I....I...I love music!

Our adventures in H yesterday were quite delightful. Highlights included our first listen of Herbie Hancock's Rock Your Soul (loved it) and Holst's The Planets during dinnertime. My sons were intrigued that the music represented planets, and my nine year old had neat questions about composers, conductors, and different orchestras. Fun listening to little voices trying to say "Philharmonic" ;D

I picked up two new-to-me cds at the thrift store yesterday. Artie Shaw's Greatest Hits and George Winston playing Vince Guaraldi. Unfortunately, neither falls in with the letter of the day!

Today's letter is, of course, I. We don't have many I choices, so it's tempting to run in some of J. (I have LOADS of Js!) But I shall refrain.

Options under I are:

Imogen Heap...heard of her, but never heard her. A friend gave me this.
Importance of Being Earnest soundtrack...love this playful set composed by Charlie Mole
In Love With Jazz...a mix. Also a gift that I haven't listened to yet.
India Arie...yum
INXS...great for housework, working out, and, of course, a favorite with my high-energy boys
Israel Houghton...also extremely high energy. I haven't listened to these cds yet. But I saw him in concert at a Worship Conference. Oh MAN was the house hoppin!! I think we could have stayed there all night...it was fantastic!

So that's what I has for us today. I need to workout, do some cleaning, and do some jewelry work before afternoon appointments. Let's see how *I* get through the day! :D

H is for...

So yesterday was G. We started off the morning with Genesis - Turn It On Again. I always knew I was a Phil Collins fan, but I had never realized how many Genesis songs I already knew and loved until picking up a few albums at Goodwill. The opening of Tonight, Tonight is so freakin' cool! And I think Congo will be a new favorite.

After Genesis, we played Glenn Miller. Not the best house-cleaning music, I'll admit. But certainly a mood setter. ;) I wanted to throw on a WAC uniform and start dancing! And the drumming reminds me, we need a new set of brushes for our kit!

Next was Gershwin while I cooked lunch and the boys had their drum lessons out in the garage. Our drum teacher made a house call. The mix I was listening to featured Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holliday, Joe Williams and more... What more need I say? S'wonderful!

And then finally we did listen to some Glenn Kotche in the car. His percussion album is an interesting choice for driving. I was almost mesmerized...which is not necessarily a good thing on the interstate. ;)

I'm excited about today's adventures in the letter H. We have lots of choices.

Hall & Oates

Happy Feet Soundtrack (which is some of the best upbeat get-yer-body moving music ever, and MAN could Brittany Murphy sing)

Harry Connick Jr...no less than 8 albums. We need to spend more time listening to the unfamiliar ones like Harry on Broadway and 30. She is probably the boys' favorite.

Herbie Hancock... Herbie is a recent addition to our musical library. I picked up Possibilities back in the Fall. That album is chock-full of the most incredible collaborations. John Mayer's Stitched Up is ridiculously catchy, and the version of When Love Comes to Town with Jonny Lang and Joss Stone stopped me in my tracks. It seems heretical to think that someone could improve on the original...but maybe...just maybe.... ;) Anyway, we now have 3 albums of Herbie and one hasn't been played yet.

Holst - The Planets

Hootie & The Blowfish...and old favorite from college days. They still sound great. But I can't get my brain wrapped around Darius Rucker's having gone country! O_O

Howard Jones...The first big concert I ever went to was Howard Jones back in 86. He was fantastic. I never thought he got the attention he deserved. I have plenty of his old 80s hits...but also a much newer album Working In The Backroom which is quite evocative.

So. There are our options for the letter H. I think we'll start with Herbie and Holst and go from there.

Here's a groovy view of Herbie Hancock and John Mayer from the Possibilities documentary...

ABC easy as 123

Back in the summer I realized that for someone who loves music as much as I do to only have an 8G iPod was both ridiculous and sad. I replaced it with a 120G iPod Classic and have been diligently, yea even obsessively, working towards filling that behemoth ever since. I have scored (get it, scored?) countless CDs at thrift stores, closing sales, and who knows where else... Just yesterday I bought six, and would have gotten seven if that pesky man hadn't picked up U2's Rattle and Hum before I could grab it. ;p Still, I did okay, having harvested:

Rush: Roll The Bones
Billy Joel: Koehupt (a live album)
Wynton Marsalis: Standard Time Volume 3 (had this one in college)
Harry Connick Jr: Blue Light, Red Light (also used to have this one)
A Putomayo sampler of the music of Israel
A Midsummer Night's Dream soundtrack (mostly opera)

All of these were from thrift stores. Total Bill... Sixteen dollars.

At this point I have close to 5500 songs on my iPod. And a good chunk of them are songs I have never heard! At thrift store prices, I can pick up music just to try it out...however the tendency to listen to the comforting and delighting strains of songs I already know is often so strong...

I decided we needed a systematic approach. The alphabet. From henceforth, we (my boys and I) will be using the day of the month to dictate the letter of the day and therefore the music(s) of the day.

Today, for example, is the 7th...which is the letter G! So we may listen to Genesis, Gershwin, Glenn Kotche, and/or Glenn Miller. That may not sound like much until you factor in that Gershwin is one of my absolute favorites and I have ten CDs of his work on my iPod! ;) But we don't have to listen to ALL of any letter. (the Js would be impossible!) I aim to start with the most unfamiliar before going to the familiar. Drummer Glenn Kotche, for example. His CD Mobile is absolutely stunning. But we've only listened to it two or three times. So we will give it serious play today. Maybe we'll even pull out our DVDs and watch him. His technical skill is breath-taking...while his creativity is jaw-dropping. So you're left breathless with your mouth hanging open which is rather uncomfortable and silly, but hey, he deserves it.

