Good morning! It's 8;25 in the a.m. where I'm sitting. More Indian Summer before the weather really takes a nosedive.I wish it could just stay like this until next March. Make hay while the sun still shines, I guess.
Music news. There is a new tune of mine on YouTube, called Shaken, Not Stirred. It's a blues based on Straight No Chaser. Same basic chromatic scheme but the figures are retrograded. A fancy term for bass-ackwards. I did this on another song I recorded. A thing called Boot Scoot, which is the first cut on my album Tele-ology. It's based on the jazz standard Lover Come Back to Me, only the melody is backwards. One of the tricks I learned in Mr Haas's Music Theory class at Lincolnland.
As far as my formal education, it had a lot more to do with writing music than performing. My major was Music Composition. I was gonna be a 'longhair composer' at one time. Just like on an instrument, I had a private lesson every week. We'd go over whatever piece I was working on, painstakingly playing every note on the piano. I remember one occasion, at Peabody, where we hit a clinker, and I got an "Aww, Samm.."But we had to make sure all the notes worked. .
. Many colleges- Oberlin and Indiana University to name two- taught composition in small classes, and I knew that just wouldn't do .And I've had three such teachers: one privately, in Boston; one at Oakland Univ in Rochester Michigan; and one at Peabody Conservatory, where I finally settled down and finished my degree.
The guitar was a different bag altogether.. 5 years of lessons at a local music store from age 12 to 17, but otherwise self-taught, except for a few sporadic lessons over the years. I was recruited early as a bass player, and bounced between guitar and bass for a long time. The bass was a lot of fun, especially playing walking lines, but I had too many people trying to tell me how to play- as in fewer notes, the role of the instrument and all. So the guitar ended up winning. But I still love being my own bass player on recordings.
Anyway! This was a more introspective post than I'd intended to write. Hope it makes a good read. I'm just hanging in there like the rest of you. The phone call and the trip to the store are both more meaningful, as they provide some needed social interaction. And music is really saving my ass.. So here we are. Thanks as ever for stopping in and wading through all this self-indulgent patter. Happy Thursday to you! I'm outa here. More later.
PS Today's pic goes back to December of 2005. The Sam Crain Quartet. From left to right: me, GG Pelletier, Kevin Ellis, Don Cochran. Never used this picture, because it's not all that flattering to moi, but what the hell...