with the only drawback being that it generated a lot of dust, and so I set to manufacturing a replacement hammer, doing most of the felt trimming outside. That was a two day process due to the amount of sanding needed and also having to glue the felt, using contact cement to hold it and super glue to harden it. When all was said and done, I had my replacement hammer:

Left: What I started with; Middle: What I ended with; Right: What I was trying to get to

It fit adequately in the spot that had been missing a hammer for almost forever. (I could tell by the wear on the felt underneath the hammer housings.)

Here you can see how light the felt is where I removed the hammer, but how dark where the missing hammer was. That hammer was missing for a long time, telling me this piano has probably been unplayable - and unplayed - for 50 or more years.

I reattached the wippen stoppers and hammer assembly to the keyboard frame, holding the wippens in place with string when I fitted the hammers back in place. Upon releasing the string, I found all the keys and hammers in working order. (Thank God!) I wanted to slide the keys in to see and hear them hit the strings and hear what it sounded like, but I still had to put some leather over the worn surface of the hammers. What’s next is next, so I set to it.

I marked up the thicker portion of the lamb leather that I will be using to cover the hammer heads with, having measured and calculated that some time ago. 

The leather, ready to be cut (pencil for scale)

I didn’t start cutting up the individual strips, though, because I’m going to cut and glue and cut and glue those individually so that I don’t have to mark them up or anything. I’m not really sure which would be more tedious, cutting all then gluing, or cutting and then gluing as I go, and although I think splitting the jobs would be faster, cutting and gluing in tandem should be easier and make it easier to avoid mistakes.

So, without having enough time to tackle the leather gluing job, including the fact that the outside temperature was too low to open the windows, I moved to some other minor finishing jobs. So finally, I cut a few pieces of felt and threaded them through the strings, working from photos of the original state of the piano (always an inspiration).

I still haven’t figured out what I’m going to do about the missing damper arm. Hopefully I’ll get lucky one of these days and come across some damper arms on the internet. Until then, I’m going to have one low, long-ringing F note.

When I finish the piano, that is.

Advanced Jazz CD Collecting: A Quick “How To”

The basis for my jazz music collection has always been the Penguin Jazz Recordings Guide’s “Core Collection”. Remember that I started out in jazz without owning a single jazz album, except for three culled from a Wall Street Journal article about “must have” jazz recordings and some average stuff borrowed and burned from the library (I don’t do that anymore, so don’t call the FBI.) . So using the core collection of the Penguin Guide eighth edition, I began buying jazz CD’s.

As is to be expected with a list like the core collection, probably more than half the CD’s are common, relatively inexpensive, and easily found on amazon or ebay. But as you pick what I call the low hanging fruit, you are left with high hanging fruit that gets increasingly harder to find and more and more expensive. Some of the recordings are downright rare, and as I’ve written before, some can’t be had for love or money. They just aren’t out there. Be that as it may, I am dangerously close to completing the core collection with only one or two substitutes, but no integral gaps from the 188 selections.

Notice there that I say “selections” because some are multi-disc sets and some recordings are now available either as parts of boxed sets or other compilations. That complicates matters. So here’s the “how to” for completing the core collection:

1)  Get the easy ones first. Lots of artists can be had for just a couple of bucks: Bill Evans, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, etc. Most every selection on amazon will have a “People who bought this also bought…” underneath with a bunch more of the selections you will need to complete the collection. Pick up what you need.
2)  Buy used. Used CD’s are almost always half the price of new, or less. There are some CD’s I literally picked up for the cost of shipping. 
 3)  Keep track of what you have and what you don’t. You will quickly form a mental database that will help guide your search and will alert you when you come across something rare or hard to find.
4)  If you see one of the rare ones, buy it. You have to convince yourself that money is not an issue here, because there are some that I have seen and failed to purchase because I thought it too expensive, and then I never saw the thing again. It’s frustrating. More frustrating than breaking the budget.
5)   Search ebay and amazon everyday. The foreign amazon sites are also worthwhile. I found some on amazon Japan that I couldn’t find anywhere else. Use the wishlist (amazon) and watchlist (ebay) to keep your eye on prices and availability.
6)  Spend the time and money.
7)  Listen and enjoy your collection. You deserve it.

