Prairiesteppes

I like musicals. More accurately, I like playing in musicals. I don’t like watching anyone, I want to play! Throughout my career – and that makes me feel and sound old now, I have participated in many Musical creations, ranging from “Whitlam, The Musical” (The only musical in the wild that was written by me), “Pirates of Penzance” (A group of us at the Conservatorium rewrote the work, for a more modern sound and arranged for a band [2 keyboards, guitars, bass, drums, Tpt, Sax and Tbn]), 3 consecutive University of Melbourne Comedy revues (That may be stretching the rubber band now) and onto the “real” world working with Really Useful (Sir Andrew) and Cam Mac. I am not going to pretend that this is my favourite musical form, as I really don’t have a favourite, but it is all fine and dandy.

I thought that my bitter disappointment with what happened at Stage West, was perhaps just a local phenomena. The whole way things worked there just didn’t gel with me and I thought I would give it another go. Not now…. I was reading the Sunday NYT (everybody does, don’t they?) and more specifically the Arts and Review section. What bliss to see how NYNY is so busy with creative things going on all of the time. It makes me jealous of Mark and all those who go and visit him.
And then I read what the new musicals in town are…..
“9 to 5″ and “Shrek”. Shrek??????? How creatively bankrupt is that? And I may point out that this is a musical based on the film, which is based on the book.

I have 3 drafts of posts waiting to be edited for here, so I thought I would just go ahead and create another! The news of today was that I held 6 of the top 10 spots in the most popular song charts on Harmonizing with Humanity.
http://hwhjamroom.com/index.php?t=chart_audio
As of now, I only have 3, but it was still pretty exciting.
The fact that it was probably caused by my testing some of the site and downloading my own songs quite a bit, is completely irrelevant.

argggghh! You may not know this, but Canada is also having an election. In fact, it is in 4 days. Although every minute detail of the American election is plastered through out media, it seems that no-one in the rest of the world realises that we have an election.
Of course, it seems that no one here in Calgary seems to know that there is an election. Or more importantly, not many people seem to care. On the night that the election was called, I contacted the NDP and asked that they deliver an election sign. 2 days later, I noticed that someone had hammered the sign into our lawn. Ok, fine, but….
a) they didn’t come and knock on our door and say: “Thanks for showing your support” and
b) they didn’t say: “Oh, and by the way, since you want to show your support, would you like to help out in some way?”
(I mean, really, the candidate should also have shown up!).
For the next two weeks, as I walked my daughter to/from school I noticed something weird. There were no other political signs anywhere on our 25 minute walk. None. Not one. After these 2 weeks (and a week away in Kansas, where, naturally enough, there were hundreds and hundreds of political signs!), I noticed one house had a Green Party sign (and let us not say too much about having an economic rationalist environmental party, ok?). Then later this week, 1 house had some Conservative signs, and a couple of Liberal signs appeared at other houses. So, we are 4 days away, and there are maybe 10 signs in our neighbourhood. I think we must walk past 200-300 houses per day, and I can see 10 signs. Why?
Why? Because it is not going to make a difference here. This electoral district is going to return a Conservative member, this city is going to vote totally Conservative and the entire province is going to return Conservative members. There doesn’t need to be any debates, or town-halls, or door knocking or anything like that. This is a one-party state. What is totally stupid is that the population does not reflect this total domination. The local areas around here show some interest in voting Green or NDP, and the areas around the University also show some diversity. There are large pockets of Liberal support in Edmonton, and one must assume they also appear in other parts of the province. This is the bad part of a totally first past the post system.
Elsewhere in Canada, there is debate. There are a large number of electoral districts where individual votes really make a difference. There are even some websites where you can find out how to “transfer” your vote for a single issue. I had a look at an arts specific site today to see what they recommended. You could almost hear the website laughing at me.
There was a one party state where I grew up. Queensland politics in the 1960s through to the mid-1980s was brutal. Due to the weirdness of the electoral system there, and due to an enormous gerrymander the National party just kept on getting elected. In one case, it became the senior party in a coalition with something like 27% of the vote. This gave it a majority of seats – basically the rural electorates (where the Nationals were strongest) had small numbers of voters, while the (lefty/pinko/commie) urban electorates had huge numbers for each seat. At least Alberta is not like this…
or is it?

