Catherine gave me my birthday present today, several weeks early: she put a down payment down on an electric piano. We had to move some furniture to fit it in, but it is way cool, and if I had to throw away a couple hundred books to make room for it, so be it. I haven't had a piano since I left home in 1985. We've been talking for years about getting one, but they're so damn expensive. Even electric pianos are usually well beyond our budget, and I'd more or less accepted the fact that it would be another twenty years before I ever got anything acceptable. But suddenly this one showed up on the market, and it was a really good deal, and when Catherine came to meet me after drumming today, she filled out the paper work, wrote a check, and said, "Happy Birthday."

I like it because it's got 88 keys instead of just 76, and also it has "touch," which means it feels and reacts like a piano instead of a synthesizer when I play. Also, there's another dozen or so reasons why I like it, but I'm too tired to write about them at the moment. I'll come back and say more after I work my way through the 108-page instruction manual. I'm probably going to play it in grand piano mode 95% of the time, but it won't hurt to figure out what else the thing can do.

Naik Borzov

Amy Beach.

For about 20 seconds, I thought I was listening to Gershwin. Then I realized it couldn't possibly be so. Turns out it was Amy Beach's Piano Concerto. Next time I'm in Kansas City, I'm going to have to spend some time with the Amy Cheney Beach Collection, just because I can.

Other people's music.

The other day, during a conversation with a friend, I mentioned that I hated Mozart. Hate, hate, hate Mozart, especially his operas. There is an etude written in d-minor that I enjoy, but I can never remember which one it is, and I don't want to wade through his entire body of work to find it. Other than that, Mozart is not for me. Today, though, as I was trying to nap, I remembered that I really liked his Requiem. I've even been known to darken the entry arches of a Catholic cathedral at least twice to hear it performed on All Souls' Day. So what's up with that? Come to find out that the reason I like it is because it isn't reallyMozart's work. He set up the requiem with the introduction, but the bulk of the work was written by Eybler and Süssmayr. Mystery solved. I can go back to hating Mozart.

The funny thing is, this has suddenly become the norm for my listening tastes. Last week I was dozing on the couch, listening to Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition and Night on Bald Mountain. I performed them both in college, and I really like them, or at least parts of both of them (the final passages of Night on Bald Mountain stick in my head as particularly nice). When I woke up after my nap, I started reading the liner notes to my CD, and realized the reason I like Mussorgsky's music so much is because it isn't really written by him. Ravel did the orchestration of Pictures at an Exhibition that I know the best (Mussorgsky wrote it for piano), and that makes sense, because I really like Ravel. And Rimsky-Korsakov completed--and completely changed--Night on Bald Mountain. The ending that I like? Pure Rimsky-Korsakov.

So, I guess the thing I like is famous music ghost-written by other famous musicians. At least it helps put me to sleep in the afternoon.

Bicoastal.

Garett and I got together again today intending to finish our last song, but we got distracted by a new guitar rhythm he was working on. So, now we have the makings of a new song, if only (once again) we could get some lyrics laid down. I'm not sure what this song is going to be called, but so far we've all thought it reminded us of the beach, sort of the last day of summer before all the fun ends.

This song is notable because it is full of screw-ups On our first two songs, even though they were still rough drafts, we edited out all the sketchy-sounding parts. This is the first time I sat down and played the entire song through instead of relying on loops that I liked. I only edited the last three or four bars, then over-dubbed a couple of the crash cymbals, otherwise, the drums in this one are recorded in one sitting. That means the drums are kind of crazy in places. There's a spot where Garett pretty much forgets he's playing the guitar, but I like that it sounds real. No keyboards yet, so the only thing I'm doing on this one is playing the drums, the bass and rhythm guitars are Garett.

Boris Grebenshikov.

Yesterday I stumbled across a Naxos CD at the library of Boris Grebenshikov. Grebenshikov (w/Akvarium [in english]) and Victor Tsoi (w/Kino, esp. Gruppa Krovi [in english]) almost singlehandedly taught me how to speak Russian, and I was just happy to see him again. When I was in school, it was all Vysotsky, Vysotsky, Okudjava, Vysotksy! And I was there for the birth of the next school of Russian folk music. How cool is that?