Depending on the availability of one or two CD’s and whether I opt to substitute or not, I should finish my core collection by the end of March. I plan to take a picture of me sitting in the middle of all those CD’s. It’s going to be exciting.

Days 71 and 72 –Saturday and Sunday, December 25 and 26 – Why piano wire makes a good murder weapon

Goals: Blow up the piano (nah, I’m kidding – just keep restringing)

Music: Art Pepper’s “Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section”; Joe Pass’s “Virtuoso”; Freddie Hubbard’s “Open Sesame”; George Lewis’s “Jazz in the Classic New Orleans Tradition”.

I continue to work hard at the restringing. It takes about an hour to do four or five strings, depending. Sometimes it goes a little faster, but rarely. As the strings have gotten longer, I’ve been having a hell of time getting the wire the correct length, because it is not possible to use the whole coil while doing the stringing, due to the proximity of the strings, and all the stuff that is in the way. One wire, I swear to God, I measured four times, cut it two inches longer than I thought I needed, and it was too short, so I measured again, got the same number, cut it four inches longer than I thought I needed, and that was too short. I decided to use string to measure actual lengths between pins, around string supports, etc, but there wasn’t a piece of string in the house long enough to do that. Mrs. S. has since supplied me with ribbon, which I used to measure the last of the five strings. I’ve decided to cut all five to that extra length and trim them down, because I really will blow up the piano in frustration if I keep getting short strings.

I really want the spare parts I found on ebay from a seller in Canada to arrive so I can work on something other than the strings. And anyway, I have to get some larger diameter pins, as I continue to have problems with untunable pins (probably five or six of them by now, and more to be expected). Since there are two layers of strings, I have to get the first layer complete before I can move on to the second layer.

Much to consider. I just want this project to be over. 

And why does piano wire make a good murder weapon? I don't know. Maybe because you can still use it in your piano after you pull some guy's head off with it...

Practice regimen

I’ve been thinking about my practice regimen lately. (As opposed to actually practicing, which would require that I sit at the piano and work, which I just haven’t been in the mood for lately.) Back in March, I developed a sort of plan, a list made up of things that I thought might be useful to practice on a regular basis. I put it in a spreadsheet so that I could print out a sort of tracking grid to actually be able to see what I was practicing and when and how often and sometimes (if I noted it), for how long. It was an excellent idea and I kept at it for one whole month before it got shunted to the wayside. Since I’ve been working on some new things in my lessons, I thought it would be a good idea to revisit it, add to it, and start using it again.

Here it is:


Obviously, there is far too much here to practice it all every day, unless you maybe do so for just a few minutes on each exercise or practice for at least two hours – which is out of my reach at the moment due to a lack of discipline. I would think that a minimum of ten minutes per area is required to realize any sort of advancement, but I find I have to spend more than that on most things before I feel I’m doing any better on it (like scales and stride work.).

One of the important things missing from the sheet is tunes. I feel that after practicing, one must make time for playing. That can be playing just to play, or playing to implement what was practiced. More often than not, for me, it’s the latter, because I think that’s what makes me sound better, but I also an not entirely against the idea of just playing a few songs to make me feel good in general and forget about the burn in my knuckles.

And so, having written all I can write for the moment about practice, I think I will go and actually do some. School starts pretty soon and if I’m going to take some classes, I’m going to have to audition, so, I’d better practice.

A bit of a rant

I wrote recently about joining the Jazz Heritage Society in order to plug some holes in my music collection as cheaply as possible. I succeeded nicely in picking up some classics such as Dave Brubeck's Time Out and Miles Davis' Milestones, plus a number of others, generally for around $5 a pop, which I consider reasonable. I have been finding, however, that these pre-internet organizations, especially the ones that have not kept up with the technology and have not established a worthwhile internet presence, really are hard to do business with. Some of them, like the BMG music club, have even had to go out of business. I think the JHS may be close to having to do the same very shortly. Here's why I think that.

