Going to DC!

Have too much to do, so this'll be ridiculously short, but I had to include an entry:

Several members of Odaiko New England are planning to rent a minivan and drive down to D.C. for the Inauguration! We're gonna bring a few drums & percussive odds'n' ends and give energy to the crowd with our rhythms and grooves. Not formally, mind you; we'll just be out there in the sea of humanity. : )

Have to find some contacts whose homes we can crash at - hey, gimme a hallway or whatever, I'll bring an air mattress & a few blankets. But I really want to be there for such a historic event in my lifetime.

Wannabe Storm Chaser

Since we seem to be nearing the end of Hurricane Season in the Atlantic, I thought I'd better include a blog entry on the subject.

I'm not sure if it's because I'm from the Midwest, but I'm a storm chaser wannabe. As a kid I was simultaneously terrified of, and utterly fascinated by, tornadoes.

I'm really dating myself with this anecdote - but it's too odd-funny not to share - but when I was maybe 9 years old, one spring I had a dream about a big tornado hitting La Porte. (Ed. note: my hometown.) It was getting ready to travel right down Toronto street, with our house in its direct path. Now - the funny thing about my dream is that it was in Black-and-White - - no color. I am convinced this is because the film footage I'd seen of tornadoes up to that point had only ever been in b&w, even after Dad bought our first color TV. ( ! )

Within a year or two Mom had bought for me my very first storm book, titled "Hurricanes & Twisters". This book was chock full of (to me) compelling B&W photos of these sky-borne monsters. While it confirmed my interest in all things tornadic, it also introduced me to hurricanes. It wasn't until I moved to Boston, though, that hurricanes took on more significance for me.

I haven't experienced too many hurricanes here - the main hits were provided by Gloria in '85 and Bob in...'91, I think. The image of Hurricane Bob I recall well is seeing tree branches zooming down Commonwealth Avenue, almost as if they were drag racing.

We've gotten smaller hits - some wind, but mainly torrential rains, from the likes of Hurricane Floyd. A number of them weaken to Tropical Storm status by the time they get into New England, but they're still interesting to follow. At work I get good-natured ribbing from my colleagues 'cause I download hurricane tracking maps from the National Hurricane Center and I track each named storm. I can't help it - these storms are just too fascinating!

Practice makes...less than perfect

We all know the expression "Practice makes perfect".

Were that but true.

Tonight in taiko rehearsal we worked on "Yatai Bayashi". In performances by Kodo or Za Ondekoza, for example, the song can run anywhere up to ten minutes. Our group plays a slightly abridged version of this piece. Playing this the traditional way - sitting on the floor, feet cradling a huge drum, and having to lean back in sort of a 1/3 sit-up position to get enough sound out of every hit - I discovered very quickly what kind of condition I'm NOT in.

There's humbling, and then there's HUMBLING. Well, perhaps I'm exaggerating a little, but, tonight was my first attempt to play through the piece in the traditional way, and the attempt sent a profound message, one might say, to my abs and back muscles. It generated a wince and a few wry, ironic, rueful smiles. Well, I guess I had to start somewhere. Now if I can just get to the point where I can believe that there will be a light at the end of this tunnel I haven't entered yet...

New York trip, Part 2 - MoMA

At long last, my entry about my trip to the MoMA (Museum of Modern Art).

Fresh from my most enjoyable concert of the past several years, I awoke the next morning energized and ready to greet the day. Not even the expen$e of the hotel room at check-out could cloud my sunny disposition.

(Did I really just write that?!....)

Anyway, strolling out to Central Park, I decided - for the first time ever - to walk a segment of it.

From about 74th Street to 61st Street, taking care to absorb all the sights & sounds I could - the expanse of greenery, the trees, elders resting on a park bench, people walking or jogging themselves & their dogs, roller bladers, a homeless person, bicyclists, parents taking their children around the park, one distressed man having an animated cell phone conversation, lovers walking hand in hand, a veritable panoply of humanity.

Approaching Times Square, I couldn't help but stop in at Colony Music. If you need sheet music - even for obscure instruments - this is a place not to miss. I picked up some hard-to-find bass transcription books and happily proceeded to the MoMA.

The first time I visited there, in 2006, I took in a special exhibit on Dadaism, which was fantastic - I saw all the classic precursors to Surrealist Art, such as Man Ray's "Gift" (a flatiron with tacks glued to the surface) and Marcel Duchamp's subversive "L.H.O.O.Q." featuring a copy of the Mona Lisa - with mustache drawn on it. However, I didn't have time to take in much of the rest of the Museum. This time, I decided to check out the Graphic Section as well as the 19th & 20th century paintings.

So many classics!

Van Gogh's Starry Night.
Giorgio de Chirico's enigmatic works, e.g. The Song of Love
Dali's bizarre Persistence of Memory
Magritte's The Menaced Assassin
A number of brilliant Picasso's, notably Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.
Gauguin, Pollock, Gorky, Warhol, Kandinsky, the list goes on and on.
Rousseau's The Dream, and Sleeping Gypsy.
Rothko, O'Keefe, Matisse, Jasper Johns.
Joan Miro's colorful constructions, especially Hirondelle/Amour.
So many brilliant - and in some cases controversial - manifestations of the human imagination.

4 hours was just not enough to take it all in...I'll have to plan a follow-up visit soon!

Today's been all business.

The work day was a long one, exacerbated by having to dine on some humble pie (note to fate: I'm already a big guy, I don't need to add any pie - especially the humble variety - to my diet, okay?).

After I got home, I had to do laundry 'cause I don't have any other time for it. At least I also found time to practice Mary's new songs for our gig Friday.

I have to tell you about this clever device that is a major aid for the musician with insufficient time for practicing: TASCAM makes portable "trainers" for guitar or bass. You can load a CD in it, plug in your instrument cable, and jam - through headphones, so as not to aggravate the neighbors. The unit allows the user to set the balance between the volume of the music & the volume of your instrument. Nice. The most brilliant element: tempo changing at pitch. So if a song has fast licks, you can slow it down for learning. It's great for getting riffs right the first time, then gradually bringing the tempo closer to normal tempo as you become more comfortable with the chord changes and riffs.

Oh, so, for any of you who are near Boston (or know someone who is), come check out the band in action Friday, Oct. 3, at All Asia Bar near Central Square, Cambridge. We're part of CNC Productions' "Music Marathon". We're going on at about 7 PM. There's a cover charge; I think it's less than $10.

With visions of happy gigster-ing dancing around the periphery of my mind's eye.....

Guaranteed to never go platinum

I can't believe I'm actually trying to write a song.

At the suggestion of Timm, the drummer in Mary's band, I'm trying my hand at a musical composition. For bass guitar and taiko drums. At least, that's the intention; I have no idea what the result will be, haha.

The trick, of course, is that a full-fledged, fully-realized song doesn't just pop out of your head the way Athene popped out of Zeus' (his headaches must have been Olympus-sized....). Unless you're really lucky. So for the past two evenings, in the manner prescribed in a textbook for writing poetry, I've jotted down a drum pattern idea here, a bass riff there. An idea for a sort of call-and-response section between the bass & one or more drums. Just getting stuff down on paper, that kind of thing. Eventually, jamming on some of these riffs might inspire even better ideas.

One of the points the author of the poetry-writing book makes is that one develops a daily routine, a habit of writing. Even if a day's results aren't worth keeping, it's worth it to keep doing it. So it seems with the music-writing. I'm sure this applies to painting or drawing, anything creative...but painting is a laborious, time-consuming process for me. I'm ridiculously deliberate, and hate rushing, so it takes ages to finish anything. I'd rather set aside at least a full hour for painting, after sketching out the general concept, just to get a sort of color framework in place.

I've had a keen interest in art for a number of years, but it wasn't until I enrolled in an introductory course at Cambridge College that I seriously put brush to paper (since we were rank beginners, Prof. Callahan had us buy heavyweight-paper art pads, and we used chalk, charcoal, and acrylic paint). I absolutely loved that course, but I haven't completed many paintings since then. : ( But when can I find the time if I'm playing bass, playing taiko, writing a song, and maintaining a blog? [insert a somewhat resigned shrug here]

Happy Drummer, too!

Last week I had two taiko drumming gigs: Thursday night at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and Saturday morning in West Boylston, Massachusetts. Both went pretty well, though I had a couple brain cramps - they were probably minor 'fumbles' that nobody really noticed, but when they happen, they remind me in no uncertain terms that I still have plenty of room (maybe a continent's worth) for improvement.

The MIT gig was for a pretty cool Japanese cultural event - there were some dancers, video projections, singers and other musicians in the performing arts, games for the kids to play, and more. The people who were checking out our drumming performance were digging it; the kids were just mesmerized by those big drums and the thunderous sounds we were bashing out of them. {big smile}

The gig in West Boylston was for that community's bicentennial celebration. It was a beautiful, sunny, comfortable morning for our gig. It was my first major outdoor gig, and it was really something to hear people talking about how they could hear our drums from quite a distance (the event's venues, food stalls, merchandise tables, etc. were spread out over a large park, an adjoining baseball field and other spaces). A fun thing at some of our gigs is audience participation - the kids almost always have huge smiles on their faces as they grab our big drumsticks ('bachi') and have a go at hitting the drums. "License to be loud".

The West Boylston kids seemed to be a little intimidated at first, but they eventually made their own brand of taiko noise. And nobody minded how loud they were.

The Great Gig in the Sky

Exit Richard Wright.

I found out around 5:10, just before I left work this afternoon. What an empty feeling in my spirit. As a support musician, I'm at peace with frequently being overlooked while Mary is singing her angelic vocals and Terry or Ellen are playing such cool guitar licks in our band; I don't mind being some of the glue that holds everything together rather than taking solos. Yet I can't help but feel Rick's keyboard genius was overshadowed 90% of the time in the Floyd, and it just seems sick that he's gone....as if his contribution to the band was never fully acknowledged, and now....

R.I.P., Rick.

A Happy Gigster!

Hi there,

Well, I know I still owe you another entry re my trip to NYC, but I have to talk about tonight's gig. Yes, your friendly correspondent is a Happy Gigster tonight!

Just got back from a set at Wonder Bar, a venue in Boston's Allston-Brighton neighborhood. We helped to kick off the annual Boston Music Festival, a weeklong celebration of everything from Jazz to Folk to Rock to World Music. At several bars & clubs all around the city. A really cool idea, but the publicity for it was pretty random; it’s such a great idea, people should know all about this for a month or more. Anyway….

Our bandleader Mary Casiello is a grad from the Berklee College of Music and writes her own material. Mary is a wonderful talent, and it’s always fun to play bass in her band because her songwriting incorporates a wide range of moods, interesting harmonies & chord progressions, and rhythmic textures. Terry, the guitarist, and I have considerable freedom to improvise riff ideas and explore tonal properties for the accompaniment of Mary’s songs; e.g. for one song I crank the highs and scoop the mids to get a bright, slap-like sound out of my bass (I’m strictly a fingerstyle player, plucking with my index & middle fingers; I can't play decent slap bass at all, so I don't) and for a couple tunes I play mainly in the upper registers, as legato as I can, to approximate a sort of cello sound.

As a support musician, I appreciate that I get to experiment with different sounds, feels, rhythms, and tones – like the way The Beatles used to work in their early-to-middle period, whoever has the best idea – that’s what we play, which is energizing and inspiring. Some of our rehearsals have consisted of a handful of tunes with ongoing arranging by the whole band; playing for awhile, starting again with new ideas, then revisiting it later if we feel like it. Sometimes we also jam on it a bit, so we can stretch a given song out for a coupla minutes.

Tonight’s gig bore the fruit of these rehearsals – we were really “on”, pretty tight with the material; we played three new songs live for the first time. I ploinked out a couple clams on one of them (painful wince….), but I pretty much nailed the other two (insert sigh of relief here). They were well-received, which is nice: as the songs are brand-new, we’re breaking them in live, so I’m sure the arrangements will be tweaked here and there as we go along and the songs will just get better & better. The crowd was smallish but as time went on more people turned up, and they were digging the music. Yeah!

New York trip, Part 1 - King Crimson's 40th Anniversary Celebration

Right, here goes:

So I ride the Acela from Boston to NYC on Friday the 15th, get checked in to my, er, 'palatial' hotel room (Comfort Inn, Central Park West) and taxi to the Nokia Theatre Times Square....not quite.

The cabbie, a genial Polish immigrant, has no idea where 1515 Broadway is.

I mean, it's TIMES SQUARE. Kind of a famous place, no?

Most people living in New York City have a general idea of its location, right?

Incredulous, I get out of the cab and figure out its location on my own. In a downpour of Biblical proportions. I guess I need a little bit of adventure even for something as mundane as a cab ride!

But once there....wow.
State of the art facility.
Smallish - seats something like 2,500 people.
I think Crimson chose it for the acoustics, which were superb.

Anyway, I'm there for the 2nd of 4 consecutive sold-out concerts, and I can't wait. I've already raided the merchandise space for the ubiquitous tour T-Shirt, which I don't mind having seeing that it's a special, one-off 40th Anniversary celebration of the Crim. I also picked up the 40th Anniversary Tour Box, and an autographed drum head graced with the signatures of Gavin Harrison (of Porcupine Tree) and Pat Mastelotto. Pretty cool, say I.

Robert Fripp surprises one and all by emerging from the wings a full half-hour before the scheduled beginning of the concert, and he treats us to one of his signature Soundscapes. For those of you unfamiliar with these, Robert puts modern technology to work in the service of creative musicmaking: thanks to advanced signal processing, he can layer sounds upon sounds and loop these to create a sort of guitar orchestra.

Then the band comes out to a standing ovation and Gavin & Pat launch into a phenomenal drum duo - polyrhythmic pyrotechnics is the term I settled on to describe those percussive fireworks! This segues into The ConstruKction of Light (the misspelling is deliberate on Crim's part, for reasons unfathomable to me). Tony Levin weaves a hypnotic, grooving bass line on the Chapman Stick, and the rest of the band joins in mightily. What a beginning!

I could continue for another 6 posts' worth on the whole concert - the set list, the little improvisational twists the band injects into each song to help keep them fresh as ever, even for songs from as far back as Larks' Tongues In Aspic - as you can tell by now, I thoroughly enjoyed the gig. The band did two lengthy encores; added to Robert's preliminary Soundscape, the band played for 2 hours, 20 minutes.

Some phenomenal drumming by Gavin and Pat - breathtaking exchanges of rhythms and textures. Gavin has a wonderfully dry sense of humor behind the drum kit, also; combined with the stage presence of Tony Levin and Adrian Belew, there were all kinds of interesting little visual details to reward the attentive concert-goer.

This seems like enough for now....will follow up somewhere along the way with comments about Day 2 in the Big Apple.