Here's a sampling...



I'll try and report back daily on what we listened to and how we enjoyed it...

Discovering Drums

How this journey began

As of this month, I have been taking drum lessons for about a year. And it's still a few months from the anniversary of my starting to play live percussion with the band. Only a year...

The decision to start playing was such a small thing. I have four young sons. My older two play the drums (and the piano) and are really good. The second one is something akin to a prodigy actually, scary is the word our teacher uses. As I watched them learning to play, I started noticing exactly how important the drums, the rhythms, have always been to me in my musical tastes. Strong rhythms, strong harmonies - those are what I gravitate towards. And I prefer the exotic. Brazilian beats, for example, do strange and wonderful things to me.

I am the musical parent in this house. I have been singing and performing since preschool days, I play some piano... I knew that if the boys' drum talent had any genetic component, it must be from me...so I started thinking "What if I could... Maybe I could...."

I didn't realize it at the time, but I was also profoundly influenced by my rediscovery of the music of Vinx. I saw Vinx live twice when I was in college. Fall of 1990, I believe it was. He was opening for Sting and I vividly remember being entranced by this blue haired man with his rich voice and his evocative drum. Something reminded me...I don't even know what..of how much I loved that music almost 20 years ago. So I went looking. I have no idea what happened to the CDs I had back then, but I found some of his music on iTunes and fell in love all over again.

Vinx plays the djembe. So I liked the djembe. Just one simple drum which can talk and sing so beautifully... Plus there's just something so lovely about the its shape. Silly I suppose, but I just love that drum. So djembe it was to be for me. (in one of those strange coincidences that make life so vastly amusing, turns out my teacher used to play with Vinx. )

So lessons began. Singles. Doubles. Paradiddles. Simple exercises. Simple patterns. Within a few weeks, I used some money for a voice-over gig to buy my own drum. I was tickled with this new hobby and it was fun... I didn't have a hunger for other instruments. And I was convinced that I would not ever be able to play the drum kit. Oh no. Not ME...

Video of Vinx performing It's Too Late

Relax

Fall into the flow
Relax with the groove
Breathe in the music
Let your heart guide the moves
Of your hands as they’re dancing
So rhythmically smooth
And loose
No need to force
or to push
or to pound
Simply play
As the sound and the silence surround
Sweetly surrender and softly slow down
Slow down

Straight to my Heart

My drum teacher gave me the cd Bona Makes You Sweat on Friday. I had no idea who this "Bona" was...but my teacher knows my tastes and he assured me I would love it. So late Friday as I drove the 30 minutes across town to play percussion with the band, I slipped it into the truck's cd player. I was daydreaming and talking to myself (what? that's not normal?) during the first few songs...so although I heard the music and knew I liked it, it had yet to really touch me. But as I neared my exit a song came on that cut right into my chest. Honestly, that's what it felt like. The harmony was so exquisite, I felt diagonal bands across my rib cage of yearning pleasure. I know...sounds kinda goofy, but that's how it felt. And the delicate pastel stripes of a desert sunset seemed to match the music for a sensory moment that was so glorious, I thought I was gonna wreck the truck! I'm telling you...It was GOOD. ;)

The song is an accapella number built loop upon loop, every perfect piece the voice of Richard Bona. Soaring, dipping, diving, popping, laughing... The beauty of it such that I actually found myself choking back tears. Even the laughter of the live audience seemed to be part of the music, part of the joy of the piece.

I fell in love at first hear with the song, and Richard Bona can now count me as a devoted fan. Don't you LOVE it when that happens?

Here is a video of him performing the song Samaouma . It's not the same concert as the cd. But the song sounds almost exactly the same... Never mind watching - just crank it, close your eyes, and soak it in.

What do I have to say?

I'm still reading Neil Peart's Traveling Music... This little sentence gave me pause:

The keystone of any artistic construction is contained in that simple question, what is the intention?

Hmm. I don't normally think of myself as a shallow person...and I don't know that I've ever been described that way. But there are times when I really start to wonder. My drum instructor does these insightful music workshops, and one of the points he always endeavors to hammer home is the idea of "expressing what's inside". That the whole point of gaining skill on your instrument is so you can say what you want to say. But I honestly am left twiddling my neurons going "I have something to say??...... Do I?"

Singing is easy. Singing, you are saying what the lyrics say. And I have never had trouble connecting with the songs and pouring myself out into someone else's carefully chosen words. A few months ago, communication was even easier, when for the first time I sang a solo where *I* had penned the lyrics. Words that truly reflected something from my own heart.... intense.

But drumming? Percussion? When I play...the only thought or emotion I have is simply how very much I LOVE playing. I am not thinking deeper meanings or profound epiphanies. When I'm jamming well enough that I'm not thinking about technique...which is happening more as my skills improve...then I'm really not thinking at all. I'm just lost in the delight and wonder and exquisite sensory overload that is making music. Is that enough of a message? Is that enough intention? To simply want to make the best music I can...because I really, really love it. That's all I've got. I hope it's enough.