First of all, the "printed" materials that came with my introductory shipment were right out of the stone age. You could almost smell the mimeograph solution on the letters. I hadn't seen anything as quaint since seventh grade. The "catalog" they sent was printed on rough, cheap newsprint. It was in color, after a fashion, but looks not unlike those "colorized" black and white movies.

Now, let's be clear: I joined the JHS just to get music cheap. And, I have succeeded in that, so far. But the other shortcomings I'm about to outline are, I think, inexcusable for an organization calling itself a "Heritage Society". First, going back to the internet discussion, I'm inundated, almost daily but easily twice weekly, with "Featured Selections" that I am required to respond to. Some selections that I have declined (in fact, I've declined every one so far), have even returned as featured selections again. Like my mom used to tell us kids when we were growing up, "No means no". I don't understand why the JHS doesn't get something as simple as that and can't make their website operate properly.

Next is the music. Take last week's shipment for example: Miles Davis' Complete In a Silent Way Sessions, and a 10-CD set of Chet Baker. The Miles set was just like the regularly available commercial set, chock full of pictures, information, liner notes, etc. The Chet Baker set, on the other hand, contained NO information about the recordings. None. Zilch. Zippo. Okay, sure, I got ten hours of music for about three bucks a CD, and these were also my first Chet Baker (and Gerry Mulligan) recordings, but, come on! Is it really asking too much to at least have a listing of the musicians playing on each recording? Maybe a blurb about when some of the bigger hits were recorded. I mean, really, isn't this a Jazz Heritage Society recording? What about the "heritage" part. That includes understanding the heritage of the recording, right? Just buying and listening to the music doesn't promote the heritage of jazz, or anything else for that matter.

It is going to be really, really hard to learn anything about the 200+ songs on that 10-CD set. I'm going to have to try, anyway.

My advice to readers is, go ahead and join the JHS for the cheap music, just be prepared to send lots of e-mails and fill in the blanks in your jazz education yourself.

A slow beginning to Finale

In my continuing effort to spur the economy on and to keep my interest in music piqued, I recently purchased a software package I had been relishing for the longest time: Finale 2009.

I cut my teeth on the free version of Finale Notepad, and I found it adequate for my purposes. But once I started trying to arrange stuff for quartet and big band, Notepad didn't cut it anymore. I asked around and did lots of research online, and the consensus was that Finale was the package to get. There are lots - really, really lots - of notation programs out there, and they mostly have similar features. I really just went with the one I was most familiar with that also happens to have the largest installed user base (as near as I can determine). With my academic discount, it was reasonably priced, and it arrived very quickly. I loaded it into my computer with no problem, started it up, and

Did practically nothing.

My ability to notate music for piano is now basically unlimited, but I pretty much had that before with Finale Notepad. When faced with a big band quantity of staves, I was stopped in my tracks. The saxes all had three sharps and the trumpets two sharps on my key-of-C song.

Uh-oh.

Now, I can make a few logical guesses as to how to go about notating a song, and certainly, I know enough about how to transpose to be able to move the notes up to the keys of D and A, but I have nothing but questions even after I make those assumptions. Like, do I write for the instrument or write for the piece? Namely, do I put the notes in the instrument's key, or in my key? What's the range of the instruments? Is there some way to transpose that automatically so I can write in a more familiar key and print in the key the musicians need to see the notes in? And what other restrictions are there on the individual parts? (Like, how many quarter notes can a trombone player play legato at 112 before he turns blue and passes out?)

I could go on.

Anyway, I've got probably the single most powerful tool for writing and composing music, but now I'm not only facing the daunting learning curve of the comprehensive application, I've got to actually know about composing music in order to get it down properly. I'll probably buy myself a composition book (of which I found several on Amazon) and try to learn composing and the software simultaneously. Maybe by summer I'll be ready to go.

In the meantime, that's $200+ injected into the economy by yours truly. Don't say I'm not doing my part.

Some practice hints

These are some things that have been working for me. They might work for you, too.

