Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

Well, the rest of it, anyway, since my last post derived from our Ashland trip.  Most years, the Ashland trip in late June IS my summer vacation, because I’m forced to plan it in November; similarly ambitious ventures for the rest of the summer remain figments of my imagination due to lack of focus and total inability to plan, and Labor Day hits me like a wrong-way drunk on the interstate.

This summer, however, events contrived to afford me several additional adventures.  That’s owing in no small part to the fact that I’m not flying to Milwaukee a week a month any more, due to a persistent downturn in my client’s business.  I’d been making that trek for the last 11 or 12 years, and the rhythm and routine of travel, the Road Warrior’s mentality, has been a huge part of my life.  That monthly trip would pretty much take out two weekends, as I’d fly out on Sunday morning and land at SeaTac around midnight on Friday night.  I had become far too wrapped up in the Frequent Flyer mindset of whether I’d get upgraded, and scheming about how to squeeze in enough miles in a year (75k) to make Platinum, instead of lowly Gold (50k).  My last trip to Milwaukee was in December, and I haven’t checked into Flyertalk.com, where “elites” bitch endlessly about every little imagined indignity the airlines are visiting on them, in months.  If you’ve seen Up In The Air, you’ve gotten a whiff of that mindset.

I still work with my client remotely, and I can’t say I don’t miss that full week’s revenue, but so much stress has slaked off of my life this year since I don’t have to screw myself up to slog through TSA, and hole up in hotels furtively practicing my trumpet and making serially bad dietary decisions.  I’m Gold on Delta for the rest of the year, but I’m resigned to being mere Silver next year, and permanently consigned to steerage thereafter.

So, on to the rest of the summer.  One benefit of not traveling was that I got to participate fully in my band’s  marching season.  We played some really fun music, and played in parades in Seattle, Bellingham, Kirkland and Vancouver, BC.  The jewel in the marching season’s crown, however, was the wedding of two dear bandmates on a San Francisco-esque foggy August day in West Seattle.  We were commissioned to play the processional and recessional, but the wedding guests were digging it enough that we played a few more numbers, and I was grateful, as it was our last performance and I really didn’t want to let go of the summer’s music. The video begins with nieces of the brides waving rainbow streamers in lieu of carrying flowers. You might consider, in the future, why your wedding shouldn’t include a marching band. (password is “RCB” in caps):

(video here)

Check out the brides’ private moshpit as the Black-Eyed Peas recessional draws to a close.

I’m not a crier, generally, and I’ve probably attended fewer than 10 weddings.  My record is still clean, but it was very affecting to observe the joy of the brides, and their parents and families.  If possible, it was more moving to observe the couples in my band as the ceremony, so emblematic of their struggle - our struggle - progressed, sniffling, holding hands so tightly that their entwined arms evoked a metaphor of nothing so much as a wishbone.  Can you tell me with a straight face that marriage needs protection from people who yearn for it this fervently?

The brides still needed to drive to Iowa to become completely legal.  Fucking Iowa.

Well, what else did I do?  Oh, yeah, there was that 6-day, 5-night kayak-camping trip in Desolation Sound, BC.  I think it needs its own post. Watch this space (click to enlarge).

Here’s a podcast with all of our RCB 2011 marching music, recorded at band camp a couple of weeks ago.  The recording was made in a cavernous room with no acoustics, during our last session on Sunday, so lips are a bit tattered and the sound is what it is.  Still, I think you can tell how much fun we’re having with this.

The theme is Dance Party, and our music director tried to make selections from the last 4 decades:

Gonna Make You Sweat
Ladies’ Night
Holiday
I Gotta Feeling
Land of a Thousand Dances
Copacabana
Four Minutes
Soul Bossa Nova
YMCA
You Dropped A Bomb On Me
Hey, Baby

More about band camp later.

