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Music
I've had a pretty complex relationship with music over the years... ought to write about that sometime. Anyways: I listen to a lot of it, in genres like "rock" and "pop" and "folk", and play some of it, primarily in the genres "old-time" and "classical".
A great lesson with Barbara -- primary areas we covered:
Bowing -- begin bow strokes with more force, get a percussive effect at the beginning of the stroke. If I am more conscious of keeping a healthy dollop of rosin on my bow, this will be easier.
Vibrado -- Barbara gave me a woodshed exercise for learning how to do vibrado and told me that if I practice it diligently for a week, I will get it. Probably not going to do this very immediately, but I will keep it on hand... Part of the trick is not to touch the neck with the base of your index finger when you are doing vibrado; the other part is to work on having a very even rhythm to the motion.
Positions -- Barbara gave me a nice straightforward woodshed exercise for moving between first and third position..
"Moose on the Roof" -- we worked on this song for about half the time of the lesson; I'm convinced I could play it pretty well with some practice. It is in cross-tuning (EADA) -- I have never played violin in non-standard tuning, it is a lot of fun.
posted morning of September 18th, 2010: Respond ➳ More posts about Fiddling
Lots of stuff going on this weekend! Sylvia (a child of the millenium, a dragon baby) is as of today, no longer able to write her age with a single digit (assuming of course that she is writing in decimal notation). We are having a birthday dinner with some friends this evening, and tomorrow afternoon her party will be at the Raptor Trust in the Great Swamp.
The other big activity for me, outside of celebrating Sylvia's birthday, is fiddling. Barbara Lamb is in town this weekend, she's giving a concert at Menzel Violins tomorrow afternoon -- I can't make it because of the party, alas, but I've arranged for a fiddle lesson this morning. Really looking forward to it! I've learned her jig "Twisty Girl", I'm hoping she'll teach me "Älgen på taket". And the fiddling continues this afternoon, when Mountain Station (i.e. me and John) will have its first gig, at John's neighborhood block party. I'm pretty shocked at the amount of music we are comfortable playing -- we didn't work out a set list exactly, but we have enough songs to play for an hour set easily, and the order of the songs will determine itself...
posted morning of September 18th, 2010: 4 responses ➳ More posts about Sylvia
John and I have our first track playing on the radio! Tune in to Henry Musikar's always-great music rotation at KCUF and you will (every so often) hear our cover of Gillian Welch's "Revelator." Here is the track if you don't want to wait:
Starting to really get my music library together -- I ripped a lot of old and new disks onto my computer this past week, and updated the file organization a little. Today's random 10 are a nice mellow mix.
"The $1 Store" sketch by The Vestibules -- a very worthwhile Canadian humor troupe. (from their Chest of Drawers 5.0 record.)
"Where I Lead Me" by Steve Earle. Ellen and I went to a concert of his last weekend that I've been meaning to blog about (can't quite find the hook though) -- I bought his record Townes.
"Garden of Eden" by the New Riders. They have a lot of good songs besides "Panama Red" -- which for some reason is the only song I really think of when I hear their name.
"Devil's Radio" from Robyn's April 96 Bilbao show. Which contrary to my assertion at cleek's, definitely does move me in this incarnation.
"Night Fishin'" by Bobby Rush, from one of Apostropher's mix tapes. One of the things I discovered while organizing my library is that a slight plurality of my non-Robyn Hitchcock music is mix tapes from various blogging sources.
"A Day in the Life", Robyn Hitchcock performing on the Give it to the Thoth Boys tape. One of the best Beatles covers I've heard of his -- this comes close to being as great as the original. (Though it gets a little silly toward the end.)
Here I am playing with The Lost Souls last week at the South Orange Elks' Club. (Thanks for the picture, dad!) Mike and Eric are to my left, Jon is behind me; other members are cropped or obscured.
John came over today; we played almost exclusively new songs, songs that we've played at most once or twice before, plus the two songs we'll be playing on Thursday at the open mic. Before he came over, I had been working on a tune that was in my head, without being able to figure out what it was -- turns out what I was thinking of was the chorus of "Frim Fram Sauce"; but not knowing that we just played through it together a couple of times, and came up with a bridge. Might be nice to learn the lyrics and try that one out. Other songs we played:
were the de facto theme of tonight's jam with Bob, Janis and Greg. Two songs I had been thinking about this afternoon before I went over there, were They're Red Hot (by Robert Johnson but I'm not sure precisely whose version I am thinking about -- don't think the Dead ever played this song) and "Simple Gifts", a Shaker hymn. As it turned out we tried a couple of verses of "They're Red Hot" and decided to try it again after listening to it more, and Janis and me played a few verses of "Simple Gifts". The playlist:
"The Deal" started us off with a Grateful Dead sound -- after that we tried "Simple Gifts" and entirely too-slow-if-one-does-not-have-an-organ performance of "Amazing Grace", then back to the Dead/New Riders to speed things up a little.
"Panama Red"
"Glendale Train"
"Rollin' in my Sweet Baby's Arms"
"Oh Lord, Won't You Buy Me a Mercedes-Benz" -- I sang this, but I do not really have the range needed.
"They're Red Hot"
"Summertime" -- this was great, slow with lots of solos...
"Harder They Come" -- I never played this before, it was a lot of fun.
A few false starts in a row, including "I Shall Be Released"*, "Red Rubber Ball", "My Baby Wrote me a Letter" and "Whiskey Bar"
"C'est la Vie"
* It would be more than worthwhile to learn "Harder They Come" and "I Shall Be Released", so that we could jam from one into the other -- these two songs go together really nicely.
On the hot February morning when Beatriz Viterbo died ..., I noticed that the iron billboards in Plaza Constitución had been cleared of their advertisement for blonde cigarettes (or whatever it had been)... The matter caused me some pain, when I understood that the vast, incessant universe was detaching itself from her memory; this change would be the first in an infinite series.
Update: Wow -- this is a really, really good album. I'm not sure what I was expecting from a first-record-in-20-years... whatever I was expecting, this exceeds it many times over. The cats are a nice touch too.
A few years old, but new for me: in September 2004, R. Crumb and Jerry Zolten produced a one-hour show on Penn State's wpsu-fm, spinning and chattering and nit-picking Crumb's collection of old blues and gospel records. Lots of great music and talk.
I haven't been able to find the mp3 of the show online anywhere but prx.org -- I'm not sure what the nature of that site is, they make you sign up for a free account if you want to listen, it seems benign enough though...
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