1) Even if it doesn't seem productive, practice all the songs you're liable to have to perform at least once each every day. On Tuesday night, not having much time to practice, I was going to limit my big band practice to the two pieces we are going to play in the February concert, but I decided to at least have a look at the third piece that the director gave me. I input the main line in my music program to get the rhythm right, and I practiced all the main phrases except for the obviously difficult ones (two of the, say, six or seven phrases). I didn't expect we would be playing it on Wednesday, but it turns out that the third piece is the "break the monotony fall-back song" for the band, and they love to play it. So when we got sick of playing one of the tunes, we did decide to play the third piece a little bit. Good thing I had looked at it the night before. I actually held my own. Then we played four pieces in combo, so yesterday, I played all seven songs over a period of about an hour. Today, since I will have some time, I'll actually work on improving. But they are sort of getting better by sheer exposure.

2) Practice right before bed, even if it sounds bad. They say your brain forges the neural paths from a day's learning while you sleep. I've noticed that even when I can't play something, even hardly at all, if I practice it more or less right before I go to bed, even if I just keep making mistakes and making mental notes of those mistakes, the next day, it goes smoother. If I'm not drinking while practicing, as I have been doing of late, the effect is even greater.

3) Mix hard drills with easy drills. This seems to give me some positive reinforcement. I work at something that I don't do particularly well, like a stride left hand or full octave scales in both hands, and after that I run through some simple arpeggios and drills, or a straight up scale or two. There was a time I couldn't really play much of anything on the piano, and the realization that now I can play these drills that were once, essentially, impossible, reminds me that I'm not wasting my time on the hard stuff. Someday, it too will be soundly based in my repertoire. (Who knows what ridiculously esoteric and difficult stuff I'll be practicing then.)

4) Never forget to reward yourself. After practicing rootless voicings over and over, I always like to go back to one or two songs with straight up, rooted, full chords. Let's face it: Repeated rootless voicings on solo piano, although they sound great at times, are desperately tiresome after a while. The ear and brain really crave resolution and 3-5-7 harmony when they are continually fed 3-6-9 harmony for any length of time. Give your brain, nerves and muscles what they want, and when the pressure and spotlight are on you, they'll give you what you want.

I'll have more practice tips soon.

Gear up!

It had been quite a while since I bought music equipment. In 1986, while I was living at my parents', I bought about $10K worth of stuff and built a small studio in the basement. I even glued acoustic panels and shag carpet remnants to the walls to help with the sound deadening in the tiny room. (We had formerly used that room to raise Discus fish, so it had plenty of electrical outlets all around the wall - perfect really - for a recording studio.) Back then, I even had travel cases for everything custom made so I could carry everything to Japan when I went back. Out of necessity, when it came to buying music equipment, I was a bit of an expert back then.

So, two week ago, when my ensemble instructor gave us all of six days' notice that we had to have our own equipment at the concert, I was a little pissed. Pissed because I would have to go through a lot of extra work to get my piano removed from its semi-permanent stand, but mostly because I knew that having to buy equipment can be a pain - pain which I was not looking forward to. Back 22 years ago, we didn't have the internet, so gathering information on equipment, researching prices, and all that took a long, long, long time. Using the internet to research what I wanted and how much it would cost me this time around was a breeze. The only catch was the narrow time frame. I would not be able to order off the internet and get everything sent to me in time. (Well, technically, I could have, but the first case I looked at had a retail price of $129 with free shipping, but expedited two-day shipping was $69 more. Who would pay that for what could be a one time gig?)

Long and short of it is, I did my price and product research online, but I was going to have to do my actual buying in the real world. I really only needed to buy a case and an 'X' stand, and it was pretty easy to see there were limited options for the former, but basically unlimited options for the latter. As far as the stand goes, a stand is a stand is a stand, so price was my only real criteria (I didn't want to spend more than $30, as they are usually available online for around $25). As for the case, my piano only cost around $500 in the first place, so I was not going to buy a $300 hard case for it. That just didn't make sense. Nope, a $99 soft gig bag was going to be the way to go. I called around to the three or four major music shops in the area, only to find nobody had what I wanted. This was on the Thursday after the announcement that we had to supply our own equipment. One shop told me they had a used gig bag, but when he went to make sure they still had it, he discovered it had been sold.