Some recordings of our parade music from band camp.  They’re a long way from the Sheherazade of our spring concert!  Percussion is way over-emphasized in these due to the room where we did the recording, but it’s OK by me because they bring it righteously.  We’re a little light in some areas (we march about 45, half the size of our concert band.  And only one clarinet?!  Calling Mrs. Perils…), but I hafta say, in my unbiased opinion, the trumpets ride into each song like the damn cavalry.  You really have to be a band geek to play more than one or two of these, or else you want multiple 80s-era flashbacks.  I’m posting them mostly for my marching-band brother, and maybe my mom.

I think these are going to be really fun in the parades we have scheduled this summer.  As we practice marching through the neighborhood near our rehearsal space, we pick up a camp following of kids and adults as they come out of their houses in slack-jawed amazement (and maybe annoyance), and then follow us gleefully from block to block.  I like to think we’ve given them a little ray of sunshine in this extended spring of gloomy weather.

Jai Ho, the theme song from the movie Slumdog Millionaire. Interesting mixture of Indian rhythms and motifs and pop-song refrain.

Pick Up The Pieces. Your Average White Band.  Nice trumpet breakout in the middle:

Mas Que Nada, a sultry samba.  It’ll be summer here sometime… I first heard this in college by Sergio Mendes/Brasil 66. We do a drill routine during the 16-bar percussion feature:

Let’s Groove - Earth, Wind & Fire.

Bad Romance, Lady Gaga. Not an 80s song.

Don’t Stop - Fleetwood Mac:

Soak Up The Sun - Sheryl Crow:

Americans We - Henry Fillmore. Just to show you we can play a straight-on Fourth of July march. And follow the dynamics now & then:

Gimme Some Lovin’:

Mickey:

Drumline cadence when we’re marching, not playing.  You really have to be a band geek to listen to this:

Still chewing on May here.  One of the fun things we did was band camp with Rainbow City Band.  It was held over a weekend at Fort Worden in Port Townsend (where most of the movie Officer and a Gentleman was filmed), and it represents sort of a breakpoint between the sit-down concert season and the less-structured marching season.  The fun started on a Friday night with a music rehearsal (of course), then a talent show that sounded like a gas.  We missed it, because I was out of town the week before, and didn’t arrive at SeaTac until nearly midnight Friday.

Mrs. Perils & I got up at 5 Saturday morning in order to catch a ferry at 6:10, as I really wanted to attend all of the planned activities on Saturday.  And planned they were.  Even as a late arrival, I still participated in 1 sectional, three music rehearsals and 3 marching/playing rehearsals in about 36 hours. In between, there were festive mealtimes in a dining hall where we sat at various tables and really got acquainted with other band members.  Our Tuesday rehearsals are so tightly focused, and the space is so cramped, that I actually had not met many of the people from the other side of the band. I was gratified by the warm and ready acceptance of Mrs. Perils, and of us as an entity.

The piece de resistence occurred Saturday night. The theme for the weekend was Alice In Wonderland and, after our post-dinner music rehearsal came a Mad Hatter’s Tea Party.  All of the communications about Band Camp had encouraged costumes, but since I was out of town the previous week I never got anything together. This, as it turns out, was a huge mistake.  The costumes at the party ranged from clever to extravagant.  There was a fully-formed green caterpillar with a hookah, Tweedle Dee & Dum, a Cheshire Cat, various playing cards including the Queen of Hearts with a formidable-looking axe, and one or two Alices in drag.  The costume that tickled me the most, however, was a guy in street clothes with a pregnancy tester hanging around his neck.  When we asked what he was supposed to be, he looked at it, frowned, and said, “I’m LATE! I’m LATE! I’m LATE for a very important DATE!”  There were numerous tables with various board and card games going on, and every 20 minutes or so, the Mad Hatter would scurry around the room forcing people to move and mix with others at different games.  Among all of the wine and other beverages and hors d’oeuvres, someone uncorked a huge barrel of a deadly concoction called Strip and Go Naked (contents: beer, lemonade, vodka), as if this occasion needed more encouragement.

