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My forays into avant-garde, self-indulgent composing continues unabated.  While I have not been able to do as much of it the past two weeks, I did manage to jot down some funky grooves.

I made it out to open mic night this past Tuesday, 12 March 2024 for the first time in a very long time.  It was a serendipitous evening:  two of my former students were in attendance, both on their respective college’s spring breaks.  One was busking his way from Maine down to Savannah, Georgia, before heading back up the East Coast—a very interesting, albeit exhausting, adventure.  The other was decompressing in a more traditional fashion, rusticating at his parents’ place while recovering from a very difficult semester.  My jaundiced eye picked up right away that he is burned out.

So is yours portly.  My Spring Break can’t get here fast enough, but it’s still two weeks in the future.  I have hit that point in the school year where the neediness and learned helplessness of modern teenagers is wearing on me, and while I love all of my students, I’m ready to have a few days of not seeing them.

But I digress.  During open mic, I popped open my music journal and, in some bits of staff paper not covered over with notes from lessons, jotted down some funky lines:

During a blessed half-day Wednesday (during which we had intermittent parent-teacher conferences in the afternoon), I plugged these rhythms into NoteFlight, and managed to arrange three groovy tracks.

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