I have been working on a number of posts for the last couple of weeks (I am trying to be prompt at doing a post at least once a week). Unfortunately “real world events” ™ have got in the way of finishing them.
I am hoping that this blog has never been mawkish, even though I have described some rather personal problems here. This entry may cross the line….

When I was younger (9-10 years old) I contracted Rheumatic Fever and with that a heart murmur. I was sick for a long time… some months and evidently I was lucky to survive. The fact that I tried to play soccer with my brother, after he came home from school, almost every day was probably not the best recovery plan! The doctors told me (or more accurately, my mother) that I probably wouldn’t make 50 and I wouldn’t be able to be very physically active.

Hah! I showed them. I suppose that 50 is still a little way off for me, but I did play soccer professionally in Australia and I have even scored an international goal against Brazil in Futsal. During this period, I would often be tested at the Australian Institute of Sport and there was never a mention of anything wrong with me physically. I had an incident when I was 21 or 22 when I may have had a mild cardiac infarction. Basically I was found unconscious in my car and spent a couple of hours with some chest pains, shortness of breath etc etc and after being taken to emergency ended up being ok. (I suppose I must state that I am not a doctor and this is all what memory tells me, and what my mother told me before she died. It is rather weird not to have concrete details of all this – and would have made the last couple of years a lot easier if I had had documentation).

I haven’t told too many people about this for lots of reasons. Mainly it has not been anyone else’s business or more importantly they probably wouldn’t care anyway. We all have pasts that have hidden little bumps and bruises.

Now, with all that has been going on for the last year, some anomalies have come up. I have had to undergo a number of different tests (rather standard tests) over the last year to try and work out what has been going wrong with my health. The weirdest was undergoing an EKG at a local test centre here (and why do we use the German Elektrokardiogramm as the standard term for this?). The woman administering the test looked quite upset and had to rush out of the room and bring someone more senior in. This is, of course, always a comforting thing for the patient to observe. When I returned to my GP to find out the results of my test, she informed me that there was something strange appearing in the EKG and she then referred me to a cardiologist. The cardiologist also gave me an EKG, talked to me for 10 minutes getting an anamnesis, He also told me that there was an irregularity in my EKG and wanted me to return in a couple of weeks for an extensive number of tests (including having a 24 hour heart monitor). All of this showed that my heart stops beating… quite regularly, actually. The cardiologist said that he couldn’t quite tell what was wrong and “suggested” that I undergo an angiogram. There were several rather serious outcomes that could cause this, and one rather benign one.

I shall spare you the details of that procedure. It is actually rather painless, quite quick and all together not too much of a stress. The fact that everyone is prescribed valium for the treatment is completely co-incidental The only downside is that you are kept in hospital for hours for pre- and post- monitoring, and that it takes quite a few days to fully recover from the local bruising etc.

The results are clear. Completely, and utterly clear. In the words of my cardiologist when I asked him:
“So why does my heart stop every so many beats”
“Your heart is just made that way…”

After living with this for 35 years it is weird to wake up and not have the spectre of something like this hanging over your head, even if you keep it in the deep dark shadows. I really haven’t consciously consider my mortality for a long, long time. I just accepted that it was the way it was (I have the same attitude to my eyesight. I have needed glasses for my whole life, and often people have suggested to me that I have laser surgery. I really am not interested in this. My eyesight is very much part of what and who I am). I feel better. I feel relieved, very relieved in fact. The last few weeks (the subject of the “blocked” blogs”) have been very good to me, and I am so happy that I should be able to enjoy what is going to happen.