We slept in a large dormitory building that used to be barracks at the Fort, and the organizer thoughtfully polled everyone regarding their bedtime/noise level preferences, and arranged our accommodations accordingly.  We were fortunate to land at the end of the “quiet” folks, as there was apparently an after-party to the tea party that left one wing of the band decidedly fuzzy Sunday morning.

At one point during our marching practice, we were approaching a chapel in which a wedding had just been consummated, and it was our (or their) misfortune that we were just finishing Bad Romance (Lady Gaga).  We tried to make it up to them by playing Over The Rainbow and Don’t Stop, but I’m not sure they were amused, and it seemed politic for us to hie ourselves to another part of the facility.  One other amusing thing: a guy who played French horn during concert season is playing Glockenspiel for marching, explaining that he’s bisectional.

We got a lot of work done, and had a great time.  Even got several beach walks in (click to enlarge):

The trumpet section…and the perspective of the drumline

(Ed: Looks like this got stuck in my Wordpress queue and never got published.)

It’s hard to comprehend, but I’ve run out of April here in Seattle.  Tomorrow I head for Milwaukee for a week; on Friday, I fly to Atlanta to attend a Microsoft software extravaganza called Convergence; on the following Wednesday, Mrs. Perils will join me in Atlanta, and we’ll fly on to Myrtle Beach, SC for our annual family reunion at the Litchfield resort.  When I get back to Seattle, it’ll be May.  2010.  The lilacs, just budding now, will likely be gone.

I continue to play my trumpet.  The Rainbow City Band has entered its summer “marching season”.  I was wary at first, because what I liked about the band was the quality of musicianship and the challenging music we have played in our concert incarnation.  The “marching” rehearsals have sorta disabused me of this wariness, as the director has carefully chosen pieces to perform, and breaks us down and makes us play them with a high level of musicianship.  He avows that we’re a “concert band that marches”, a theme that I like.  A sampling:

• Jai Ho - the Bollywood-ish theme from Slumdog Millionaire.  It’s an interesting mix of Indian meter and American song standard, and the rhythms are challenging.
• Soak Up The Sun - I have always liked Sheryl Crow
• Let’s Groove - Earth, Wind & Fire is great outdoor music
• Mas Que Nada - a little Brazilian touch to offset the funk
• Pick Up The Pieces - Average White Band

What I think is happening here is, we’re reprising our director’s salad-day soundtrack.  We’ll perform in several parades during the summer, and I’m thinking it will be a lot of fun.

I’ve also been whoring around with another community concert band on Thursday nights that plays more standard fare like Oklahoma, Music Man, etc.  Not as demanding as 1812 Overture, to be sure, but amiable, and I find it preferable to lace up and play with a group than schlep down to the basement to practice.  And I continue to take a lesson now & then, and play trumpet trios with my teacher and another of her adult students.  We may do a recital later this summer, if we can settle on 4 or 5 of the gaggle of stuff we’ve been experimenting with.

After a premature warm spell that got everything blooming and budding early, our weather has been drippy and chilly for two weeks or more, and the light in the evening is often the only sign of progress in this stillborn spring.  I think it’s driven me to “cocoon” a bit - there have been a couple of days lately that I didn’t leave the house at all.

The NCAA basketball tournament may have had a lot to do with that.  At first, when Ohio State was playing, I felt compelled to watch, both their games and, of course all the others, because you never know which of the other teams they might end up playing; then, after OSU bowed out in the Sweet 16, it became merely an excuse to dally.  Since all the games are now available via online streaming, I could sit with a game on one of my dual computer screens, pull up a spreadsheet on the other and tell myself I was multitasking.  Didn’t even need a “boss” key.

The license to sloth ended Monday night with a thrilling championship game, however, and I need to get out & get active a little more.  I’ve been barely maintaining: biking to the gym every second day but, other than a leisurely 12-mile kayak trip a week ago, the bulk of my other exercise has been walking to restaurants.

