Category: Personal

When I first decided to be a professional musician, my goal was to be a great craftsman musician. I wanted to be the cat who got called for anything that used a trombone. My goals have since developed into more specifically artistic ones, but I feel good about what I did as a jack of many trades trombonist. I played symphonies, and operas, and reggae bands, and had cool gigs with “big acts” as far ranging as Ronnie Milsap and Stevie Wonder. Coming up in that “sideman” scene, one learns much about the etiquette and unwritten rules of behavior that one must follow to remain regularly employed. One of the rules that can vary geographically, and even by sub-scene, is when it is or isn’t cool to send a sub. In New Orleans it is never cool to send a sub with out telling he leader, but on certain gigs, it is acceptable to call the leader and say “hey, something came up and I can’t do Saturday, but Jerry will be there to sub for me.”

Today I received an email from the great trombonist/composer/teacher Ed Neumeister. If you are not hip to Ed, check him out, his stuff is great. The email was letting his mailing list know about some upcoming performances and DVD releases. (Check the website for that info) Ed came through the New York craftsman scene on the way to where he is now, so I loved it when he closed his email:

Mark your calendar now.

Hope to see you there. Thanks!

Keep in touch.

Ed

PS if you can’t make it, please send a sub….

My involvement with, and exploration of, electroacoustic music has increased exponentially in the past few months, and it is a lot of fun. I am finding that new tools of expression are helping me increase my understanding of the factors that make music compelling.

Right around the time I started getting serious about exploring electronic music on a deeper level, this disc showed up in my mailbox. Cities and Eyes by The Skein: Andrea Parkins and Jessica Constable is a a duo project that lists the performers’ instruments as: electric accordion, effects, samples and live processing, synthesizers, piano, voice, and electronics. Some of those are listed for both musicians. To my ears, this CD does a great job of taking sounds that we don’t normally associate with “songs,” and putting them in a context that has the vibe of “songs.”

If you are not sure how you feel about electronic music, check out Jon Appleton.

I have spent the last three nights at the LSU Festival of Contemporary Music. The guest composer was John Chowning. He is a wonderfully engaging man, and ridiculously smart. That is a great combination, and it was a real pleasure to get to spend some time with one of the pioneers of computer music.

One of the most interesting learning aspects of the weekend, for me, was getting to explore LSU’s ICAST surround sound system. For the FCM it was set up as 12 pairs of loudspeakers, plus a subwoofer. The speakers are set up in a way that allows stereo mixes to be presented in a variety of ways that remain true to the original stereo placement, but allow front/rear motion, and variation of the sound in relation to direct or reflected paths from the speakers to the ear. That is a somewhat simplified explanation, as there are many other possibilities with the system. The part that excited me, was that ICAST provides a performance aspect to the presentation of prerecorded music. This makes the concert experience very different from simply listening to the pieces on a nice stereo. Several students had the opportunity to diffuse (mix) a piece each night. It was a lot of fun, and thought provoking on several levels. Diffusing also gives me a bit of the performers rush that I get when playing. Over the three nights, I got to diffuse Love Song by Paul Rudy, Le Renard et La Rose by Robert Normandeau, and Fat Millie’s Lament by Kenneth Gaburo.