Addendum: Oh my. The liner notes give thanks and credit to Miki Pohl. She was my next door neighbor when we were in Leningrad in 1988. We operated in different social circles--we were in different grammar and conversation classes at LGU--but one thing we had in common was our interest in dissident rock. It is so neat that she took the topic and ran with it.

Bands of America.

http://www.bands.org

Northmont H.S., Ohio.





Center Grove H.S., Indiana.







Bellbrook H.S., Ohio.

I'm supposed to be vacuuming.

I had to take my drum set over to Diane and Garett's last night, and I haven't set it back up because this is a perfect opportunity to vacuum a corner that hasn't been cleaned in five years. It's amazing how much dust can accumulate over such a length of time. It's kind of bribe--do the vacuuming, and you can drum some more!

I'd like to drum, Bobby lent me a new book, "The Art of Boogaloo" because he noticed two of the exercises play off my favorite drum pattern. It should be cool. He's good for my ego, yes, he is. Today he told me that I seriously sell myself short as a drummer, that I'm really better than I represent myself to be. Part of me thinks he's just trying to make me feel good, part of me wants to believe him. Whichever, I usually come back from seeing him all ready to drum again.

Catch up.

I was so tired last night, I forgot to even point out--that's just 1/2 a song, the background, and it hasn't been mixed, so the trumpets are way too loud. Garett is working on lyrics, and once we get those laid down, we'll make it sound a lot better.

I am so far into sleep deficit, I'm never going to get out.

New.

Once again, we started out making a rockabilly song, and ended up with something totally different. Our new song, affectionately known as "rough draft" is a cross between Van Morrison and some dead ska band.

We've renamed the band, it's now called Bicoastal.

Not your mother's music.

Not my music, either.

I promised Bobby I'd bring him a list of my CDs so he could pick out some music for me to practice with. I promised him the list three weeks ago, and I finally started writing it up tonight. At first, I just listed out the pop/rock CDs, but then I thought I should add the jazz/big band stuff, just in case, and maybe the country and swing stuff, also just in case. I ended up writing them all down, all twelve pages of them (the key lesson here is "don't listen to Susan when she whines about being busy, because she always finds time to do stupid, pointless tasks"). It turned out to be a rather revealing exercise.

One thing I promised myself when I got involved with Catherine was that I would not let her govern my taste in music. My previous girlfriend's taste dominated the relationship, and when we broke up, I realized I had no idea what I was supposed to listen to--all the music was hers. So, for the first couple of years with Catherine, I very determinedly held to my own aesthetic principles. Maybe it was more like the first couple of weeks, 'cause I'm looking at this list and seeing very little of myself in it. I see a lot of stuff we bought together, but the majority of it isn't mine. I guess that's okay, but it's kind of strange, since I'm supposed to be the musician of the family. Some of the albums are obviously mine--the Korean ones, for instance--but I think even my closest friends would have a hard time figuring out what other ones would go with me if this relationship ended.

Yet one more thing to add to the "when I get a job list": buy more of my own music.

It was a dark and stormy night.

Preceded by a dark and stormy day. Catherine picked a good weekend to leave town. It was the perfect day to curl up in bed with the cats and read Dante, so that's what I did all afternoon.

Eventually I got out of bed and made good on the promise I made to Garett two years ago, which was to go over to his place and play some music with him. It's really quite amazing. In just a couple hours, we managed to lay down this completely New Age song that we made up on the spot. I definitely didn't expect to turn out something so weird when I started out today, but that's what happens when you wing it. I played all the percussion and the keyboard, Garett played the rhythm and bass guitar. First I laid down a standard clave rhythm on the upbeats, then added the ashiko, then the dumbek, and then the scraper. At that point, it sounded like we had some neo-West African beat going on, but once we added the bass guitar, it completely changed. And since my keyboard playing is almost non-existent, we had to take what we could get, which was a simplistic rendition of a chord, played with one finger. Garett's rhythm guitar almost sounds like a piano playing. Really, really odd, but still, kind of neat that two people can just pick up some noise makers and record a song, just like that.

We're going to take our New Age band, the Ethereal Soundscape, on the road, man.