The creepy little girl with blue eyes who kills her grandfather and then falls in love with a dead man.
Once again Russell wins the race for first completed piece, another addition to his Dune-themed series: "Saint Alia of the Knife." He and I have a tradition of naming our pieces from our favorite or current reading materials. If you don't who Alia is I encourage you to check out Frank Herbert's Dune book series (not the movie). If you think you're too cool to read fantasy, may I remind you that Wayne Shorter loves it. So there.
Naming tunes is deceptively difficult. It's easier if your piece has words and is about romantic love. But if it's an odd-meter groove with an angular melody and squiggly line that means "someone solo," it can feel hard to be authentic about the title. There are a few common practices that the uninspired musician can always lean on. The pun, the rhyme, the woman's name, the estoric single word that supposedly means something, something 'ology, and my least favorite: some kind of play on the word "blue." I'm serious. I won't like your tune if I find out "blue" is in the title. Unless it's "Blue in Green," which I love. Come the think of it, "Kind of Blue" is the reason that the "blue" thing is done.
I'm certainly not saying that stealing titles out of reading material is best way to name songs. It just helps me avoid naming my tunes "Ass Hippo in Blue" or "Rain." And for the record, I think that Mingus has the best titles.
I was fortunate enough to catch the Dave Douglas-Keystone show at the Blue Room this weekend. It's always satisfying when you get hyped up about something and it delivers. Dave's been a hero of mine for quite some time now so I'm biased, but it was probably the second-best show I've seen since moving to Kansas City, after the Wayne Shorter Quintet. I even stayed for both sets and I never do that.You could argue that you can tell the status of a player by the caliber of the musicians in his/her audience and by that measure Dave is doing pretty well.
In the realm of BHIC specifics we've had a couple of hiccups in the personnel department but that's settled now and the group is finalized with 10 players. My work schedule has changed this week which has made me adjust my composition habits. Now I'll have an answer to the age old question, "Does music sound better written at 6:30am or 9:30pm?"
Here's a pretty interesting article about the mountain of bullshit that people have to endure when setting up jazz programs:
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