In the end, I was able to find one store that had 'X' stands reasonably priced (around $35) and another store that had a custom Yamaha case not unreasonably priced (around $165). So, I figured I was going to be in for $200, and I let it go at that. On Saturday, I decided to physically make the rounds of the stores, just to see what I could see. Since I had already called around, I knew where I could go to get what I wanted, although not necessarily at a price I wanted to pay, but I thought there was at least a chance I might see something that would work or that I would talk to somebody who could steer me in a different but acceptable direction. I set up my itinerary, and decided to make a stop at a place that over the phone told me they didn't have what I wanted, and from there, I would go in order to two other stores where I knew I could purchase what I wanted.

Well, there's something to be said for doing legwork. The first place I stopped at, although they had said they didn't have stands, happened to have one really nice one, still in the box, that met my needs perfectly. It was more than I wanted to pay ($65), but the salesman said he could knock it down a little. I asked about a case, and he said he didn't have any, but he might have a gig bag that would work for an 88-key instrument. I told him, that's what I'm looking for, even though I said "case". (This is probably where some confusion hindered my search: these guys differentiate between bags and cases. I just consider a gig bag as a "soft case". Oh well.) Again, he had one that was still in its wrap, and again, it was more than I wanted to pay, so I asked him to do a package deal. I ended up getting the case and stand for around $175, tax included, out the door. List for both would have been between $200-225. Online would have been around $130, or $200 with fast shipping, so all in all, I got what I needed when I needed it, pretty much within budget. I didn't even bother to visit the other two music stores.

I guess I still know how to do procurement of music equipment after all.

How to prepare to give a jazz concert

Here's a list of things a jazz ensemble should do to prepare for a concert:

1) Make sure you have a designated practice space that will not be commandeered by other musicians or groups, forcing you to cut short or cancel your own practice sessions.
2) Decide well in advance where the concert will be held - don't wait until less than one week before to finalize the venue.
3) Decide the date of the concert also well in advance - don't wait until the week before to decide, "Well, Tuesday, not Thursday." (This, together with #2 is also important in being able to tell folks who might attend your concert when and where it will be held - two of the critical factors in getting people to show up for... like... ANYTHING!)
4) Practice together every week for four weeks leading up to the concert. That is to say, one group session a month before is probably not enough preparation.
5) Decide on the songs you will play at least a month in advance so everyone can work out everything to their satisfaction. Whatever you do, do not wait until less than a week before the concert to finalize the repertoire.
6) Make sure everyone knows they are responsible for bringing their own equipment or otherwise making arrangements for having equipment at the gig - again, don't wait until a week before to tell everyone and expect them to be able to comply.

I'm sure there are a number of other things a jazz ensemble needs to do to get properly prepared for a concert. I'm sure our jazz ensemble didn't do any of those things, either. We sure didn't do the six listed above...

Our concert is Tuesday, Nov. 18. Hey, baby, it's jazz. We're going to make it happen, and it will be all right.

Zero to sixty in about eleven months

As attentive (and not-so) readers of this blog well know, since discovering jazz some two years ago, I have primarily relied on the Penguin Jazz Recordings Guide as my key reference to help me select jazz recordings to buy. I have used that book's Core Collection of 185 recordings as the list of what I should buy, basically using it as a checklist and picking up recordings by artists that catch my attention and have a selection (or two, or more) in the core collection. This has been helpful in selecting both dreams (like Helen Merrill with Clifford Brown and Portrait of Sheila by Sheila Jordan) and duds (such as The Magic City by Sun Ra and Sound by Roscoe Mitchell) to add to my collection - of course not knowing they are dreams or duds until after I get them - recordings that I never would have otherwise have thought or known to buy. Well, two days ago, I received After Midnight by Nat "King" Cole and yesterday, "At the Golden Circle" by Ornette Coleman, giving me a total of 60 recordings from the core collection list. (I have many more jazz CD's than that, however.) Pretty soon, I'll be adding a couple more, but the majority of my recent purchases are other things I have wanted that do not appear on the list. Anyway, I always wanted to mark the 60-point in my acquisitions, since it is almost one-third of the list and is quite a milestone in and of itself. I'll have to get on the Macintosh and check our iTunes and music database software to get a count of my entire collection for my next entry.

Nat Cole, by the way, kicks ass. It will definitely end up on the Yoity Tot list before long.

School days

Well, this week in north Alabama, the kiddies go back to school. Add five minutes to my daily drive time, as I go through two school zones and have to stop for at least one school bus a day, but add two hours a week to my sleep time, thanks to no more late night shenanigans by the neighborhood hooligans.

Speaking of going back to school, that's what I decided to do, too. I'm going to take a jazz improvisation course on Monday nights and a jazz ensemble course on Thursday nights. I decided to take them for credit in case I lose my job and end up pursuing a second degree in music, but for right now, I'm just a general student. I'm looking forward to the exposure it will give me to a lot of music and musicians, as well as the more structured environment to learn about music as compared to my weekly piano lesson, where I call most of the shots. It will be interesting and I'm sure it will give me lots to write about. We'll just have to see how much time it takes up though, as I have a feeling I'm going to really have to practice a lot.

Expect short entries in this blog in the future, unless I really don't have to work that hard.

I changed my mind

Here we are, two weeks later, and I still haven’t sorted the yourmusic.com situation. They assure me they are working on it, but in the meantime, the credit card I had on record with them expired, and I missed yet another selection of mine, Wayne Shorter’s Speak No Evil, one I was really looking forward to getting. Right after that, I got a rather rude, automatically (I think) sent e-mail that simply announced, “Dear ERIC, We have cancelled your subscription because of multiple unsucessful [sic] attempts to process your Music Queue shipment using your default credit card.” I rejoined by clicking on the link they sent, but I regret having done that. I should have left well enough alone. My plan now is to just buy the CD’s I want, when I want them, probably using PayPal to make the payment, and screw everything else having to do with yourmusic.com. I’ll still introduce you to them to get a free CD, if you are a glutton for punishment like I am, but I hereby officially withdraw my recommendation of their service.

Great music service gets downgraded - slightly.

Some time ago, at the suggestion of my piano instructor, I began a subscription to yourmusic.com. This is a neat site where they resell brand new club edition CD's for just $6.99 apiece with free shipping. I joined because I didn't have many jazz CD's and this provides me with a slow but steady diet of new music. The service is nice because you don't have to do anything other than buy one CD every month, with no minimums, and you just keep a queue on the site and they send you the next CD from your queue on a specific day each month.

At least, that is how it is supposed to work.

All of a sudden, last month, my selection didn't show up. (It was actually a McCoy Tyner CD I need for the experiment I outlined on March 13.) Then one day, I got a funky e-mail saying they could not process my credit card. This sort of annoyed me, because the day before the e-mail, I used the card with no trouble, and I hadn't been having any issues with it, not to mention that fact that I successfully bought about $100 worth of CD's from yourmusic.com with that card over the last 5 months. I went to my account information on the website, and it said it wanted me to input my credit card security code. Unfortunately, the site had that box grayed out and I could not input the number. I sent a quick e-mail to customer service. The next day, I get a reply saying it is fixed, try it now. Same deal. I send another e-mail. This time there is a delay, but I get the "all clear" from them, and so, I try again. This time I am able to put in my security code, but, when I press the "submit" button, I still got an "unable to process" message. At that point, I figured something was wrong and they just weren't jiving with American Express, so I put in my Mastercard details and hit submit, and,

"Unable to process".

I send off some more e-mails to customer service, each getting a little pissier than the one before, and I keep getting reassurances that everything is fixed, but the site just continued to refuse my credit card. So, I went to PayPal, put money in using my Amex and placed an order with the "pay by PayPal" option.

Not ten minutes after I do that, I get an e-mail saying, we fixed the problem and are processing your order. Great, I think, now I've got two orders on the way. I fire off another e-mail to customer service telling them what happened and asking them to make sure they don't duplicate the order. A couple hours later, I check my order status, and the whole order is cancelled, even though they've got my money. One more e-mail, and I finally got them to reinstate my order. Now, I'm just waiting for the dust to settle and for my new Amex card and CD's to arrive before I try yet one more time to get things back to normal. Yesterday, Mrs. S told me that her regular monthly CD didn't ship because they were "unable to process" her credit card (which is a different number on the same Amex account as mine). Oh, well.

Truth be told, I couldn't find any other site where you can get brand new CD's for less than seven bucks, so I'm going to figure out how to get this service working again. That is to say, despite all my troubles, I still recommend this service. Everything was working fine until they goofed something up last month. I remain convinced they can fix their problems. After all, I'm offering them my business.

And if you are now thinking about signing up, drop me an e-mail so I can recommend you and I'll get a free CD when you join. That's the least yourmusic.com should do for me after all I've been through.

An Informal Survey into the Fame of Cole Porter

We have a safety slogan board at work, and I'm usually the one to come up with the slogan that goes on the board. I've been doing it for about four years, so I've been out of ideas for the last three. Yesterday, I came up with something that I thought would fly, and it did. I used Cole Porter's lyrics to formlulate a seasonal safety slogan to this effect:

Birds do it.
Bees do it.
Even educated fleas do it.
Let's do it.
Let's stay safe this spring.

(Yeah, I know.) After I put it up, I thought I would get some comments, but alas, no one said anything unless I asked first. Although when prompted several people said they liked the slogan, no one knew where it came from. So, I just started asking people if they knew who Cole Porter was. I estimate that I asked forty people. Most of them were older than me (I'm 44). Only five people knew or had heard of Cole Porter. Not one of them knew that the "safety slogan" I put up was a lame variation of a Cole Porter song. These were not the results I expected.

The youngest person to know Cole Porter was 30 years old. The oldest I won't say, but I think he's in his sixties. Of the five people who "knew" him, only three knew he was a jazz musician, and only one knew he was a composer. (A familiar reaction was, "I've heard of him, but I don't know what he sings.") I'm not disappointed, but I am surprised.

I feel privileged to be as "young" as I am and as familiar with Cole Porter as I am. Being a jazz musician does have perks, however insignificant they may seem to others.

The Jazz of Madonna

I’m this close to rushing out and buying a book of Madonna sheet music.

Readers will already know that I’m not a big jazz guitar fan. But I have a sudden, call it “fuzzy” feeling that Bill Frisell has put me on the road to change that. I’ve been listening to Frisell’s Have a Little Faith for two days now, and it is growing on me. I don’t like everything on there, but I’m really starting to dig his takes of some “pop” standards, like Bob Dylan’s Just Like a Woman and Madonna’s Live to Tell. Last night, I woke my Madonna CD’s from their hibernation and listened to them, trying to see if I could tell what makes them viable jazz songs. They don’t sound particularly jazzy, after all. (Do they?) But I suppose the bridges and turnarounds she uses are closer to jazz chord progressions than pop chord progressions, if one breaks them down and analyzes them. For me, at this stage, it is hard to tell. But man, I’m telling you, Frisell does some really cool turns with the melody and harmonies in Live to Tell, and it is fascinating. He lets the percussionists get a little carried away in the middle of the song, but then he brings it all back together with his guitar. I’m not a guitarist – although I plucked one for a summer way back in grade school – so I’m not sure how he even gets his guitar to sound the way it sounds. Half the time, the string doesn’t sound like it was picked at all, just, like, he looks at it, or strokes it or twiddles his ear at it, and a smooth, round, full sound comes out. Mysterious, like.

I’m determined to explore what makes Madonna (and Dylan) more suitable to jazz than other music. I mean: The Real Book only has two Beatles songs in it, telling me that the Beatles’ music is not particularly suited to jazz. (Of course, we’ve all heard Beatles songs in movies, elevators, slide shows, merry-go-round calliopes, kazoo compendiums, and solo Jew’s harp performances, and even some esoteric things, so, maybe I shouldn’t conclude what they are or are not“suited” to – maybe they’re suited to everything and jazz musicians just don’t want to take that ball and run with it.) (And, yes, I know there aren’t any Madonna songs in The Real Book … yet.) Anyway, Bill Frisell had a reason for picking those songs, and I don’t have his phone number, so I’m going to have to figure out on my own what makes Madonna rock when her music is played by a jazz musician.

