My Three Favorite Musical Discoveries of the Summer!

My first great discovery from the past several weeks has to be Spok Frevo. A former band parent sent me the YouTube link you see below. It's a Brazilian ensemble that mixes big band jazz with a frenetic local style called frevo. The Afropop Worldwide website describes frevo as "breakneck northeastern Brazilian rhythm and dance." I call it "muito quente"--Portuguese for "very hot"!

Notice how each horn player has his own wireless mic attached to the bell. This allows total freedom of movement and excellent sound reinforcement. They all have single headphones as well so they can hear the live sound in one ear and the mix in the other. The percussionists should be familiar if you remember what you learned in the Latin American music unit as a freshman. To the left of the drum set is someone playing the giant surdo bass drums--note the boom-BOOM boom-BOOM pattern. On the right is the pandeiro player with the shallow and heavy Brazilian version of the tambourine.



My second discovery came courtesy of a podcast called Sound Opinions. This is a weekly program billed as "the world's only rock and roll talk show." You can hear it locally on WBEZ 91.5 FM, but I download the shows and listen to them when I'm working out or running. Greg Kot and Jim DeRogatis cover a wide range of topics, from historical to current performers. A few weeks ago, they had tUnE-yArDs in the studio. The band is led by songwriter/vocalist/percussionist/African music expert Merrill Garbus. Her music features a great deal of live looping, a process by which a musician can play a pattern and have it repeat over and over electronically while adding new parts on top of it in a live setting. When she combines her overdubbed vocals and percussion with a bassist and two saxophonists, it's a truly infectious new riff on 1970s Afropop.

tUnE-yArDs perform 'Doorstep' on Sound Opinions from WBEZ on Vimeo.

Want to see and hear more? Click here and scroll down to Show #294.

My final discovery is something that makes me very happy. There used to be an online music service called lala.com that allowed you to listen to thousands of tracks for free. The only catch was that you could only listen to each track once unless you paid a nominal 10 cents to add it to your playlist. Instead of downloading tracks, it was all cloud-based. Anyway, Apple bought them out and promptly shut them down a couple of years ago. Since then, the only worthwhile free service has been Pandora, which doesn't allow you to specify the track you want to hear. Instead, you specify an artist or a genre or a song you like, and Pandora serves up a non-stop feed of similar music. It's like having your own radio station, 24/7. So if you punch in "Life During Wartime" by the Talking Heads, you might hear Billy Idol's "White Wedding" and "Momma's Reward" by Edgar Broughton Band. But what if you want to hear a specific album or track?

Enter Spotify. Until this summer, it was only available in Europe, but it has now debuted in the US. Like many music services, it has subscription plans, but it also has a free version. Simply apply for an account, wait a few days for the email "invitation," download the app, and start listening. It's a very slick interface, and they have a pretty big collection of albums that you can listen to in their entirety. With the free plan, your album gets interrupted with ads for other musicians hawking their tracks. This can be jarring when you're listening to a quiet, subtle album like Esperanza Spalding's eponymous disc and some loud rock music bursts through the speakers in between tunes, but hey, it's free!

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So, those are my latest discoveries. In the meantime, I've been back at school choosing music for all the bands. I've got some great plans for each group! I've put up my bulletin boards, photocopied a bunch of forms and warm-up packets, and ordered all new marching band t-shirts for everyone! The countdown to the new year continues!

Summer Band Mailing!

The annual summer band mailing is going out today! An electronic copy has been e-mailed to sophomores, juniors, and seniors and their families. Freshmen will receive it via US mail on Thursday or Friday. That means that exciting new musical experiences are on the horizon for the 2011-2012 Concert Band, Symphonic Band, Wind Ensemble, Jazz Band, and Warrior Marching Band! But don't let that ruin your summer vacation; you have plenty of time left for rest and relaxation. Just add some practicing to the mix so nobody returns with summer chops!

Traditional Pakistani Music Meets American Jazz

Check out this BBC segment about an orchestra in Pakistan that plays jazz music from America. You can hear Paul Desmond's "Take Five" with strings, tabla, and sitar. UPDATE: It's now the top selling jazz album on iTunes! By the way, even though the announcer credits the piece to pianist Dave Brubeck, it was written by his saxophonist Desmond. Most people assume Brubeck wrote it because it's his most famous and most requested piece, just like Duke Ellington didn't write his theme song "Take the 'A' Train." That classic was composed by his collaborator, Billy Strayhorn.

Summer Break Continues

Last night I finally made it to Ravinia to see a classical concert, compliments of my wonderful Class of 2011. Actually, we went to "hear" a concert; we sat on the lawn and listened to the performance, which was in the Martin Theatre, over the sound system. It was a beautiful night, and being close to the lake, an escape from the extreme heat we've been having. At one point, there was a bizarre circular cloud pattern in the sky, and we even saw a satellite go overhead.

