Last year, I checked out Troika: Numinous Edition and ran a couple of one-shots (well, three-shots) for groups from both of the gaming Discords I socialize on. I wrote up an entire post about it, only to… entirely forget to publish it. So anyway, here it is, many months late.
This is my regularly updated practice log, mostly for accountability with my saxophone practice. Below you can see my practice for the week. If you’d like to check it out, here’s my goal list of tunes for the year. This week, it seems I’m continuing my work on “Up Jumped Spring,” and casting about regarding what I’ll transcribe next. Maybe that Dexter Gordon solo on “Misty” I mentioned last time, but I’m not sure. I’m taking a little break for now, or rather, I’m focusing on preparing for the coming semester this week, since classes start on the 4th of …
A few weeks ago, I was fortunate enough to participate in a playthrough session of Joanna Piancastelli’s Before the Storm, which is the final final game in Pelgrane Press’s storygame collection Seven Wonders. I should have written up the session at the time, because now some of the details of the session have slipped away from my memory, but I’ll focus on my impressions of the game as a system and an experience, rather than the plotline that unfolded during our particular session.
So Wildsea is… wild. It’s essentially a FitD game but with the multi-playbook character building of Spire. The setting is bonkers, the character types are bewildering and fun, and the best thing is that the mechanics are flexible enough to accommodate all types of characters. For example, my character is a gau “char.” In normal people language, that means it is a fungus-humanoid and the ship’s cook. A lot of my character’s personal contribution to the game is cooking, and its personal quest is to be a kind of Darwin-meets-Julia Child, wandering the world and documenting recipes and cooking methods …
Well, I spent the last week (yes, it took me a week) transcribing Sam Gendel’s solo on Lonnie’s Lament in this live performance with “Tiki” Pasillas and Fabiano do Nascimento: You can find a link for the PDF on my brand new Transcriptions page. I figured I might as well have a page that indexes these, assuming I’m going to do more. (And I do plan on doing at least some more of them.) I’m not sure why it took me so long to get around to trying to transcribe improvisations. Other than one hurried study of a Charlie Rouse …
This is my regularly updated practice log, mostly for accountability with my saxophone practice. Below you can see my practice for the week. If you’d like to check it out, here’s my goal list of tunes for the year. This week, it seems I’m concluding my work on “Misty”—I think I “have” the tune, as I “got” Lonnie’s Lament last week. Maybe when I finish transcribing one Lonnie’s Lament solo, I’ll do the same for a version of Misty—maybe one of Stan Getz’s, like this one. As far as picking other tunes, I was tempted by Anthropology or Ornithology, but …
Happy Lunar New Year! Above is some ddeok guk I made for the holiday, because I felt that maybe we should have some Korean food this Lunar New Year holiday. My wife was so happy with it she had seconds and thirds! And I had to tinker to make a decent vegetarian version of the meal, so that was flattering! Trailing behind the whole new year hustle as I do—often I’m teaching a winter class from late December to mid-January, and it doesn’t feel like a new year starts until that’s done—I tend to count new years off the Lunar …
This is my regularly updated practice log, mostly for accountability with my saxophone practice. Below you can see my practice for the week. If you’d like to check it out, here’s my goal list of tunes for the year. This week, it seems I’m working on two tunes: “Lonnie’s Lament” and “Misty.” There are reference examples I’m working off and listening to linked from the list of goal tunes. Below, you can see a log of my practice sessions for the week.
A couple of months ago, my wife excitedly informed me that she’d discovered the existence of a jazz club in Sejong City, only about a ten minute drive from our home. The place is called Jazzin Lab and they hold regular concerts, of which I’ve now had the chance to attend a couple. Both groups performing were new to me, but both were really outstanding, so I thought I’d do a little writeup while they’re fresh in my mind.
A new year, a new reading list. This one’s for books I read in 2024. As always, the posts come at some delay after reading. I’m also going to go with shorter posts responding to multiple books from now on, which might give me a little more time to, uh, read. Oh, one more thing: I’ve recently (as of last November) joined a book club. Normally I’m ambivalent about book clubs and wouldn’t join one, but a friend invited me and the book list is interesting enough to make me give it a shot. Some of my readings will be …