I know that this is a boring topic, but it does matter (at least sometimes). It is September and we, all around the world, are in the change of seasons. September means that in Australia it is the end of the football season (and it can rain a lot during this period. In England it is the start of the football season (and it can rain a lot as well!)). Here in Calgary, September is the end of summer. A lot of people joke that Calgary only has 6 weeks of summer, but it really is 3 months – June, July and August. September means that it can get cold here. We are in the middle of about 7 days where it hasn’t broken 15 degrees as a maximum and it is down at the very low single digits in the morning.
So, why am I talking about the weather? It is because that you should never plan a wedding (outdoors) in September. [Pause for delivery of Soup and Pasta to my hotel room. Hotel room? What hotel room? Read on....]
On the first weekend of Sept, I was booked to play a wedding with my usual people. The leader emailled us on that week and reminded us all to bring a jacket as it could get cold. As we play in Tuxes, I would usually ignore this warning, as I am rather immune to the cold in general. I did, however, pack some fingerless gloves, just in case. I arrived about a hour before we were to start (The life of using taxis…) to be met with the blackest clouds that you could imagine and finding out that there was no cover for the band. Once the leader turned up, we both decided that there was no way that the wedding was going on outside, as, since there was no one officially from the bridal party there at the time, we started the pre-arranged back-up plan. I moved my keyboards inside and started to move the PA system inside as well, when the mother of the bride turned up and stated: “This wedding is going on outside.”
Now it hadn’t actually started raining by this time, but it was quite windy and very cool (single digits, probably minus something wind chill), but one doesn’t really want to argue with the mother of the bride (MOB)! This wasn’t my gig, and the leader is good at this negotiating and soothing any ruffled feathers. As it turned out, we played the ceremony outside – it rained a little, and it blew a lot which meant that the poor trumpet player was in almost every key other than the one that the rest of us were in. Asking a brass player to play like that without any warm-up is just cruel.
As musicians, we need to juggle the competing needs: Protect our (expensive) instruments, perform at the best of our ability, not to be put into a dangerous physical position (I played a gig outside with a Big Band when I was very young. I kept noticing that my hands kept slipping off the keyboards. I also started noticing the blood seeping from my cuticles…..). It is not always an easy decision, but sometimes you just have to say “No”.
What else about the weather? It is suddenly very tropical where I am now, and the cicadas are incredible noisy. How did Calgary turn so tropical? I am not there, this week. For the first time in my life, I have stepped foot onto the continental United States. Not so much of a culture shock, but still a brave step. I am at the Unity Village in Kansas City attending a conference for Church musicians and things like that. I shall report about that later….

is a dying hard-drive. I have been listening to an awful whirring sound from my computer for the last week or so and I thought that it might just be a build-up of dust in the machine (Sort of like Deus ex machina but not…). I unplugged the box, with the 20 or so other attachments (viz 4 usb cables, 2 speaker outputs, 2 line inputs, Midi connector, Firewire connector, Monitor plug etc etc) and started the de-dusting project. For some reason, this house is very dusty, and it is not because we don’t clean enough, so this is a semi-annual event. There was a lot of dust inside and after a bit of vacuuming (hoovering?) I put the box back together, and carefully plugged everything back in (after discovering I had reversed the stereo imaging for a whole heap of recordings recently!) and turned it on…..
whirrrrrr……whirrrrrrrrrrrrr……whwhwhwhwhwhwhwhiirrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
Crap. New computer time. This box is over 7 years old, and although almost every part has been replaced over that time, it is time for a new box. I am about to take the leap and go over to the dark (no, that is not right, the lighter) side and get a Mac. We book a Macbook last Christmas, and it is fantastic, so I think that a Mac desktop will be the way to go. The only problem is that other family members need a new PC (I think it has a lot to do with Spore and Sims 3) so, we are going to get an intermediary PC gaming box, and the new Mac desktop will be an late October purchase.
Technology is an important part of the contemporary musician, whether he or she is a classical performer, a Hip-hop dude, or a jack-of-all-trades. It is when technology breaks down that I wish I had a nice Bösendorfer or a new Fazioli piano. Still Technology, just older technology.