The music was all famous works for winds: Beethoven's Octet, Janacek's Mladi, Strauss's Serenade, Op. 7, and Dvorak's Serenade, Op. 44. These four pieces were quite varied, even though they shared similar instrumentation with various combinations of flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and horn. The Dvorak is one of my all-time favorites, and it was one of four pieces that were named in a doctoral study as the finest works ever written for wind ensemble. I had never heard the Janacek, but it is a wonderful piece for woodwind quintet plus bass clarinet. It has an Eastern European flavor that links it to the Dvorak, but being composed 50 years or so later, it's more modern sounding. Check it out as played by the Zemlinsky Sextet in Amsterdam:



Speaking of Ravinia, might I recommend the July 31st concert, which features the Chicago Symphony Orchestra performing Tcaikovsky's 1812 Overture with live cannons! High school students can sit on the lawn for free with a student ID. The school with the most attendees receives a cash prize, so let's pack the place with Warriors! So far, we're not in the top five schools (New Trier, HP, Hersey, Libertyville, and Stevenson), but there's still time!

In DHS band news, I'm busy arranging kids TV show themes for our Homecoming Show. Plan on some Peanuts, Sesame Street, Spongebob, Rugrats, and Pokémon! I've also been working on revising some Concert Band worksheets. Next week I'll send out the summer band mailing, so look for an email about that. It's only 26 days to band camp and 36 days to our first rehearsal of SB and WE!

Next week I'll also be attending the wedding of two former band students. This is the fourth marriage that began in the DHS band since I've been here. So next time you're sitting in rehearsal, look around and you might see your future spouse!

Keep practicing--no summer chops!

Summer Music Camps

This past weekend, my wife and I traveled to the U of I to pick up my son from the Illinois Summer Youth Music camp, where he spent a week in the middle school band program. Here's why I always talk up going to summer music camps:

• He got to play in a large band of talented peers, practicing 4 hours a day, with a great director who taught them a lot.
  
• He played some great, challenging repertoire, including Emperata Overture, a piece I've done with high school bands. They played another piece that I had not heard before, but I plan to do it with the Concert Band this coming year.
  
• He got to play in the orchestra as well, directed by a U of I music ed/orchestra faculty member, Louis Bergonzi.
  
• He met band students from all over the state.
  
• He had a daily horn master class in which he learned about the original, valveless natural horn, how to care for his instrument, and what to look for in purchasing a new horn.
  
• For his elective class, he performed in an Indonesian Gamelan ensemble and learned about the music and culture of this fascinating musical tradition.
  

This was one jam-packed week of music! While we were there, I also had the chance to hear the final performance of the percussion camp, which happened to feature two DHS band members. They had a similarly intensive week, working with U of I professor Ricardo Flores. Their concert included a traditional concert percussion ensemble, a mallet ensemble, Afro-Cuban hand drumming, Brazilian samba batucada, and two Caribbean steel drum pieces. Again, that's a lot to experience in one week, way more than you can get during the year at DHS. Moral of the story: there's no better way to improve over the summer than to spend a week or two immersed in your music!

My Summer Vacation, So Far

My summer vacation started off with a wonderful musical opportunity, performing with the Hurricane Saxophone Quartet in Evanston at the Custer Street Fair. The group is usually an all-woman ensemble, but two of the members were unavailable, and I got the call to sub in. We dubbed ourselves the "His and Hurricane" quartet for the day, as we played a noontime concert under the Metra tracks, following a group of Native American musicians and dancers.

There was a very nice crowd enjoying our set of ragtime and jazz. It was great for me to have to practice several times in preparation and to get my reading chops and endurance in gear. As a band director, it's too easy to get away from performing and lose that perspective, so it was especially good for me to do. Plus, all four of us are Northwestern University music alums from the mid to late 80s, so it was a fun reunion.

Last week, my family and I took a mini vacation to New Buffalo, Michigan for some relaxing family time among the dunes. Our condo had a third-floor patio looking out over the marina. As I like to do on family trips (much to the embarrassment of my kids), I spent some time on the patio playing a xaphoon. This is a fun instrument I picked up a few years ago, invented by a man in Maui who calls it a bamboo saxophone.

Mine is the cheaper version made of plastic, but it still works great. It's really a clarinet-type of instrument because it has a cylindrical bore and overblows at the 12th. A sax has a conical bore and overblows at the octave. In other words, a clarinet has a register key that makes whatever note you are fingering jump up 12 notes, e.g. from a C to a G, whereas a sax has a true octave key. Anyway, it uses a tenor sax reed and fairly standard woodwind fingerings. It's probably closest to the forerunner of the clarinet, the chalumeau. You can check it out here.

In other news, I just finished writing up a project we did in Symphonic Band for inclusion in a book about teaching composition. It's the Cajun Folk Songs melody project we did this spring when everyone in the band wrote a melody on the dorian scale. The book is being edited by Maud Hickey, a music ed professor at Northwestern, and a good friend and colleague. I'll have more details when I find out about the publication date. Later this summer, I'll be a guest lecturer in Dr. Hickey's summer school class, "Teaching Composition in the Schools."

Finally, I'm going to get started today with marching band music for the fall. The homecoming theme is "The Good Old Days," so I'm looking at some of the TV shows the students will remember from their youth, like "Sesame Street" and "Arthur." Feel free to send any suggestions along!

Keep practicing--remember, no summer chops!

Annual Band vs. Orchestra Kickball Game

Band 6
Orchestra 1

Another year, another victory. I'm just sayin'...