Author: Jeff Albert

June travels

I was on the road for about half of June. From the 14th to the 23rd, my wife Jennifer and I were in Italy. The trip was half business/half vacation. I played four different concerts with Marcello Benetti. Two in a trio with Helen Gillet on cello, and two as a guest with his Italian band Supuesto Blue.

Soundcheck silvia

Supuesto Blue bassist, Silvia Bolognesi during sound check before our performance at the UDIN & JAZZ Festival.

Privata

Our fabulous lunch at a privata near Cervignano, Italy. All of the meat, cheese, salad, and wine was a product of the farm at which we were eating.

Valley from castle

The view from Castle Runkelstein, looking back down the valley towards Bolzano.

Tunascicle

The main course of our meal before the gig at the Mirano Oltre Festival. I called them tuna-scicles, which doesn’t come anywhere near doing them justice.

When we got back from Italy, I had a day and a half at home, before I left for a week long music information retrieval workshop hosted by the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford University.

Theknoll

The Knoll – Home of CCRMA

The week was great. On top of the beautiful weather, the instructors were fabulous. They were each among the best in the world in their specialties, and came from a healthy mixture of academic and industrial situations. There is a course wiki that has lecture slides, and a wealth of material about what we learned over the course of the week.

Ccrma2011mir

Course participants and instructors, from left: Chris Colatos, Jeff Albert, Kamlesh Lakshminarayanan, Sean Zhang, Doug Eck, Eli Stine, David Bird, Gina Collecchia, Stephen Pope, Steve Tjoa. Not pictured: Jay LeBoeuf, Rebecca Fiebrink, George Tzanetakis, Leigh Smith, Dekun Zou, Bill Paseman, John Amuedo.

On the last afternoon of the workshop we took a tour of the CCRMA facility. They have a great vibe going there and some super cool stuff. There is a bit of a museum aspect to it at times, but also some state of the art gear for making sonic art.

Radio baton

One of Max Matthew’s Radio Batons that had recently been revived and played at Max’s memorial.

View from knoll

The view from the front of the Knoll, looking across Stanford’s campus.

Recent Reading – The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue

The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue

The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue
A Phenomenology of Music
Bruce Ellis Benson, Wheaton College, Illinois
Paperback
ISBN: 9780521009324
Publication date: February 2003

This is the one book I finished during my many hours on airplanes in the past few weeks. I highly recommend it for those of you who like to look for the realities of musical practice, and not settle for the myths that we have adopted about what we do. It isn’t so much about improvisation, but it is quite interesting as a phenomenology of music.

Hanging with composers, or electroacoustic name dropping

Meeting people who are well known in one’s field is always a great learning experience. Sometimes all you learn is that a person you thought you respected is just a jerk. More often (at least in my experience), you learn that this person is not only a great artist, but a great person as well.

I have always had trouble separating my perceptions of an individual human, from my perceptions of the art he or she makes. I am predisposed to like the work of people who I have met and like on a personal level, just as I have trouble enjoying the work of people who I have met and determined to be jerks.

A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure of meeting Jon Appleton. He spent a week at Loyola University as guest composer. The New Orleans electroacoustic scene is littered with Appleton students…well, ok, Paul Botelho at Loyola, and Tae Hong Park at Tulane, were both Appleton students. Paul brought Jon to town for a week of teaching and a concert. I had several chances to spend some time with him, and it just confirmed that the famous guys are famous for a reason. He premiered a new piece, and his mastery was obvious. His thoughts on music and life as a musician were both clear and inspiring. And, he is equally fun to talk with about pizza, bourbon, and removing chili stains from pink shirts.

Last weekend I had the pleasure of hearing Lukas Ligeti. Lukas is a composer and percussionist, and he performed a solo concert of his works at Zeitgeist in New Orleans. The stuff he did that night was all electronic, and was a cool mix of sampled and synthesized sounds. He spent an extra day in New Orleans after his show, and ended up back at Zeitgeist the next night, when I played a duo show with Dave Cappello. Dave, Lukas, René (from Zeitgeist) and I ended up having a nice post gig meal/hang. Lukas has done a lot of travelling and has some interesting political ideas, so it made for a great night of conversation. It was so interesting, that we didn’t even talk about his famous father, although I did learn the correct way to pronounce the name.

Meeting cool people is far and away one of my favorite things about the life I am blessed to lead. I now have an even greater enjoyment of the works of Jon and Lukas.

I blame Nick, or any press is good press

We had a great concert last Monday night with the Laptop Orchestra of Louisiana at the Manship theater in the Shaw Center in Baton Rouge. There was even a nice review of the concert in The Advocate, which is Baton Rouge’s main newspaper. We made the front page, with two photos even.

Read the whole article here: http://www.2theadvocate.com/news/Music-from-things–you-touch-every-day.html

It’s funny, I have played trombone in venues all over North America and Europe with some of the world’s greatest musicians, but it is the gig on which I play glowing orbs and wiimotes that gets these two pictures on the front page of the paper.

Music+touchh+040511

Wiimote jeff

Photos by Adam Lau/The Advocate

Nick wrote the piece that produced that wiimote pic. I blame him.

We learn from our students

Students can turn you on the the oddest stuff. We talked about musique concrète in my Intro to Music Tech class the other day, and after class a student (Spencer) said it reminded him of this:

Dig the lederhosen wearing, serpent playing horn section. Spencer’s favorite part was the record scratching parrot voice. It’s like a modern day Officer Krupke…sort of.

LOLs video

Maybe the only way to break my unfortunate “one post per month” recent pace is to make multiple posts on one day a month…

Anyway, last Tuesday the Laptop Orchestra of Louisiana (LOLs) played a concert in Free Speech Alley at LSU. It was fun. There was sunburn. Someone shot video.

We did a number of pieces that day. The piece in this footage is something we called “own instrument improv.” It is an improvisation, in which we each play an instrument of our own design. I was playing a joystick instrument that I designed for a piece called Forbidden Butch and another instrument that I call R2D2 because it sounds a little bit like the droid. They were both made in Max/MSP. The forbidden butch instrument uses a Logitech Joystick, and the R2D2 instrument uses an AKAI LPD8 as a controller, although it can be played without the LPD8. If you want to check out the patches, send me an email, and I’ll send them to you.

In Bb 2.0 or internet art

My friend John Worthington tweeted this link earlier today. It is a fun instance of internet art.

http://www.inbflat.net/

As described on the site:

In Bb 2.0 is a collaborative music and spoken word project conceived by Darren Solomon from Science for Girls, and developed with contributions from users.

The videos can be played simultaneously — the soundtracks will work together, and the mix can be adjusted with the individual volume sliders.

Creativity and distractibility

The Wall Street Journal Online posted an interesting article that looks at creativity and attention deficit. The basic idea is that distractions can lead to creative discoveries.

Such lapses in attention turn out to be a crucial creative skill. When we’re faced with a difficult problem, the most obvious solution—that first idea we focus on—is probably wrong. At such moments, it often helps to consider far-fetched possibilities, to approach the task from an unconventional perspective. And this is why distraction is helpful: People unable to focus are more likely to consider information that might seem irrelevant but will later inspire the breakthrough. When we don’t know where to look, we need to look everywhere.

My wife always busts my chops because I am an unrepentant eavesdropper. I can’t help but to listen to interesting conversations that are happening in my vicinity. Maybe that is just a sign of my creativity, and not some moral deficiency.