July 2006 Archives
And speaking of family, our nephew and niece Josh and Jenny are spending their six-month honeymoon hiking the entire Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada, all 2,650 miles (4,240 km) of it. They're blogging their experience as they go, entering their journal entries when they get to towns that have public libraries and other places where they can get Internet access.
It's a remarkable journey that they're undertaking, and their writing and photos of it are compelling and fun to read. And it's great that they can share it with us all as they're underway. Lots of family and friends are commenting and sending their love - social software at its finest!
My niece Rachel, a recent grad of RIT in film production, is here on campus this summer teaching summer camp kids how to make digital videos. We were watching some of the short videos her kids had produced yesterday (it's amazing what a group of creative kids can do in a week of summer camp!) and Rachel remarked that they had written the music themselves too.
Of course, what she really meant was that they had assembled some original combination of the stock Garage Band loops to go along with the film. Somehow, that didn't strike me as "writing music" - nobody had a musical instrument in hand, or a microphone, much less putting down marks on staff paper. It seems to me that we need another verb for this kind of bricolage activity that characterizes so much of current music-making.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it's not a valid way to construct music - just that it's helpful to distinguish between different ways of getting to a musical result.
Or am I hopelessly old-fashioned?
I'm working on writing a Research Bulletin on Social Software for the Educause Center for Applied Research. I'd like to point to some good uses of social software (blogs, wikis, Second Life, del.icio.us, whatever) in higher ed institutions - whether it's for supporting courses, research efforts, administrative work, or anything else. If you've got some shining examples, please send 'em along.
As part of this effort, when I discover new blogs here at the University of Washington I've started posting them to del.icio.us with the tag uwblogs (with apologies to our colleagues at the Universities of Wisconsin and Waterloo).
Technorati Tags: higher-ed, social-software, UW
I just spent the last ten days helping my parents start to prepare to move out of their house in New York. We spent a lot of time sorting through the accumulation of a lifetime, deciding on what goes and what doesn't.
One of the things we unearthed was a collection of my sixth-grade homework. And right there, on the flyleaf of my science notebook, titled "the Universe", it says:
Uncopyright 1965
Any part of this book may be published without author's consent.
complete with a little u in a circle.
Is that cool or what?
One of the first jazz albums I heard when I was a teenager just getting into jazz was Gary Burton's Duster, featuring a young Larry Coryell on guitar. Larry's playing on that album, which covered the gamut from country-tinged melodies to pretty out-there free improvisation, made a deep impression on me - as a matter of fact, I ended up playing one of the tunes from that album, General Mojo's Well Laid Plan, at my college senior recital (which I'm sure I have a reel-to-reel tape of somewhere, though I'd be scared to listen to it now).
Larry's 1974 album Spaces, which features an all-star cast of the era (John McLaughlin, Chick Corea, Billy Cobham, etc) is widely cited as one of the most influential jazz guitar albums of the seventies.
This past weekend I got the chance to attend a jazz clinic Larry gave for the Seattle Jazz Guitar Society at the Mercer Island Community Center. Larry told some great stories about his life in jazz, leaving Seattle at the age of 21 in 1965 to move to New York to seek out the jazz muses. Then several of us got to take turns playing duos with Larry. I had my upright bass, and when I got up to play I have to admit to being pretty nervous about playing a duo in public with someone as accomplished as Larry. I acquitted myself fine (though I don't think I played at my most brilliant) and Larry was kind enough to say warm and encouraging things about my playing (even asking, kiddingly I think, if I wanted to go on the road with him!).
That evening Michele and I and a couple of other friends went down to Jazz Alley to hear Larry playing with Mose Allison, another long-standing hero of mine (and an old college friend Milo Peterson was playing drums). Larry opened the show playing a few solo pieces, including a beautiful arrangement of the Beatles' She's Leaving Home.
Larry had told us stories about how there was no rehearsal time with Mose, illegible charts, and quirky complicated tunes. He managed to sound fine through the evening, with a few notable points where he obviously hadn't heard the song before (better him than me, that's for sure!).
Today I downloaded two of Larry's more recent albums - Tricycle (a trio date with Paul Wertico on drums and Marc Egan on bass) and Cedars of Avalon (with Buster Williams on bass, Cedar Walton on piano, and Billy Drummond on drums) from eMusic (DRM-free, of course). Both are terrific, and I feel really privileged to have gotten the chance to spend a few hours with an artist of this caliber.