I’ve had a chance to process the videos Mrs. Perils took of my band’s From Russia With Love concert.  Here are my favorites, not necessarily in that order.  My camera records sound nicely in stereo, but likes to normalize extremes, so these sound better at higher volumes than lower:

Stravinsky’s Infernal Dance and Finale from the Firebird.  Relentlessly driving, then a gorgeous horn solo before the finale.

Shostakovich 5th Symphony Finale:

1812 Overture.  Sprawling with thematic ebb & flow, 15 minutes long.  Amusing when Mrs. P figures out where the “cannon” is coming from:

The whole concert here.

OK, I’m going to go act on my assertion above.  Still drippy & cold, but it’s a downhill ride to the gym.

I thought I’d get my monthly post out of the way early here in March.  I know that’s not how I usually do things, but here we are.

Since we last chatted, I’ve been to Milwaukee and back, destroyed a Macbook by spilling hotel-brewed tea and taken a couple of trumpet lessons.  Among other things, of course.  I’m a vibrant and fascinating fellow.

The Macbook incident was particularly galling.  I’d done this before - coffee vs. Dell laptop.  The Dell warranty I had, however, covered stupid stuff that owners did as well as hardware failures, and I got a free motherboard replacement.  While my Macbook was still covered under Applecare, I believe that Apple presumes that Macbooks are all operated by Geniuses® who would not under any circumstance fuck up the liquid/gravity/Macbook relationship.  I got a “D” in high school physics, however (I lied about it when I filled out my application to own a Macbook), and there’s a fine-print Applecare exception for people like me.  The repair was estimated at up to $1200 if the system board had to be replaced (likely).

This happened on Tuesday of the week I was in Milwaukee.  I limped through the week working on various desktops at my client’s, and lugged the corpse home Friday night.  I spent a day dithering about whether to repair or replace, which sounds like I was engaged in critical thinking, but I was just wallowing in the Grief stage. Then I started looking around Craigslist for a replacement.

I ended up finding a 17″ Macbook 2008 vintage (the dearly departed was a 15″ 2008), stopped at the bank for a wad of Benjamins and made a UW student’s Sunday night. I had done a Timemachine backup in early January, so I was able to get my system, including my Windows VMWare machine, back as of that point.  I had determined that my old hard drive was undamaged, so I looked up detailed instructions on how to extract it from my old Mac (the Internet is the best thing since people learned to make arrowheads out of flint).  I put the drive in a casing and brought my system pretty much up to the Milwaukee Valdez incident. All of that took me up to last weekend.  Little fires flare up now & then, and I’m behind on my billing and a few other things, but life is pretty much back to normal.

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The trumpet lessons have been an interesting turn of events.  I haven’t had a trumpet lesson since I was a sophomore in high school.  Since I’ve been playing regularly, however, I find myself wanting to improve a bit.  I found an instructor and signed up for an initial session.  It helped quite a bit, as she espied some bad breathing and embouchure technique I’d either fallen into or always had, and I got a nice handful of new exercises to practice.

She also got the idea to hook up with another of her adult students and have the three of us play trumpet trios.  I’ve done that twice now, and it’s fun - I can hear myself in a way I can’t when I’m playing with the full band, and it pushes me into higher ranges, as we trade off parts.  We may try to do some performances if things proceed.

In band, our Russian concert on the 19th and 20th looms.  We had an “extra” rehearsal Saturday (we usually rehearse Tuesday evenings), playing 1812 and Sheherazade, and I thought the wheels fell off in a few places.  There are a lot of solo bits and “bikini note” exposures where intonation is critical.

