It Was A Good Day For Music

-

Today, (well, actually it was yesterday now that I am getting around to scribbling this), was a very good day musically.

Scott Bailey's Second Line Jazz Band, (in which I play clarinet) performed at noon for a community group in Lakeway, Texas. It was an excellent room for music and the house sound man did an outstanding job. It helped a lot that they had a very good grand piano on stage. We play so much with electronic keyboards these days that I forget what a real piano sounds like. It was a packed audience and they were very appreciative.

This evening was the Tons Of Fun Jam in Round Rock. In addition to our regulars, a couple of Dan Augustine's friends showed up. Todd Sloan brought his piccolo and a wonderful tubist, Bill (I did not catch his last name) surprised us with some simply excellent ensemble and solo work.

After the jam, I was talking with Todd and discovered that his Dad is an old friend and sometimes musical cohort, Dave Sloan. Dave is one of the better string bass players in Austin.  Todd certainly inherited some of Dave's musical genes.  You do not often hear a dixieland piccolo, but if you get the chance to hear Todd, it will become one of your favorite instruments!!!


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The 4th of July

-
Image
Not the most beautiful place to awaken, but it was nice to have hot coffee waiting for me! Spent last night in the parking lot of a small truck stop in the town of Riesel. It sounds much worse than it was. The Casita has blackout coverings over the windows and is insulated well enough that little sound from outside gets through. And, of course, it was quite nice to walk inside the truck stop this morning and find fresh coffee ready and waiting. We had looked for a more aesthetically pleasing spot, including one rather long, after dark tour of a series of narrow gravel roads. The roads cut between crops of corn and sorghum that seemed to tower over the FJ, Once I had started down the road, there was no place wide enough to turn the FJ and Casita around.  Our luck held and we wound around and came out back in Otto, where we had started. That is when we decided to go back to a more traveled road and found the truck stop. We got up at 6 am so we could get t...
Read more

Why is it called "Playing" when you make Music?

-
As I woke this morning, that is the question that was rolling about in my otherwise empty head. Most people would dismiss such a useless question as merely the result of indigestion from the prior evening's meal of greasy canned meat, but I could not so easily dispose of the thought.    I don't suppose that it makes much of a difference, but, yes, the words we use are important. The denotative and connotative thought patterns associated with the word "play" are diminutive:  engage in activity for enjoyment and recreation rather than a serious or practical purpose For at least the last 2500 years, philosophers have considered music to be an essential element of being human. They have considered music to be a foundational cornerstone to education and life. Why, then, do we use the word " play " when we talk about making music? It seems to me that music has a serious and very practical purpose: music allows us to communicate things that cannot be communicate...
Read more