A treated photo taken a couple minutes after this incident a few months ago.
Me: “What’s your favorite sound?”
Bodybuilder James: “There are two. But I can’t spell ’em.”
Me: “Try anyway.”
Bodybuilder James: “Well, the first one is the sound your fishing reel makes when it whizzes. WWWZZZZZZZZZZZT.”
Me: “I like that one too.”
Bodybuilder James: “The second one is that if you know when you’re holding a piece of aluminum siding, and you kinda shake it, and it makes that sound that aluminum siding makes when you shake it?”
Me: “I do, actually. Yes.”
Bodybuilder James: “And if you got rhythm, you can make it do cool stuff?”
Me: “Totally.”
Bodybuilder James: “That’s one of my favorite sounds too. But there are hundreds of others. So many to choose from.”
Me: “I know what you mean.”
Legendary jazz drummer Max Roach has left us. He was 83.
Here’s a classic experimental piece he did in 1977, performing an improvisational drum solo over Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
“Jazz is a very democratic musical form. It comes out of a communal experience. We take our respective instruments and collectively create a thing of beauty.”
— Max Roach
The Van Halen with David Lee Roth tour is on. Eddie and Valerie’s 16-year-old kid Wolfgang will be playing bass and supplying backup vokes. He also picked out the set, which apparently consists of about 25 songs from the good old days. Check out the press conference.
Hit the ground running. Floor tickets for Staples are “available” for a grand each. It’ll be a circus not to be missed.
Oh, and if it were up to me, off the top of my head: [click to continue…]
The whole Leno humor thing can really push the sap factor once in a while, but these get me every time. 
The two tabletops are the same shape and size! Gnarly. I didn’t believe it until I pulled it in to Photoshop. It’s true. I ripped the below animation to prove it. [click to continue…]
Spending a little time digging through some old paperwork frozen away deep in unused file cabinets out in the garage. I found a folder of old music papers from college back in 1990-91. Among them is an assignment given to us in Bradfield’s 20th Century Music class.
The 20th century marked the point in history where virtually every possibility had been explored in Western classical tonal music theory. 20th Century composers of music began to aggressively break the rules that came out of the Classical period. New devices were brought to compositions, including lots of dissonance, serialism, metric modulation, microtonality, minimalism, and technology. Everything from the experimental to the avant-garde. Music by guys like John Cage, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Igor Stravinsky, and Arnold Schoenberg would be classic examples of this stuff.
Sometimes, for some people, it’s just noise.
Anyway, one assignment was to study, analyze, and provide a review of “The Roachville Project” by Barney Childs. Here it is. Click the image to view a larger version:
So that was that. I had a few things to say about it, but I figured a boring review of it wouldn’t do my opinion of the composition justice. Instead, I used the piece as a source of inspiration to compose my own piece. A pseudo-cover, if you will. It also represented what I really thought of “The Roachville Project” in not so many words.
I therefore submit to you, for your listening — and performing — pleasure, “The Tilting of the Sombrero” Opus #2. Click the image to view a larger version:
