Fifteen years ago today, on 4 July 2010, my old brass band, Brass to the Future, played an outdoor concert in a park in my hometown of Aiken, South Carolina. It was a bit of a “guerrilla” concert, in that we did not ask permission, but just showed up in the park and started playing for our fans.
In the spirit of Independence Day, I’m featuring rare footage from that concert today.
This past Friday, 22 September 2023, I played a gig at a local coffee shop with my buddy John. I was recovering from a sinus infection, but through a combination of cough drops, water, and tea, I soldiered through and managed to hit quite a few high notes—woooooot! It also helped having John there to carry lead vocals on several tunes.
It was a sloppy performance on my end—I mixed up the lyrics to a song I have been singing for eleven years!—but I’m chalking that up to the sinus congestion and my slowly diminishing mental faculties. The result, regardless, was an absurd, self-indulgent, over-the-top, ridiculous, long closing number to a very fun show.
Tonight, for the first time in awhile, I’ll be playing a solo gig at a local coffee shop in Darlington, South Carolina. I’m looking forward to stretching out these stubby fingers and doing some soft rockin’.
Well, it won’t be entirely solo: my buddy John will be joining me on a number of songs. His gorgeous twelve-string guitar and his capable backing vocals add a great deal of depth and texture to my tunes, so I’m glad he’ll be joining me.
Back on Thursday, 20 July 2023 I made a pilgrimage back to Lula’s Coffee Company, which for several years before The Age of The Virus was the epicenter of a flourishing of musical and cultural activity in Florence, South Carolina. Then the management dragged its feet on resuming open mic post-pandemic, and I largely wrote it off as a venue.
Fortunately, I am overcame my stubborn resistance and occasionally make it out there for open mic night. It is a long way from my home now, so I don’t get out there much, but I found my most recent visit to be quite rewarding.
My buddy John Pickett and I played “Greek Fair“; I regard this song as the best I have ever written. Others have proven more popular, but I’m really proud of this one.
Two years ago I wrote “Supporting Friends Friday: The Cinematic Compositions of Mason Sandifer” about the composing work of one of my student, Robert Mason Sandifer. Mason (as I call him) started distributing his music to all the major platforms (Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, YouTube, etc.) earlier this month, and he is directly responsible for inspiring me to put my old instrumental music on the same platforms.
Mason is currently undertaking an ambitious project to compose instrumental music that tells the story of the Bible, from Genesis through Revelations (or, as my friend Steve O would say, “from Genesis through Maps”). It’s an amazing concept, and he has executed it beautifully so far.
It’s good to be back at open mic—finally!—and I’m getting some of previously unreleased tunes posted to YouTube. One original tune I played last Tuesday, 13 June 2023 is a piece I wrote in 2018 about the open mic scene called “Private Lessons (Goth Chick)“—the cattiest song I’ve ever written.
Thanks to the gentle prodding of Audre Myers, I’ve decided to upload videos actively to my YouTube channel. I’ve had this channel for almost fifteen years (apparently), but only used it to upload a short video from the video game Spore in 2008 and some footage of my old group Brass to the Future playing “The Stars and Stripes Forever” on Independence Day 2010.
I’ll mostly upload original music. There are plenty of songs I love to cover, but uploading those covers to YouTube without obtaining permission from the original songwriters is technically a violation of copyright law. I’m a big believer in the protection of intellectual property, and I’d rather not run afoul of the YouTube police, at least not for something legitimate.
That said, readers are welcome to cover my tunes, just let me know about it.
So, I thought I’d periodically post a digest of some recent uploads for readers who want to dive deeper into my music—for free!
Last week I wrote a short post about Saturn’s (extremely slowly) disappearing rings. In that post, I referenced one of my songs, “The Rings of Saturn,” which I wrote way back on 7 August 2015.
Naturally, that got me thinking: I should record that for Open Mic Adventures! “The Rings of Saturn” is one of my personal favorites of my original tunes, but I wrote it after the release of Contest Winner EP, and I’ve never made it back into the studio. It didn’t help that my life and work grew exponentially more demanding in those years, but I also went through a long spell of creative dryness that never fully relented.
That said, it was time for “The Rings of Saturn” to make its official Internet debut (and its YouTube debut).
It’s time for another front porch concert! This event—the TJC Spring Jam and Recital—will be the sixth Front Porch concert I’ve hosted (I think), and I’ve learned quite a bit from the others, including the last Spooktacular.
This year marks the third Spring Jam, which has become a popular event with my private music students. These front porch concerts started out as a way for my buddy John and me to play gigs during The Age of The Virus, when nobody was open for live music. I realized that if I wanted to play in front of a live audience, I’d have to circumvent the hysteria and become the venue and talent.
Gradually, the concept morphed from a self-indulgent concert into a recital for my private music students. The Lord has really blessed me—far beyond what I deserve—with a large clientele of private music students (around twenty-two at the time of writing, working out in practice to anywhere from twenty-to-twenty-four lessons a week), so it made sense to offer a couple of recital opportunities a year for them.
Well, here we are again: another Bandcamp Friday, which means I hope you will consider pitching in a few bucks to buy my music—or my second book! It’s the last Bandcamp Friday until August, so if you want to support my work, today’s the best day to do so for awhile.
It’s also Teacher Appreciation Week. What better way to show your appreciation than by buying my awesome merch?
The first Friday of a bunch of months in 2023—February, March, April, May, August, September, October, November, and December—will feature this pro-indie music observance, a day on which Bandcamp waives its usual 15% commission on sales.
In other words, when you buy my music, almost 100% of it goes to me, instead of almost 85%.
Currently, my entire discography of ten releases is $9.50, a savings of 45%, which is not bad for ten releases. That’s $0.95 per release—not too shabby! To purchase the full discography, click on any release, and you’ll see the option to purchase all of them.
I’m also selling all of my paintings for $10, with free shipping in the United States, regardless of how many you purchase. They’re one of kind, so once a painting is purchased, it’s gone.
I’ve also joined Society6, a website that lets artists upload their designs, which can they be printed onto all manner of products (like this throw pillow, or this duvet cover). Why not get a bookbag with a mouthy droid on it?
I only get 10% of the sales made there, but some of the stuff looks really good—I really want these notebooks with my “Desert View” painting on it (which again, is just $10 for the one-and-only original). Some of them are straight-up goofy, like this church doodle I made celebrating the presidential pardon of Roger Stone (the description for the piece is “Anger your friends with this doodle commemorating the presidential pardon of America’s most dapper political operative“).
I have a few new paintings from my highly unsuccessful foray into selling at the Lamar Egg Scramble, and I have two new doodles for just $5 each: Robo Talk 23 No. 1 and No. 2. I’m also working on quite a few more doodles for Society6, which will also end up here.
My first book, The One-Minute Mysteries of Inspector Gerard: The Ultimate Flatfoot, is $10 in paperback, and just $5 on Kindle.
My second and newest book, Arizonan Sojourn, South Carolinian Dreams: And Other Adventures, is $20 in paperback and $10 on Kindle.
Thanks again for your support!
Happy Friday!
—TPP
The Portly Politico 