bi [sic] le

Made with the Twitcast app on my iPhone propped against a beer can.

A couple days ago I blogged about a treasured jazz discovery and all the old-school analog work I had to do to go about acquiring it. I closed the post with an adieu about digitizing an album of Civil War music I listened to regularly in my youth. I thought it had been loooong-lost, but in fact had been in my collection all  all this time — rediscovered serendipitously when I went searching for the LP with that jazz number on it.

So, in the wake of the epic battle waged yesterday between north and south with the highly favored regiment from Indiana engaging underdog troops from Louisiana, I salute the victors and  opportunistically offer up one of my favorite tracks from the 50-year-old platter, the somber and saintly “All Quiet Along The Potomac Tonight,” by Col. Beauregard and the Volunteers:

PS. The French horns always make me choke-up.

What a difference a couple decades makes. Nowadays if I hear a song on the radio, I simply open up my Shazam app on my iPhone point it in the direction of the noise and in a few seconds … well, SHAZAM I have the artist, the track title, and various links to listen and/or buy an MP3 of it.

Fast-backward with me tto one afternoon  in 1986. I was coming home from work driving north on Fulton Avenue listening to KKGO, then L.A.’s jazz station and the song being played was this rousing tune from some unknown big band that hooked me right from the toe-tapping start and featured an amazing dialogue of two tenor saxophones talking back and forth throughout. I was so entranced by the tight and hard-swinging number that when it was still going strong after I go to my apartment building I sat in my parked car listening to its end — and I’m so glad I did because it finished with a sax solo so effing JAZZ it gave me chills and I wanted it to keep going forever. But it didn’t, and when the DJ didn’t give me any info on it and instead went right into the next song, I sat in my car listening to that in its entirety with my fingers crossed that he would come back and give me some sort of clue.

My prayers were partially answered in that he did come back on air and quickly list the last several artists and what I heard for the second to last one sounded like “The Catearse Orchestra.”

You kids in the audience need to understand that in those dark days there was no running to a computer and extracting data from a search engine. Sure I could’ve dialed up a BBS at the blazing speeds my 400-baud modem was capable of and posted a question on one of the forums then waited around for an anwer, but the odds of anyone knowing were slimity slim.

So what I did in those analog days was start my car, back out of my parking space and roll a few miles to the nearest record store — in this case it was  The Wherehouse on Van Nuys Boulevard in Sherman Oaks. Inside I went and asked the nearest clerk if he knew anything about the “The Catearse Orchestra.” Shaking his head he pointed me to a massive phonebook-sized reference, which apparently listed all albums currently in print and available on earth.

I dove in and dug through it, but found nothing. Bummed but not beaten I came back home and gave the station a call.  When someone finally picked up I told them my plight about hearing a great song but not being able to find any record of the band at the record store.

“What’s the name?”

“Something like ‘The Catearse Orchestra?’”

And the person on the other end laughed. “No wonder you couldn’t find them. It’s ‘Capp/Pierce!’ as in Frank Capp and Nat Pierce. And the song you’re looking for is called “Little Pony” off their “Juggernaut Strikes Again!” album.”

“How do you know?” I asked, writing all that down.

“Because I’m the one who played it!”

Now it was my turn to laugh and thank the DJ. Then I raced down to my car armed with those facts, drove back to The Wherehouse,  went straight to the jazz section and when I didn’t find it in stock I dove back into the book, found Capp/Pierce, found the album and  went through the motions of special ordering the platter.

A week or so later it arrived. I brought it home, through it on my Marantz turntable, reveled in  it, and my musical landscape was never the same.

And now through the magic of my wonderful USB turntable, I can share the song with you — and in case you’re interested the two tenors are Bob Cooper and Pete Christlieb:

Now, while searching for that Capp/Pierce album in my LP collection I’m amazed to have found another that is a huge aural touchstone of my childhood. So if you’ll excuse me I’m off to digitize the heavily-scratched tracks from Whitehall Records’ “The Sound Of The Confederacy,” by Col. Beauregard Johnson and the Volunteers, an album I absolutely cherish and have not listened to in perhaps 35 years and thought long lost.

Honda has a cool TV ad campaign out for its new Crosstour vehicle. A couple of the spots feature fetching animation backgrounded by great songs. One is a jazztastic version of “Fever”, and the other I immediately recognized when I first heard it this weekend but couldn’t identify, and I certainly  wouldn’t've known it by its name and artist — owing to the fact that its infectious melody carried me waaaaaaaay back to a visual of me hearing it from the AM radio while in the passenger seat of my mom’s Chevy Corsair.

Meaning I was 3 years old, maybe 4. A time when performers’ names and song titles didn’t mean all that much to me.