So it only took 3 months of continually calling a number of stores in town every single morning, only to be told:
a) (usually) none in today, or
b) You are too late. The 2 we got in just got sold (This was usually at 30 minutes before the store opened.
The only way I thought that we could possibly get a chance of getting one of these units was to know someone who worked in one of the stores. Of course, at my terribly advanced age, I don’t really know too many late-teens, or earlier twenty-year olds. Then one day when I was shopping at a large chain store, one of the students from “Suessical, the Musical” greeted me, wearing the bright red uniform of a summer worker. I told him, half-jokingly, to SMS me if they got any Wii Fits in. (This particular chain is not at all hip, and although they carry some video games, it does not have a large range of them).
I got the SMS today. At 1510. In a middle of a rehearsal!
Fortunately, the rehearsal was with Glennis (The Cabaret, remember?) so she agreed to drive me out to the store, and then we could finish the rehearsal in (relative) peace. All I will say is that they had 3 units. I bought one, and so did the two other people who were behind me in line, not realising that they were riding the coat-tails of someone with insider knowledge.
We have had it home for a couple of hours now, and it is very very fun. That is all that it is supposed to be.

Ok, so the weather has cooled down, and everyone is getting back into the idea that Summer is almost over and it is time for the gigs to start again. I have also, to my amazement, spend a couple of hours almost every day this week writing. This is by far the most music (at least written down music) that I have produced since returning from Mongolia. Way to go, me!
Today was full of rehearsals. One was for a mini big band wedding big production thing that is just a bread and butter commercial gig. It is nice to move into some bigger sounds sometimes, although that often means that the piano is there for looks and not for any sounds as everyone else is too loud.
The other rehearsal was for a rather more long term project on which I have been working for a lot longer. Glennis Houston is a local singer that I have worked with a bit over the last few years. About a year ago, she approached me with an idea to do a cabaret, in which I was very interested. I have performed in a number of cabarets in Brisbane when I was younger and I have always found the format very interesting. The mix of the intimate with the starkness of only two performers and the energy of the theatricality that is necessary to sell the show attracts me. The chance to work with Glennis again, is also, a good thing. I think a longer post on the idea of this cabaret is called for, yes?
The other surprise for me this week was a rough mix of the first track off a new CD by a friend of mine Anthony Burbidge. It is a good song, with a mix of the simple sound of Anthony singing and just the piano, contrasted with a full orchestra with world-music instruments. The other surprise is that I sing on this CD! You may have to purchase the CD just to hear that.

Just a quick note to say that the site has been upgraded to the latest version of Wordpress. If you have any problems, drop me an email. Of course, if you have any problems, you can’t see this anyway.

and I have always found it hard to work in the heat (I think I may have mentioned that somewhere, yes?). I am ashamed to say that the weather is no where near as hot as it was in Australia growing up. In fact, I was talking to a friend there yesterday who was complaining that it was very cold in Melbourne (It was then 13 degrees). The amusing thing is that our minimum last night was less than 13. Still, I am now used to it not being over 25 for any length of time, and so…. it is hot.
For the last few days it has been very hard for me to concentrate on anything. I have been slack with the redesign of my website (although I did have a very productive meeting with agent-types), and quite slack in the practice department. I was hoping that I would get to rehearse with CiCi at least once this week. That did not eventuate, but I did spend some time finding some new songs for CiCi to try. CiCi and I have also started writing together. Darren, her husband, has 1000s of lyrics from his time as an active songwriter, so we have a lot of choice there. There is one song that we are both happy with the basic format of the piece, but it still needs some putting together. I have also send some drafts of tunes to them to listen and critique. One tune seems to be pushing some correct buttons with the both of them, so I think that the whole process is working well.
I have complained about the weather… So what am I going to do about it? I decided to sit down in front of the computer screen, load Sibelius up (Notation program) and write. A lot of (literature) writing skills people talk about the non-editing type of writing to get past some writer’s block. What you do is to start writing for a specific period and to not stop or edit what you have written down until the page is full (or the time allotted is finished). I have not ever tried to do this, but I did try today to do it in spirit. I think that my musical hearing is in no way, at the level it was before. I played the piece back several times, and saw (and heard!) mistakes, or places where I wanted it to go into different directions. It took about 3 hours, but… I now have about 90 seconds of good music. I was going to post a link to a picture of the score, but I think I want to save it is a PDF, and I will post it here tomorrow.
This is the first time in over a year that I have had the inclination and ability to sit down and just write. It was quite difficult and yet, at some times over the afternoon, it was fun. I am very happy with the fact that I have produced something that has some depth to it, and that I wrote without any improvisation or keyboard at all. Let us see what comes out over the next few days.