Yours portly hasn’t had a chance to noodle out any more new saxophone compositions or to tinker with new digital compositions, so I’m digging up a little something I put together last year and waited until Sunday—the first day of summer—to upload.
I recorded this little cover of the jazz standard “Summertime” from the opera Porgy and Bess last summer when I was driving up to see then-Dr. Fiancée. On those long, boring drives, I would usually entertain myself by sending her goofy voice messages. These usually hit in the third and final hour of the drive, when I’d be dying to get out of the car and see my girl.
Such is the provenance of this cover, my own little rendition with some altered lyrics.
My Boomer-esque journey into the glory of free movies (with ads) on YouTube continues with the 1978 remake Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the classic featuring the likes of Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, and Jeff Goldblum. At the time of writing, the film is available for digital rental or purchase on YouTube, but it was available for free last week:
Regardless, it’s been a couple of years or so since I last saw this classic, and watching from the relative intimacy of my office computer—up close, largely focused, with a clear view a foot or so from my face—I appreciated Invasion of the Body Snatchers more than ever.
Yours portly has been noodling away on his alto saxophone and putting together some experimental recordings, which I’ll eventually compile and release as Säx II: Noodling. These aren’t great masterworks, but I’ve enjoyed putting them together, especially taking a more DIY and improvisational approach to composing and creating music.
Of course, in case you missed it a few Sundays back, here’s what I’m referencing in the the title for today’s post:
With that silliness out of the way, here’s three posts about recent sax recordings:
“New Music Tuesday XIV: ‘Sumatran Snake Charmer’” – I really love this piece; it’s my favorite of the three I’ve done so far. The scuttling of Nugget’s feet and the chirping of birds bleeding into the drum part really lends it that mystical, Far Eastern quality (along with the slithery sax part).
“New Music Tuesday XVI: ‘Old Boy’” – Such a weird piece (and accompanying video); I really love how strange this one is, and it’s based off a “vocal stim” I sometimes chant/mutter/recite around the house, ha!
Last summer I served as the fill-in pianist for the local United Methodist Church in what became our new town. You can read about that here. Two Sundays ago I was invited to play for the local Presbyterian Church for their annual camp service.
What is a “hedge pianist”? Essentially, it’s a term I’ve coined for a freelance/unaffiliated pianist-for-hire. The “hedge” comes from the concept of a “hedge knight“; the hedge knight is a landless, traveling knight who takes work where he can, hoping his skills will land him in the retinue of some great lord, with all the benefits that come with it. With just his horse, armor, and arms, the hedge knight seeks to prove his skill in tournaments and small conflicts.
Similarly, a “hedge pianist” is a masterless pianist traveling about, taking gigs where they come, with a possible interest in gaining enough renown to land a cushy weekly church gig, or playing Friday nights at an upscale eatery. It’s also just a nerdy (or cool?) way of making playing as a fill-in pianist at local churches sound like I’m some kind of musical ronin roaming about the countryside looking for a piano to play.
Regardless, I had the opportunity to play that role two Sundays back for the local Presbyterian Church. The church has a “camp” service every year in preparation for their Vacation Bible School, and the pastor asked if I could play some hymns and all the usual pieces for High Church Protestant services, namely “Doxology” and the “Gloria Patri.” Naturally, I agreed.
The ChapelA Gazebo with a Bent CrossThe Campground and Buildings
The service was held at a campsite owned and maintained by the Southern Baptist church that Dr. Wife and I attend. It’s a beautiful little spot about twenty minutes outside of town, tucked away among the pine trees. The grounds and buildings are very well-maintained. I had some trepidation that the service would take place outdoors, which would present two inconveniences: the intense South Carolina summer heat, and the wind blowing my music everywhere.
Fortunately, the camp has a commodious (and air-conditioned) chapel, where a responsive Yamaha digital piano waited for me. There was also a delectable fried chicken lunch on the other side of the service.
I’ve been dedicating recent Wednesday posts to highlighting some of WordPress’s features, so I haven’t been running many Midweek Koi Pond Updates. However, we have big news from the pond: our rosy red minnows had babies!