In all honesty I can’t recall having heard it since, but there it was burbling out of the TV speakers into my ears for what may very well be the first time in 40-plus years, simultaneously making me bop in my seat and like a time machine transporting me back to a long-forgotten moment of joy in my toddlerhood.

So of course I blindly gooogled “Honda Crosstour Commercial Music” and ultimately found myself at the page within the automaker’s website where they were so good to identify the singer and song: Miriam Makeba, “Pata Pata.” Next of course I clicked over to Makeba’s Wikipedia page where I sadly learned she died at the age of 76 in November 2008, after having collapsed onstage during a concert in Italy following the performance of “Pata Pata,” which was her biggest international hit in a remarkable life and career.

I wasted little time finding the single available on Lala.com and purchased it, and I share the joy of it with you:

As you might recall from a previous post, my Baybee fulfilled a long-unrealized reuniting this past Christmas by getting a tenor saxophone to finally replace the one I’d had to sacrifice to make rent back in the mid-90s.

Other than picking it up and playing it badly that first day, the sax has sat in its case, with me and my 12-year-dormant embouchure somewhat intimidated by it.

Then last night, I could no longer resist and I brought the sax into the space off the master bedroom formerly called the Clubhouse but duly redubbed the Sound Chamber, sat my ass in a folding chair, and tried to blow along with Art Blakey’s “Moanin” and Lou Donaldson’s “Blues Walk,” two jazz classics I used to play along with way back in the day.

I enjoyed it, but further cemented the fact that I am reeeeeaaaaally reeeeeaaaaally rusty.

This morning I’m here at home, instead of work because I have a traffic court visit scheduled downtown for early this afternoon for a ticket I got on my bike last summer — one that I decided to fight. I don’t really expect to win, but I’m going to give it a shot anyway since the ticket was unfair and cost me $202.

But seeing as there are few places that make me more anxious than courtrooms, and I had the house to myself, I brought out the sax to sooth my nerves, but under the guise of adjusting a a pad protector screw that I discovered was juuuust long enough to prevent a lower pad from closing once opened. After doing that of course I played a bit, and when Ranger didn’t run howling from the room I decided to record a slice that — since it doesn’t totally and entirely suck — I’ve uploaded for you and posterity and titled:

In 1985 I decided I was going to be a tenorsax man. That’s me on the right (click to biggify) shortly after I went to Baxter-Northup Music Company on Ventura Boulevard somewhat on a lark and bought a used Bundy on a two-year payment plan. She was not at all pretty to look at as saxes go, but she was beautiful to me and along with a couple beginning instructional booklets I brought her home to Van Nuys, and soon after spent many an hour with the doors closed in that dressing area of my single apartment usually with socks stuffed in the bell to protect my neighbors from the awful noise that came from my self-teachings.

Month to month, paying the $1,200 total down, my ability with the sax gradually increased. Never to the point of being any good or knowing what the hell I was doing, but I could put on “Joe’s Blues” recorded live at the Century Plaza by the Capp/Pierce Juggernaut and riff along somewhat capably with my favorite jazz vocalist Joe Williams. Same with some Manhattan Transfer, Lou Donaldson, Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson, and others.

When my grandmother died in 1987, I consoled myself with long slow renditions of “Amazing Grace.”

Though it became quickly clear I didn’t have the chops or the dedication or the desire to be anything but a closeted sax player, I kept on blowing for the sheer joy of it until I even got up the courage a couple times to venture outside, open up the case and just blow under a streetlight. Once was at the Santa Monica Pier, and once at my beloved and long-gone Cafe Figaro located at the mouth of Melrose Avenue just before it drains into the convergence of Santa Monica and Doheny on the Beverly Hills border. Each time I made a few bucks, probably more out of my passing patrons’ sympathies than out of appreciations for my musicality.

Nevertheless I always said the two things I’d never be without was my bike to get me where I’m going and my sax when I got there to make me some money for breakfast. Or beer.

I kept saying that up until one of the literally and figuratively poorest days in my life. It was 1996, and to make whatever month’s rent, it came down to putting an ad in The Recycler and sacrificing my beloved sax. A fellow answered the “for sale” offer and showed up to see what I had. Given its condition got no better from when I’d bought it, he scoffed at the $350 asking price, countering with something substantially lower. I told him point blank there was no “OBO” in the deal and that the least I could do to honor my best friend who I’d been able to turn to keep me company through some 12 years of some serious solitude was stay firm on the deeply discounted price. It was $350, take it or leave it.

He took the price and my sax and a bit of my heart when he walked out the door.

