Wildsea and Brancalonihack

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 …

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FILED UNDER: RPG

Sam Gendel Transcription Done

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 …

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Practice Log: 11–17 February 2024 (Sunday–Saturday)

This entry is part 3 of 18 in the series 2024 Practice Log

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 …

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Lunar New Year 2024

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 …

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Practice Log: 4–10 February 2024 (Sunday–Saturday)

This entry is part 2 of 18 in the series 2024 Practice Log

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.

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Music @Jazzin Lab, Sejong City: Tony Lakatos and Thomas Stronen & Time is a Blind Guide

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. 

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December-January Reads

This entry is part 1 of 9 in the series 2024-Reads

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 …

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Horn Acquired! and Practice Log: 1–3 February 2024 (Thursday–Saturday)

This entry is part 1 of 18 in the series 2024 Practice Log

Horn Acquired! Last Wednesday, I made a trip to Seoul to purchase a second-hand baritone sax. I should pause to mention that buying a bari sax in Korea is a hell of an undertaking. Nobody plays the damned things here: second-hand tenors and altos are common, and even sopranos are pretty easy to find, but almost nobody seems to have any interest in the big horns. Of the four I found for sale over the last few months, one was exorbitantly overpriced (a guy was asking 35 million Korean won—let’s call that about $30,000—for an early Selmer Mark VI low-A …

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Bill Evans: How My Heart Sings by Peter Pettinger

This entry is part 23 of 23 in the series 2023 Reads

Like all the posts in my 2023 reads list, this comes at a lag. Quite a lag, as it’s 2024, but hey, that’s how it is.  Here’s some listening for the post. It seems only appropriate, given the topic. I haven’t actually finished this book, but I read the vast majority of it in 2023, so I’m counting it as one of my 2023 reads. So far, I’ve really enjoyed it, which surprised me since I’ve never really dug into Bill Evans’ work before (aside from on Kind of Blue). I was surprised, in fact, when I saw a review …

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Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton

This entry is part 20 of 23 in the series 2023 Reads

Like all the posts in my 2023 reads list, this comes at a lag. Quite a lag, as it’s 2024, but hey, that’s how it is.  Ducks is a sizeable autobiographical graphic novel about Kate Beaton’s time working at the Alberta oil sands projects, and what she learned living and working there. What she did learn living and working there is… well, it’s pretty heavy going, as you will intuit if you know about the ducks to which the title refers. In 2017, a judge ruled that Syncrude (one of Beaton’s employers in the book) was responsible for the deaths …

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