Found on Google Earth

I've been thinking a lot about QE2 and what her faith will be now that Dubai's economy is crashing.

Here's a shot from Google Earth, taken about three weeks before I joined, at the Malaga pier.

You can also see her at across from the Sydney Opera House, also on Google Earth.

Anybody want to hazard a guess what'll become of her?

You never know where the music business will lead you.

Last night I played a gig in Houston with The Pictures, a band that I work with sometimes when they need to beef up the horn section by adding a baritone sax (that’s me!) and a trombone. Jimmy Shortell and I drove in a rented Hyundai to the Toyota Center, not really knowing what the event was that we were playing for. When we got there, it turned out we were playing Yao Ming’s charitable foundations annual fundraiser for Chinese disaster relief.

There being only one stage in the Arena, we shared the stage with Yao Ming. Let me tell you folks, you have no idea how big this guy is until you park alongside him and look up.

To prove my point, here is a picture of Chris, the singer in The Pictures, who is not the tallest of men (but one of the best singers in the business). As you see he goes up to Yao’s belt buckle and no further.

Yao struck me as a very gentle guy: soft-spoken and humble. He’s done a lot for earthquake relief--building schools, dealing with the ramifications of 70,000 dead. He’s a credit to the human race.

Three Little Words (no vocalist)

Here we are sightreading a vocal arrangement of Three Little Words, a song as old as dirt, which I wrote last week.

You'll have to whistle the melody after the intro, because we're still hammering out the vocal responsibilities.

The tenor solo is Tony Bray, a recent transplant to Austin from Long Beach, California. Piano solo by John Groves.

How We Spent Our Valentine's Day

We worked! ORB at Wells Branch community center. And Jan used our Flip camera to make this, which turned out to be the last tune of the night.

We'll be at their July 4 party again this year. Last year I had my implant for 3 whole days. I played, though.

Sightreading Rehearsal, and Our Flip Camera!

We had an excellent rehearsal last night, playing stuff that no humans had played before. Until now, the notes were in Finale and I was depending on the playback sounds in QuickTime. Plenty of stuff was plowed through, all of it found to be worthy of further attention. Now all we need is a place where coffee or beer is served. I’m afraid Jimmy’s music room, while it sounds nice, is too small for folks to come and hear us.

Participating: Paul Baker and Tony Bray on tenors, Chris Kapral on baritone, Kevin Flatt and Jimmy Shortell on trumpets, Ulrican Williams on trombone, Ulrich Ellison on guitar, John Groves on piano, Kris Afflerbaugh on bass, and Jimmy on drums. We ran several vocal charts, but no canary. I want to hear the band parts first. The gentlemen did an outstanding job. Here’s the first read of my adaptation of Billy May’s Front Page Rag, from the movie of the same name. Not an easy piece.

. . . And that brings to mind that Jan and I bought a Flip movie camera. I am a very happy adopter. I have a Canon HD movie camera, but I seem to always have too few arms and legs to operate it. This Flip is just a point & shoot, but sometimes that’s all you need. It’s a cinch to capture video and it records sound pretty well, although I could have presented something better than my back when I was playing clarinet on Front Page Rag.

Why 3 Corgis Remind Me of Playing Dixieland

This is a video of our 3 dogs--2 Cardigan Corgis and a Corgi Mix (guess who has all the brains).

The mixing in of Dixieland music is intentional. As anyone who's ever played it knows, Dixieland is about weaving in and out of personality types.

Charts charts charts

Wonderful news! We booked a gig through Gigmasters (I think, I haven’t been dealing with clients since my cardiac problems). Anyway, in addition to all the gigs for the 9 piece band (Original Recipe) our website declares that we have another band (Original Recipe Big Band) with a link to another site.

I’ve been a busy little chart writer, and have added to the heap Celebrate, 3 Little Words, Green Eyes, Stray Cat Strut, Do the Hustle and No Spring This Year, a ballad my dad wrote when I was a couple years old for Lad Carlton’s band back in Fitchburg. (I got an email from Lad’s daughter. He wants to know what’s going on with Dick Fenno’s kids. Maybe we’ll have something more concrete to report now.)

I got a CD from Bob Bastien, who played alto in Lad’s band in 1954. How he tracked me down I’ll never know.

The demo has S’Wonderful, No Spring This Year, Sunny Side March, and a theme song dad wrote for Lad. Three out of 4 arrangements live, in slightly modded form, in my book.

Speaking of demos, we had to cancel the Promiseland session on February 21 because we booked a gig for the smaller band, one that starts at 4 in San Antonio. I need to get together with Mike at the studio and push back a time we can all agree to.

But meanwhile I am cautiously calling a rehearsal for next week. The upcoming big band gig is in June, in Stonewall, and pays $200.

That means leverage. Calendars graven into stone will thus be made flexible.

When My Horns Were Stolen

There was a time when all the musicians who played softball in Santa Cruz rose as one to my aid. Between the first version of Sofrito and the second, after I’d gone to New York with drummer Jim Baum and came back to town, after I’d played alto, baritone, flute, clarinet and bass clarinet with the Glenn Miller Orchestra, I was in town to play a few tentative gigs with what became Sofrito once again, transformed.

My entire net worth (expressed in woodwind instruments) could fit into the back seat of my 1964 Dodge Dart, and that’s where it was when, after one of those gigs, I arrived at the house the girl who became the mother of my children. I may have locked the doors of the Dart. Her west side house was plenty quiet at 1 in the morning when I arrived.

We were pretty deep into softball then, as I’ve described elsewhere, playing long ball on the short-porch fields of Branciforte Park as many afternoons as not and taking in an Oakland A’s game once every couple weeks.

While the blissful ignorance of all people who trust human nature to be a benign force in the universe, there was my Dart, loaded up with expensive woodwinds, most of them Selmer Paris. Like an idiot, I compounded my stupidity by bringing in my flute, an Armstrong worth maybe $80.

Some time in the night, the car’s contents were removed. I knew that the car’s locks could be easily picked. I was blindly trusting the universe to protect me from villains. Someone with other ideas strolled by in the wee hours.

When I woke up at the crack of noon, I discovered the deed. There was no broken glass, but none would have been required, because any 1964 Dodge Dart could be unlocked with a coat hanger. My horns were gone.

So I called my home team. We had a meeting, dividing the city up into sectors, some heading for the music dealers, some for the pawn shops, some for the schools. Soon we received information about a guy in town who was bragging about coming into some woodwind instruments suddenly. It’s hard to imagine back then that this whole thing was co-ordinated without the benefit of cel phones, which at the time were toys of the idle rich.

The sun went down, and the softball gang had grown militant. They were going to track this guy down if it took all night. Sadly, there was no progress until early the next morning, when my once and future wife went off to Cabrillo, the local junior college and, finding a message chalked to one of the boards of the music department, called the guy’s number and recovered every one of my horns.

So I guess we were not all that successful in our plans to enforce simple justice. The guy left town, and the goods were recovered by Sue Slater and Holly Ray, not by the softball guys with the testosterone pumping.

No matter. We had a potluck at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center to celebrate the oddest thing, the coming together of forces for good in Santa Cruz, where it was at times impossible to get people to see mutual interest in anything. We played music that night, and it was good.

Treasured friends who took part in this mobilization included Joyce Cooper, Sue Slater, Peter Burchard (then known as Peter Ashley), Steve Bennett back when he still flew single-engine planes, Olaf Schiappicase, Dennis Broughton, and many, many others.