But the rent got paid and I vowed that one day I’d replace her. I even kept the mouthpieces handy as reminders — a plastic black one that I bought to replace the white one that came with the instrument and a far fancier Berg Larsen one that my friend Donny Sierer — a cool cat and a tremendously talented musician who married my good friend and tremendous actress Josie DiVincenzo — had given to me as a gift in the late ’80s (along with kind encouragement to keep up my playing).

To this day, within arm’s reach at my desk the mouthpieces sit. And held to the plastic one by a clamp whose copper has spent the last 13-plus years oxidizing  is the same 2-1/2 Rico Royal reed that I last wetted and blew through so long ago.

Last night, after coming home from Yosemite, we decided not to wait until this morning to open our presents, mine from my beloved Susan being a brand new tenor sax. Goodness gracious: with going to Yosemite and coming back to find the Most Awesome Present Ever, could this Christmas get any better?  That answer would be no.

As to any question about how she sounds, I like you people to much to subject you to any initial audio evidence of the havoc so long an absence can have on skills that were at best meager to begin with. But if anyone needs me I’ll be in the upstairs cubby hole off the bedroom known previously as The Clubhouse but now as the Music Chamber with some socks in the sax’s bell blowing my heart out now that an old hole in it has been filled.

Last March at Disney Concert Hall I considered it a once-in-my-lifetime event to hear my favorite symphony, Felix Mendelssohn’s “Italian” played live. After all, I’d been waiting for that since I was 12.

Last night at the Hollywood Bowl, in attendance with my wife and mother among 18,000 others in the capacity crowd, under a full moon and a smattering of bats flittering about the dusky skies, I truly was privileged to witness a Once-In-A-Lifetime event — nothing less than a defining and historical milestone in the cultural landscape of this city. Not only was I there for the much-anticipated debut as Gustavo Dudamel officially lifted his baton for the first time as the L.A. Philharmonic’s musical director, but I exulted in an uncompromised presentation of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony the likes of which I’m pretty sure I’ll never see again — nor ever expected to.

In front of a full orchestra and a chorus some 200-strong behind it Dudamel transported me and I marveled in the Ode To Joy finale as it reinvigorated my creative spirit in reminding me of the pure power and prestige of  music and the arts.

Pure and simple: It was superb and glorious.

Nevermind their location is way in the up ‘n back and all the way over to the left, three of the coveted admissions for the “Bienvenido Gustavo!” event at the Hollywood Bowl October 3  just came in the mail yesterday! Thanks to fellow Silver Laker and LA Metblogs contributor Mykal Burns for dropping the super secret earlybird code on me so I didn’t have to get all frustrated waiting in line at the Bowl box office last Saturday.

Found this (that I’ve never before seen or heard) thanks to the every-loving Boing Boing: Ray Charles covering the hell out of “Ring of Fire” on the Johnny Cash Show:

UPDATE (8.7): I meant also to add there’s a personal significance to seeing these two legends together in this clip, as they represent half of the first music I adored as a child. I couldn’t tell you how many times Cash’s “Boy Named Sue” and Charles’ “Hit The Road Jack” I played over and over and over and over. And over. The other two were Henry Mancini’s “Baby Elephant Walk” from the sountrack of the movie “Hatari,” and Rossini’s “William Tell Overture,” better known to me then as the theme from “The Lone Ranger.” The moment any of these songs would finish I’d race back to my mom’s Admiral hi-fi and move the needle carefully back to the beginning and start it all over again.

One of my favorite diversionary iPhone apps is a little number called Bloom from Brian Eno and Peter Chilvers that allows users to generate ambient musical compositions by tapping out notes on the iPhone’s screen that then get replayed in a slowly fading loop that you can add on to pretty much for infinity.

In times of stress or angst I’ve turned to it  and plinked out a random melody and it has a wonderful calming effect not only in the soothing music and colors it produces, but also in getting me to focus — if even but for a few moments — away from whatever’s frustrating me at that time.

Of course true to the ephemeral nature of its on-the-fly creations, Bloom offers no way of saving and exporting whatever you’d done from the iPhone. Until now: I just figured out a way. Because I’m a bottom-rung genius like that.

The trick is it involves additional equipment:

1) Some sort of digital audio recording device — preferably one that can capture in stereo (I use a Sony Recorder – Model No. ICD-UX70)

2) A jack-to-jack wire that can connect from the headphone output of the iPhone to the mic input of the recorder.

Then it’s just a simple matter of hitting the record button on my Sony and tapping out a tune in Bloom. After that I plug the recorder into a USB port on my computer, open up the MP3 file in Quicktime and either save it in iTunes or export it as a WAV audio file, like this minute-long snippet.

Granted, it’s just a whole buncha not much, but I’m pretty pleased that I figured a work-around and for better or worse, you might be hearing some of these ditties attached to the occasional future bike commute timelapse vid.