A couple of funny bits from rehearsal:

• We were stopped for a bit, and the conductor was admonishing us to play as loudly as we could during a crescendo, but not to lose control of tone quality or intonation. Once we got outside our control envelope, he said, “it’s like a little old lady walking a Rottweiler.”
• We were rehearsing 1812 Overture, and really working on some passages, always approaching, but never playing, the triumphant climax. About the fourth time we were locked & loaded to drive Napoleon back to Europe, but stopped just short, a woman trumpet player next to me said, “this is Tantric music.” (Her point was that the whole piece is just an extended tease until the ending, but the rehearsal situation made it all the more humorous)

Just returned Friday night from a week in frigid Milwaukee, where temps hovered in the single digits. I once again schlepped my trumpet along, but this time I added a bit of technology that I learned about a couple of weeks ago (click to engorge):

It’s from Yamaha, called “Silent Brass”. The black mute in the bell of the trumpet almost completely silences my playing, a mercy to anyone in adjoining rooms. A pickup wire from the mute runs through an amplification device, and I can hear myself as if I were playing with an open bell. I had to remove an earbud a couple of times to be sure I wasn’t actually peeling the paint at full volume. Yamaha makes an assortment of these devices for various brass instruments, including tubas!

It’s a good thing that I got to play during the week, because we got the music for our March concert over the past month, and it’s pretty daunting. The theme of the concert is From Russia With Love. Yes, we’re playing a Bond theme or two, but the meat of the concert is:

• Mussorgsky’s Pictures At An Exhibition
• Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture
• Stravinsky’s Danse Infernal and Finale from The Firebird
• 4th movement of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony
• Scheherazade - Rimsky-Korsakoff

There’s a lot of trumpet-playing there, and a lot is at high volume. The 1812 and the Shostakovich are each close to 15 minutes long. Mrs. Perils says I should be doing push-ups with my lips. But then, she’s been saying that for decades.

So one night we’re about to rehearse Firebird, and I turn to the guy beside me, who’s younger than I but past his 30s for sure, and ask him if he knew that Yes used to play a recording of the Firebird finale as a prelude to taking the stage. Well, he’s heard of Yes, of course, and liked them, but had never seen them live as I had several times in the 70s. We’re stopped for a bit before playing the last several ecstatic bars, and I tell him this is the point where Rick Wakeman swirls behind his bank of keyboard in his cape and blends in with the crescendo. Blank stare.

The Yamaha kit does one other cool thing - it lets you plug in an mp3 player and play along with music. I’ve obtained this recording by the US Army Field Band of the Shostakovich, and have been curious if it’s the same arrangement we’re playing. Last night, I wired up with my iPod, put my music on the stand and played along, including counting all the rests. This is indeed the same arrangement:

The trumpet part consists of two pages with enough rest bars that we should probably put in leave requests; the clarinets, on the other hand, have 8 pages.

Here’s a video of the OSU Marching Band singing, playing and performing a drill to the 1812 (this is definitely not my band - it’s the 21st century version). There are fireworks, of course, but the interesting thing here is the choral excellence, and the fact that, despite being strung across 90 yards, they’re right on the beat:

When I was in the OSU band, we played a version of the Firebird finale.  If I can find it on my moldering vinyl collection, I’ll rip it and post.

Christmas arrived like a summer storm, and I’ve been running a little ragged.  I’ll be back here soon.  Meantime, here’s a nice number from our holiday concert last Sunday.  I’m in the group of trumpets on the right of the stage. (turn it UP!):

More videos from the concert collected here:

http://vimeo.com/album/159297

Hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas day.

So I continue to play in a concert band.  We’re busily rehearsing for a holiday concert on Sunday, 12/20, and the trumpets just have a ton of playing to do.  Stamina could definitely be an issue, so I’ve been practicing at home a little bit longer, and working to extend my comfortable range a bit higher.  The basement spiders should be hibernating now, so I don’t think I’m disturbing their ecosystem.

Another amusing director quote: Anita, the associate director, was rehearsing a piece we’re playing called Three Klezmer Miniatures.  In places there are intricate rhythms that need to be traded back and forth between sections, and the other night we started out a little out of sync.  She stopped the band and said, “If anyone were dancing to you guys, they’d be hurting themselves.”

To get you in the mood, here’s the piece we’ll be starting our concert with (again, not our band):