Herman Leonard

Sometimes Euterpe appears as a veil of smoke or a cloud of incense, and sometimes she embraces her musician. The gallery begins here.

The Luxembourg Pipe Band

I just found out that my old friend Chuck Watkins is the bass drummer for the Luxembourg Pipe Band, "the first and only Pipe Band in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg." Here's a fine collection of videos.

Tin whistle update

My two big tin whistle projects at the moment, aside from easy tunes I stumble across: Over the Waterfall and The Foggy Dew. For the latter, also see this page. At the bottom of that page there's a link to a recording of some old guy singing his version of the song - that's the version I learned to sing. For ubuntu people, you can play the file via "mplayer -playlist http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/easterrising/ram/rs_l06.ram"

The tin whistle follies

The tin whistle bug has bitten. I'm currently working on God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen, having discovered that the alphabet song/twinkle twinkle/baa baa black sheep is gratifyingly easy to play. I have two whistles; naturally, the kids grab one the moment I put it down and start tootling away.

Once I can stumble through God Rest, I'll look into tackling Over the Waterfall (that's not me in the video):

United breaks guitars

A song about United Airlines from the Sons of Maxwell:

The joys of autodidacticism: Bach

One good thing about being an autodidact is that you sometimes discover something really good only after you're old enough to appreciate it. For example, Bach's chorales! Good solid simple Lutheran hymns perfectly arranged by JS Bach himself.

Paul Anka is the king of something

I would have bet cold hard cash that Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit couldn't be turned into a horn-heavy lounge tune straight outta 1965 Vegas with the swingin' Rat Pack. I would have lost. It's a quintessential Rat Pack tune.

The Mountain Dew Song

From our goofy 12-year-old, to the tune Jingle Bells:

Charging through the glue
with a can of Mountain Dew.
It's such a wonderful drink,
it would make a freighter sink.

Just take another sip,
and your black cat won't nip.
And we'll be running through the cheddar cheese tonight.

Mountain Dew, Mountain Dew
sipping all the way.
Oh what fun is to have
a can of Mountain Dew.

Mountain Dew, Mountain Dew
sipping all the way.
Oh what fun it is to have
a can of Mountain Dew.

One of the creepier things I've seen

The Archdiocese of Los Angeles got rid of their old cathedral, St Vibiana, after it was damaged in an earthquake (iirc). Now it's a place called "((( artists den )))" [sic]. It's distractingly creepy to see music acts performing in front of the altar of an abandoned cathedral.

Four thousand winter

Sort of a colloquial Exsultet:

Adam lay ibounden,
Bounden in a bond;
Four thousand winter
Thoght he not too long;

And all was for an appil,
An appil that he tok,
And clerkes finden,
Wreten in here book

Ne hadde the appil taken ben,
The appil taken ben,
Ne hadde never our lady
A ben hevene quene.

Blessed be the time
That appil take was.
Therefore we moun singen
'Deo gracias.'

Why yes, I have been listening to the Mediaeval Baebes.

Good music, randomized

Captain Obvious here. I've realized that when I find an mp3 file I like on our White House filesystem, I can just symlink it into, say, ~/Music, then do 'mplayer -shuffle *.*' that dir to get randomized musical goodness.

Tuesday night music for programming

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Revolution take 20?

Maybe so - somewhere between Revolution #1 and Revolution #9.

The Bill Awards

And the winner for best use of background keyboards in a song is... Aimee Mann for her song Phoenix. It's a distillation of Everlast's quiet hip-hop-influenced keyboards and a whole lot of beautiful harmonic exploration. You can get a taste of the keys in the video here, but the performance and mix are much better on the album, @#%&*! Smilers.

Hard day's night

I've pulled two all-nighters in a row, followed by all day with the kids at home while Lisa works at the bookstore. The owners of the store are taking a short and well-deserved vacation and with my flexible schedule Lisa is able to cover for them. So the kids and I are organizing around the house, thanks to some good "clean-up" music: Jaco Pastorius's album Invitation, the Meat Puppets album Too High to Die and the Red Hot Chili Peppers album with their remake of Stevie Wonder's Higher Ground. What's it take to get on our playlist? You've gotta be at least as harmonically interesting as the Beatles.