Tag: MUSIC

Learned in the Studio

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Recently I stumbled upon a track online that happens to be the first studio recording I ever made. It was a guest appearance on a folk-pop album titled Xylon I, by a local musician named Xylon Cozens, and I play soprano sax on a single track. It’s odd: there’s basically nothing online about Xylon, or the album, even though it was recorded in 1995: I guess that says something about my own personal sense that the Internet caught on about that time: it did for me, but everyone was still on dialup, and it didn’t seem apparent that the Internet and music would necessarily …

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Monk, Amblyopia & All

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Wanting to check one detail about Monk’s life, I picked up my copy of Straight, No Chaser: The Life and Genius of Thelonious Monk by Leslie Gourse, and searched… and an hour later, I discovered I’d happily read a big chunk of the book. So far it’s a very balanced treatment, from what I can tell: Gourse doesn’t shy away from the few unpleasant things that come up, but doesn’t dwell on the either. It’s not a particularly musical biography, so far: no analysis of Monk’s music. (There’s more of that in Gabriel Solis’ Monk’s Music, which I’d dive into next if it weren’t …

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Alain de Botton is a…

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Well, I haven’t actually read him, so I don’t know, but Fisun Güner makes a pretty good argument that at least when it comes to art and art appreciation, he’s “a moron.” Güner’s harsh, but understandably so: there’s always someone out there who’s ready to explain to people who do get art, and celebrate it, why they’re doing it all wrong because people who don’t get art aren’t getting art. It reminds me of a drummer I knew in music school, who scolded me and a few of my friends for not seeing in our heads the same picture he saw …

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Sopranoed! WX5ed! Fluted! But… Argh!

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UPDATE (27 March 2014): Hold on! Looks like my students were wrong, and there is one sax tech somewhere in Saigon. Problem is, I’ll have to track him down myself: I went to the music shop my student mentioned to see if they had something that could remove the stuck swab, and they told me that, no, they can’t, but there’s a saxophone repairman in District 10 who can do it. They called him and he confirmed that he could. The catch? They tried to tell me I couldn’t go there myself, I had entrust the horn to their care. …

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Links You Should Check Out

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Today, I was reminded of why I stopped doing these link roundups: they’re time-consuming to produce. I’ll probably switch to just tweeting or linking on Facebook, like almost everyone else I know, and this is probably the last post like this I’ll do. But anyway: Typhoon Haiyan: We were lucky: it was much-diminished when it hit Vietnam, and on top of that, it landed nowhere near us. Folks in the Philippines were nowhere near so lucky, and pretty desperately need our help. Climate change is apparently making storms (and other extreme weather events) worse, so events like Haiyan are likely …

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All Blues

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Another week, another tune. This one’s a classic, and strictly speaking, it’s actually just a blues in concert G. But I was trying to capture some of the original Miles Davis version. (On which all the solos kill me, though I used to focus on the Coltrane; lately, I’ve reached a new appreciation of just how badass Cannonball Adderley was–that’s the first sax solo, for those who are curious.) These days, I’m trying to get better at walking the line between “inside” and “outside”: the more traditional, “tonal” sounding playing that I’ve been working on since picking up the horn …

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How High The Ornithology, or, The Contrafact

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Well, I was slowed down a little by a crazy ear infection, but I’m back. Here’s my take on two tunes, which are actually kinda-sorta one tune: “How High the Moon” (1940) by Nancy Hamilton (lyrics) & Norman Lewis (music) “Ornithology” (1945) by Charlie Parker & Benny Harris My take on this pair of tunes is flawed: I had to slow the backing track to make it playable with both tunes, my attempt at Bird’s famous Ornithology solo is haphazard, and the sound quality is something I’m not happy with… but I still feel like I have achieved something, compared …

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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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