Category: MY MUSIC

A Serving of Links

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A sampling of what I’ve been digging into lately. Books: Remember Choose Your Own Adventure books? Remember how those Fighting Fantasy books by Steve Jackson & Ian Livingstone added die rolls and character information to that paradigm? Now imagine reading one and not having to flip from one page to another. Imagine one that takes advantage of all the possibilities of ebooks. Is this new version of Dave Morris’ classic Heart of Ice what you imagined?  (I haven’t read it yet, but it’s getting rave reviews, and I plan on checking it out.) R.H. Kanakia presents: a Taxonomy of Readers. I’m …

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My Secret?

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Got a funny tweet this morning: @GordSellar Just received your memoir from @HonestTea. #location pic.twitter.com/kGxqOYeVKS — Derek Brown (@derekbrown) September 6, 2013 Ha, funnily enough, I submitted this a long, long time ago, and forgot all about it. But for all that, the principle seems to hold. In the past couple of weeks, since relocating to our new apartment, I’ve: started exercising regularly (that is, swimming daily, and tracking it on Fitocracy, because gamification = motivation boost; I’ll be adding a regimen of bodyweight exercises next week, too), drafted close to 10% of the novel I’m working on (I should …

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In Lieu…

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… of an actual blog post, the last recorded musical homework of my Introduction to Jazz Improvisation course that I’ve been taking over at Coursera. Two tunes this week, because we have no analysis/written homework this time. The first was a blues in concert F: Yes, the horn section sucks. But I wanted the tune to have a little more oomph. I actually made the foolish assumption that the track was going at a steady tempo, but it wasn’t, so I couldn’t cut and paste the horn section stuff to another chorus as I’d intended. Ah well… (EDIT: I redid …

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WWSRD? (What Would Sonny Rollins Do?)

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The title of this post is a question every tenor saxophonist asks himself or herself at some point, and I think it belongs on a T-shirt. I’d buy a few of them for myself, to be sure! Anyway, what led me to come up with this expression is that my homework this week in my Jazz Improvisation course at Coursera involved recording the head (the pre-existing melody) and one chorus of (imporvised) solo on Keith Jarrett’s tune, “Memories of Tomorrow.” I actually have a relationship with this tune going back to high school: my saxophone teacher at the time, Mike …

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“Natural Selection” Trailer

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UPDATE (18 August 2013): I forgot to mention, this short film will be screening in Portland early this October at Zompire: The Undead Film Festival. In fact, it was the first film mentioned among those that got “early selection” for the festival, and I couldn’t be prouder of Mrs. Jiwaku, who directed the film. Original Post: The Korean title is “Natural Selection” (well, the Korean equivalent: <자연선택설>) but the English title isn’t, though Mrs. Jiwaku and I both call the film by that working title. (The English title is “Environmental Pressures & Species Adaptation” which, okay, whatever…) Anyway, we finally …

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