I don’t think it has anything to do with the clothes she wears (or doffs).

Some more regarding learning about jazz.

Mrs. S is always picking up something interesting at the library for me. Yesterday, she brought home a CD called "Bernstein on Jazz", which is just what it sounds like: the great Leonard Bernstein talking about what jazz music is, what makes up jazz music, and how to tell jazz music from other music. It's another one of those CD's that, had I not listened to, I would not have felt a great sense of loss, but is one that while I'm listening to it, I keep picking up these little nuggets of information and perspective that I wouldn't have gained otherwise, or at least, would not have gained as soon and I'm not sure how I might have gained them anyway. Some of it made me smile all day long just to think about it. (He points out that classic blues are actually written in iambic pentameter and he proceeds to put Macbeth on a blues riff, which is almost as clever as having an opera singer sing a blues riff without syncopation and straight up without blues notes, which he also does.) When I walk around the company after learning something like that, I end up smiling to myself a lot because I think, nobody else knows what I know and I sense that everything else that surrounds me is so trivial when I am learning about and becoming more and more engaged in making music. It's a strangely euphoric, almost smug, feeling.

Bernstein also talks about "playing with" notes. That's what jazz musicians do. Jazz is the only musical art form where the performer and the creator are the same person. I realize that's one thing I need to work on: my creativity. I can play notes and makes songs sound respectable, but my music definitely lacks creativity at this point. This may not be a particularly dreadful thing. Creativity comes not just from talent, but also from knowledge, so, at least as long as I am increasing and improving my knowledge, my hope for achieving some level of meaningful creativity is also kept alive.

Revisiting Dolphy

Spending the weekend painting the garage. Yes, no joy. But, it gives me lots of time to listen to music, so I basically pulled out everything I hadn't listened to in a while. Eric Dolphy's Out to Lunch managed to make the cut, and I almost put it away without listening to it, but then I thought, aw hell, let's try it. The last time I listened to it, which was probably the second time overall, I had to turn it off. The dissonance, or whatever you want to call it, was wearing me out. This time, I listened to it the whole way through, and I didn't find it half bad. Maybe my jazz ears are finally developing, I don't know. I'll probably give it another try today or tomorrow.

Becoming a jazz musician is a process. I'm glad to find I'm making some progress.

De-cidedly good, but de-finitely not great.

Mrs. S had watched it once before, but having been on a classic song kick of late, we borrowed the DVD De-Lovely from the library and watched it together last night. If you aren’t familiar with it, it’s a movie about the life of Cole Porter starring Kevin Cline and Ashley Judd. I didn’t know much at all about Porter, so the movie was pretty interesting. The music is, of course, wonderful, and the producers got a bunch of big names – Robbie Williams, Alannis Morrisette, Natalie Cole, Sheryl Crow, etc. – to sing some of his signature tunes so we didn’t have to listen to Kevin sing/talk/whisper/warble his way through them (although there are plenty of other songs where we do). This movie makes a bit of a to do about Porter’s bi-sexuality, but thankfully, it’s handled tastefully and as Porter (apparently) did during his life, it isn’t treated as a major issue. My only gripe, and it is a small one, is that the movie seemed a little too surreal. The sets were all really bright and lavish, obviously trying to evoke “the jazz age”, but I think they could have done it better by hiring musicians instead of actors to play in the background (I get a little irritated when I hear the piano going down the scale and the pianist on the screen’s hands are going up, up, UP, or the drummer’s hitting the snare while the high-hat is going “tss-t-t-tss”). Then if they subdued the tone a little, made it just a little rough around the edges, I would have enjoyed the movie more. In retrospect, there was nothing wrong with the way the movie was shot. I just think the mood the director was trying to evoke was not the right one, especially when you consider part of the movie took place during the Depression and part also took place during WWII. Could be I was just in the mood for a slightly darker, “film noir-ish” experience. And I’m no big fan of Ashley Judd, and Morrisette’s solo was pretty grating, if you ask me. All in all, these are minor complaints, so, if you have any interest in Cole Porter and his music at all, this movie is worth renting/borrowing to check it out.