Rosy red minnows are a color morph of the common fathead minnow, a popular baitfish that is found in freshwaters all over North America. The rosy red variety first appeared in the 1980s in Arkansas (I believe; at the time of writing, I can’t find where I read that—d’oh!), and the variety has become popular as a decorative fish in aquariums and ponds. It is still used widely as a baitfish, too.
Dr. Wife and I purchased our rosy red minnows from PetSmart back in the winter. The fish feed off of biofilm and other effluvia in the pond (and will also eat little bits of the kois’ food pellets), and help to manage algae while adding only minimally to the bioload of the pond.
They also reproduce very quickly. We started with an initial population of ten, then I added twenty more. I imagine some may have ended up as snacks for the koi, but a number of them have survived and thrived. As soon as the hot South Carolina summer survived, they laid eggs (which we never saw in the murky pond) and Dr. Wife spotted the first babies two Saturdays ago.
At the time, they were the size of a grain of rice. By last Saturday (when I’m writing this post—I’m working ahead!) they were bigger than they even appear in this video. They went from being tiny white little swimmers into being small, pinkish critters.
New life in the pond!
From what I can gather, we’re likely to get another batch of eggs at some point this summer; given that it appears this batch hatched three or four dozen, we’re looking at potentially having over 100 rosy red minnows in our pond. Again, my research indicates that even at these numbers, we’ll be fine in terms of bioload. Of course, we’re likely to see geometric growth, so at some point I’ll start giving rosy reds away or selling them locally as baitfish and pets. I’ll also eventually get a twenty-gallon tank and start raising some of them indoors, which should make for a nice little side project (one other goal is to catch some wild fathead minnows and let them breed with the rosy red color morphs, which will mostly see a return of the drab, olive-green coloring of the dominant gene, but will also produce some recessive rosy reds and—and this excites me—minnows with olive-green scales with pinkish spots).
Of course, the koi will likely thin the numbers a bit. For the most part, though, the koi have been ignoring the babies. We’ve seen Sunny, our big yellow koi, skim through the area where the minnows like to gather—the surface near where our cascading bog filter allows water to cycle back into the pond—and it appears he is sometimes picking up a rosy red snack—but there are so many of them, it’s probably beneficial for him to snack on a few. That said, one cool trait of rosy reds is that the fathers will guard egg clumps, and will even eat algae off of the surface of the eggs to protect them until they hatch.
What really makes me overjoyed about the babies (called “fries” in the fish world) is that it’s a sign that our pond is healthy. It also means that the rosy reds aren’t stressed out by the much larger koi, and are successfully reproducing. Of course, I also love how delighted Dr. Wife gets when she sees them.
Today’s video is probably already a bit dated, but I’ll continue to send along some more updates soon.
Dr. Wife will finish residency officially in eight days, and she’s excited to be here at our new home all the time. We have a good bit of unpacking to do since the multiple moves over the past few months, but it will be so much more enjoyable to do it together.
We’re also looking forward to doing some traveling in the future. We have an excursion planned for mid-July, before she starts her “big girl job,” as I call it, as a rural family medicine doctor. Beyond that, it will probably be a bit before we hit the road again, as she’ll settle into her new schedule and I’ll get settled into my new quasi-freelancer life.
One trip, however, that I hope we can take one day is up to Maine for this tour of the The Maine Solar System Model. It might be awhile before we are able to take the time to do it, but I’m thinking summer will be a great time to cruise across the Solar System—so we can escape the South Carolina heat!
Note: the following post contains affiliate links. I receive a portion of any purchases made through these links, at no additional cost to you. —TPP
Back in 2018 I shifted The Portly Politico from the old Blogger/Blogspot to WordPress.com, and I’ve never looked back—until now.
I’ve dedicated the last two Wednesdays to highlight some of WordPress.com‘s functionality; you can read those posts here and here (for those of you that read last week’s post, I’m happy to report that I was able to deactivate the “Classic Editor” plugin with no ill effects—everything converted back to the blocks editor seamlessly). I thought it might be interested to go back and remind myself why I made the leap to WordPress.com, and to see if maybe I was too hasty in making the change.
I decided to compare Blogger/Blogspot to WordPress.com in three areas: overall interface (looking at the home screen, for example, when you first log into your account); the posting interface/editor; and the final published content (what the blogs look like when published).
