Struttin' with some barbecue

There's some great talk over on Darcy's blog about the notions of jazz vocabulary and strategies for jazz education, and some very good discussion too, I've chimed in with my own (cosmic) ideas, but the groove of the conversation is tenaciously clinging to the what of the playing more than the why. I find the same when I hunt through videos of school and community bands, more often than not I find execution and articulation but with very little fiyah. They sit, they play, there, done it; next?


They have the 'what' down pat sufficient to dazzle the judges, but there's a gap in their education on the 'why', even though the 'why' of this music is so simple: it is the sound of joy.


Amazon: Louis Armstrong

The Worldwide 'Love' Vibe

Worldwide 'Love' Vibe Detected: "A subtle and mysterious global hum has been detected by seismologists studying records from Earth's most boring seismic stations.

The newfound vibration is made of two-minute to five-minute, side-to-side surface seismic waves, also called Love waves ... The discovery comes 10 years after seismologists first identified louder global oscillations that resemble the ringing of a gigantic bell."

Of course, Chubby Checker knew all this YEARS ago.

The Folk Song Suite

Encapsulating the mood, the emotion of the time, and setting it forth right there in the concert venue, that's what we do, and last time we looked at the strange attractors of nostalgia and patriotism as the domain for a concert band's command. Here today I'm digging a little deeper, off into a topic that occurs over and over with our music, the whole sense of the deeper meaning of a repetoire piece, in this case Ralph Vaughn Williams' military band tapestry called the Folk Song Suite.


Today's film sets this so-typically-English tune where we normally encounter it, as a statement in nostalgic patriotism, an opus from over 'ome, the iconic epitome of England. That's how many approach the work, as a stately grand and respectful thing, woven from ancient quaint folk songs.


The real story, on the other hand, is quite different. To begin with, these are not just any folk songs; most are old baudy ballads, barrack-room tunes of lusty wenches and trickster maidens and the soldiers who woo both!


You see, in the historical perspective, we have Vaughn Williams as a soon-to-retire commander of a post-war peacetime army band, which is to say a squad of bored young men lead by a man with little or nothing to lose.

"But if you come round to my mummy's house, when the moon shines bright and clearly,

I will come down and let you in, and my mummy shall not hear me.



So I went down to her mummy's house, when the moon shone bright and clearly,

She did come down and let me in, and I lay in her arms till morning."

Ok, hardly competitors to Salt'n'Peppa lyrics, but remember, only the soldiers know the real lyrics of the tunes -- to the bystanding public, it is a quaint english ditty they may have heard hummed by grand-dad at work in the garden. We also have Lazarus and Dives which is the familiar barracks tales of Officers vs Enlisted Men where only one of them is going to find St. Peter's favour, There is the Green Bushes which one might parallel to Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree from WWII swing-era, John Barleycorn, a song about beer and the sad-sack Baffled Knight slyly outwitted by the maid of his (lusty) dreams. For the lonely-hearts, My Bonny Boy could well be the lament of the sweethearts left behind, or those yet to be. If you ask me, it's Soldier-Boy material all the way,


Amazon: Ralph Vaughn Williams

Synchronisation

metronomes (or "pendula") when on table, oscillate with random phases, since that is how they started and they are "uncoupled" (no energy/information flows from one to other so they do not "know" each other.) When they are??? all together on the cans, notice that the cans themselves oscillate little, providing coupling/information crossover. which forces "synchronization" in periodic systems.

a compelling illustration why multitrack recording is counter-productive to the production of musical energy? while editing a digital recording of a big-band concert, I noticed the 5 leading reeds were perfectly aligned, their triangle waves all in synchronous peak; when co-located in close proximity (relative to the listener) synchronous waves would give a power function growing exponentially with the number of players.