One Truly Evil Saxophone

Tonight Ivi and I went to a performance of the Eastern Jazz Combo at EOU's McKenzie Theater. This is a ten-person (all or mostly students) group: bass, drums, vibes, three (evil) saxes (tenor, alto, soprano), piano, guitar, trumpet and vocals.

Matt Cooper (EOU prof and killer jazz/classical pianist) directed and played piano on a couple of numbers with the guest Rob Scheps. To quote from the program:

"Oregon native Rob Scheps began studying the tenor saxophone at age nine. He grew up on Long Island, New York. After having graduated high school at age sixteen, he enrolled in the New England Conservatory. He received a Bachelor of Music in Jazz Studies with Honors in performance in 1986. While living in the Boston area he lead his own groups, most notably the True Colors Big Band. In 1988 he moved to New York, formed the Rob Scheps Core-tet and Bartokking Heads and established himself as a formidable force on the jazz scene.

"A member of the Mannes College of Music Faculty, Rob has been a workshop clinician at Bowdoin, Dartmouth, Hunter, Lewis and Clark, University of Missouri at Kansas City, Friends University, and Whitman College as well as Portland State and the University of Connecticut."

Matt also introduced him as a major force in contemporary jazz, who knows almost everybody in the industry, and has just returned from a European tour, most recently in Norway.

The combo played some great jazz pieces, from Miles Davis to Wayne Shorter to Freddie Hubbard to Billy Strayhorn, and for me they really exceeded expectations. I was especially taken by the performances of Trent Shuey on drums and the sax players, Kyson Lamoreau, William Morris and Mariah Boyle. And a couple of tunes into the show, Rob Scheps took the stage ... and blew the audience away. Come and visit and we will play you a CD with his Norway group that we picked up afterwards ... and when he learned that Ivi was a budding sax player, he shook her hand and told her that she shared her first name with one of Duke Ellington's great lead vocalists, Ivy Anderson.

And finally: In one of those remarkable Ivi coincidences, she told me just before we left for the concert that she was listening to a random selection on her MP3 player, Miles Davis' "All Blues" -- which just happened to be the Jazz Combo's opening number tonight.

West Side Confluence

When I came home from work, Ivi recounted a string of coincidences: (1) she had just finished reading Romeo and Juliet for her English class, (2) today at school, the visiting Oregon Symphony Brass Quintet played, among other pieces, selections from West Side Story, and (3) today's mail delivery included West Side Story via Netflix. As you probably know, West Side Story (circa 1958 or 1959 or 1960?), was a more modern musical (Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, et.al.) adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, set in the mean streets of New York. So of course (after Ivi finished her math homework), we stayed up until nearly 11pm watching it. Predictably, Ivi got in her chuckles and giggles at much of its 50-year-old quaintness, but we had fun nevertheless. Ivi's favorite number was "Gee, Officer Krupke".

UPDATE, Thursday, March 06: Here is an interesting guide by boston.com to covers of the music (all downloadable from the iTunes Store), which I intend to check out ASAP. Dawn Upshaw is one of my operatic favorites so I have to hear that, plus Dave Brubeck, and of course, one of my childhood heroes, Little Richard -- and probably all the rest, too.

And now for Ivi's pick:

Getting Cozy

How could I have forgotten?  In my fit of yesterday's Buddy Rich nolstalgia, last night I realized I had forgotten my all-time single most favorite drum solo.  I had this thing on a 45rpm single when I was in high school. "Topsy" by Cozy Cole.  Here goes:

My Buddy Rich

When I came in to work today, a colleague announced that Buddy Rich, the drummer, had just passed away. Wait a minute! I knew that Buddy Rich, my drumming idol when I was a kid, had died at about age 70 in the mid-80s.

Buddy Rich, imho, was incredible. Went way beyond conventional rolls, flams and paradiddles. This guy could do one-handed rolls with either hand, smoothly and at fantastic speed. Gene Krupa and Max Roach were also amazing drummers of that era, but for me it was Buddy Rich and his technique.

I was to learn that the Buddy Rich of today's news was apparently a rock drummer, not a jazz drummer as My Buddy was. (Guess my awareness of hot rock drummers never got much past the great Ginger Baker-- until Toby, of course.) Showing my age, I recalled that I bought a Rich Vs. Roach album in 1959, my final year of high school and took it with me to college (I still have the album, and have it on the pile that someday I intend to digitize ... using my old Technics turntable that I connected to my computer with a German phono preamp via USB port).

One of the more well-known Buddy Rich events was his appearance with the Muppets in 1970-something:



And another interesting TV appearance in 1965 was with Jerry Lewis.

RIP, all Buddy Riches.

Public Domain MP3s: Robert Johnson, Et. Al.

Believe it or not, I made this discovery while undertaking legitimate research in the workplace.  To demonstrate some techniques around making Flash and XML communicate, a programmer showed on his blog how he created a simple MP3 player ... and he used as source material some music found at PublicDomain4U.  There is some great stuff there, playable online or downloadable, from the likes of (some of my favorites) Robert Johnson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Louis Armstrong, and many others.  Some samples above, in my own player.

A Blog You Must See

Almost every day I find myself hitting the Web to "visit" with other programmers and Web developers, whether to find specific problem workarounds and other solutions, or to just keep up with the industry. In the course of researching Flex and AIR and other Adobe app issues, I hit the blog of Tom Cornilliac, an Oregon guy with a strong reputation in the biz ... and a great header photo for his blog. And it is the latter that I want to share with you: http://www.cornilliac.com/blog/?page_id=43

Joshua James Covers Modest Mouse