Note that I have the free Blogger/Blogspot account that anyone with a Gmail e-mail address can get, while with WordPress.com I have the Premium plan, which is $8 a month when paid annually (or $18 a month otherwise). Blogger/Blogspot does not have any inherently paid options, but lacks the ability to purchase a domain name from Blogger/Google directly. You can purchase a domain name from a number of third-party providers (that’s my approach with www.tjcookmusic.com, which I built using Google Sites), but it’s not integrated into Blogger/Blogspot the way domain name purchases are in WordPress.com.
Regardless, the basic functionality of posting, checking analytics, etc., is analogous enough between Blogger/Blogspot and WordPress.com to make fruitful comparisons.
Like last week’s piece, I’ve got another experiment in multitrack recording recording using Audacity and my Logitech Blue Yeti USB microphone (that’s an Amazon Affiliate link; I receive a portion of any purchases made through that link at no additional cost to you). My workflow was a bit different. I did start with a Voice Memo recording while driving to play at a Sunday morning camp service for the local Presbyterian Church (the summer is always a good time to be a sellsword hedge pianist), and I used that as the template for building today’s piece.
I tend to walk around the house singing and/or chanting weird little phrases or songs I make up. Dr. Wife calls these my “vocal stims“; she claims (correctly) that I do them the most right before bed, as I get the “zoomies” before crashing out for the night. One I do frequently is saying, “Old Boy” in a slight British accent in a very low register.
To illustrate, here’s the track I recorded on the way to play that morning (converted to a lossless WAV):
I used that track as the base for recording other parts. I used the count-in to assure that I came in with the vocal harmonies correctly. I did a major third, a fifth, and a major seventh, then re-recorded the root note so I could ditch the above track, as I didn’t want the road noise in the mix. I also re-recorded the beatboxing as part of the root track.
To keep effects consistent, I mixed the four fresh vocal tracks down to a single track, and applied a 1980s chorus effect, as well as a “large room” reverb preset and some kind of mastering preset. The only downside was that, for some reason, my mic did not pick up the new beatboxing well at all, even though I was “performing” directly into the microphone, with my generous, pouty lips touching the mic’s grill. Maybe I screwed something up when I was playing with noise reduction, which I tried initially to avoid re-recording the (admittedly) short base/bass/beatboxing track.
Next came the saxophone parts. I wasn’t sure what key I was in, I just knew it was major. It turned out to be something approximating B major, with the vocal parts forming a Bmaj7 chord (B, D#, F#, and A#). That works out to an Ab major on the alto sax, but due to some intonation (and possibly the slight tonal ambiguity introduced by the major seventh A#), it didn’t sound quite right until I started recording. It felt like I brute-forced the song back into major—the vocal parts were taking a minor flavor—with the punchy, vibrant saxophone part. Regardless, I riffed out parts that, to me, sounded like a celebration, which really changes the entire mood of the piece (although it probably does capture something of the chaotic joy of vocal stimulation).
I was recording the sax part yesterday morning in the waning minutes before I had to head out for an afternoon of tasks. That said, I managed to squeeze in four quick sax parts, with the result being today’s track, “Old Boy”:
YouTube has a treasure trove of classic films that are free with ads—legally. Indeed, in watching some of these films on my desktop, I’ve had no ads actually pop up (and I’m not using some kind of cheeky ad blocker). YouTube has fed me some great films, mostly from the 1960s and 1970s.
One of the best I’ve seen so far is 1970’s Cromwell, a historical drama based on the life of the the Puritan warrior and later Lord Protector of England Oliver Cromwell. The film also stars Obi-Wan Kenobi—excuse me, Alec Guinness—as King Charles I in a pitch-perfect performance (Richard Harris also delivers a fiery performance as Cromwell).
Here’s the entire film here; it is well worth investing in the runtime, and I found it gripping for the entire duration:
Now that you’ve spent the morning watching the movie, on to the review!
Looking back at the my oeuvre, I’ve written precious little about my favorite breakfast beverage, coffee. However, I’ve done just enough to phone in this smooth and nutty edition of Lazy Sunday:
