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On Nina Simone

By on May 24, 2011 | Category: Article

AlterNet posted a story by someone named Mole333 about Nina Simone. My youngest daughter’s middle name is Simone. My wife and I are huge fans of Nina Simone’s music and life. Nice to see some more respect being paid to a woman that means so much to me.

Perhaps surprisingly I had never heard of Nina Simone until I hung out for awhile in a rather odd wine bar near the downtown NYU campus called the Bourgeois Pig where I found some good wine and music that included a fair amount of one of my favorites–Tom Waits. But there was also a powerful woman singer that was also featured on their musical tracks…someone I discovered was Nina Simone. I used to hang out there reading scientific papers over some wine and enjoying the music in the background. The sound of her voice was powerful, almost overwhelming. And the pairing with Tom Waits as the main background music for the place was amazing.

Link: On Nina Simone, Powerful Singer and Civil Rights Leader | Culture | AlterNet.


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This One Time At Band Camp…

By on March 10, 2011 | Category: Article

Many people that know me know that I used to be a professional jazz musician. Used to be has nothing to do with the jazz or musician parts of that statement. A more accurate statement might be, “I used to play music for money.”

I care very much for music. When I’m working, I’m nearly always listening to music. When I was twelve, I decided that I enjoyed playing music so much, that I wanted to do it for the rest of my life. In my young mind, that meant becoming a professional musician. Later on, I realized that the music industry robbed people of their lives. The very fact that there is an industry associated with music is a very disturbing fact, if you think about it long enough.

Before I reached a point of burn-out associated with professional music, there was a moment that was very profound. And that is the tale I’m going to write about here…

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WordPress 3.0: Thelonious

By on July 19, 2010 | Category: Article

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Image by oddsock via Flickr

After a lot of wrangling of PHP, HTML, a tiny bit of JAVA, a little CSS, and redirecting some RSS, BLHill.net is now on a new server running the latest version of WordPress. WordPress 3.0 is a massive upgrade from the previous version. For me the most important part was merging of WPMU, or WordPress Multi-User, into the code base. This allowed me to set up one installation of WordPress to host all of my websites. I am only running a few sites right now, but plan to add more. Some people are running thousands of sites using a single WordPress installation including WordPress.com, which hosts over 100,000 blogs.

Now let’s talk about whom this release is named after – Thelonious Monk. Thelonious Sphere Monk was a jazz pianist. But saying Monk was just a jazz pianist is like saying Steve Wozniak is just a computer geek. Go learn more about Thelonious Monk, buy his music or find out about his son’s work. (Incidentally, when I played the Playboy© Jazz Festival at the Hollywood Bowl, T.S. Monk, opened for us…)

I’m hoping that the move to a grid hosting plan at GoDaddy, will result in quicker response and better stability for my sites. I’ve heard good things and am hoping that affordable hosting can in fact be reliable. I’ll be trying to post here more often, but much more will come from my newsletter, as well as on Twitter. I have a new site in the works and AEC Forensics . com will be updated soon with an amazing theme and a lot more content. Stay tuned… some geeky stuff: And as a postscript, I like to briefly mention a topic that has been getting a little heated: WordPress, the GPL and premium themes. I don’t know legally if a WordPress theme would be defined as derivative or not, thereby requiring adherence to the GPL. But, I have chosen instead to avoid the controversy by installing an amazing theme by Sayontan Sinha called Suffusion that is open source and mind-numbingly flexible. In fact, after hearing some of Matt Mullenweg’s opinions on the subject, as well as revisiting some of Cory Doctorow’s perspective, I’m seriously considering going completely open source, and ditching proprietary/closed-source software. We’ll see.


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Jazz Fest 4.23 Day 1 | JamBase

By on April 26, 2010 | Category: Link

Wish I was there!

Fans at the 41st annual New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival were greeted with buckets of rain on the first day. Though the numbers were a bit thin and most of them damp, those who did weather the storm were rewarded with spirited performances, no lines for food and plenty of Fest atmosphere. Between noon and 3 p.m. roughly two inches of rain covered the Fairgrounds, but the only set that got canceled was Bruce Daigrepont Cajun Band. Everyone else played right on through.

Kayceman’s Top 3

#1 – Lionel Richie

Watching Lionel Richie go from “Dancing On The Ceiling” into an instrumental Van Halen “Jump” tease and back into “Dancing On The Ceiling” was a standout moment of Richie’s Friday Festival closing set. Playing lots of Commodores, talking ’bout Afros and making the cougars purrrrr, this was nothing but fun fun fun.

#2 – Rotary Downs

As the rain finally broke, local rock band Rotary Downs began to play the Lagniappe Stage. Bandleader James Marler commented that drummer Zack Smith “paid the devil $20 to stop the rain” as they tore through a set of propulsive indie rock with pop hooks and psychedelic burns. The rain started to pick up again and Marler asked Smith to put another twenty in the meter before the band dismantled The Beatles’ “Get Back” in glorious fashion.

#3 Maurice Brown Effect

Dashing into the Fairgrounds as the sky opened up, many ducked into the Jazz Tent, where trumpet virtuoso Maurice Brown was holding court. Offering shelter from the storm, Brown’s banging five-piece band (trumpet/sax/drum/piano/upright bass) floated from traditional jazz phrasing into wild excursions full of noise-jazz and trumpets laced with wah-wah effects. At this point, the rain hardly seemed to matter.

via jambase.com


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Benefit for trumpeter Khalil Shaheed

By on April 25, 2010 | Category: Article

I have to confess my ignorance of Khalil Shaheed prior to hearing this story. But I feel like I know the guy, because he reminds me of some amazing musicians that inspired me as a kid – not just because of their musical performances, but also because of their hands-on involvement in the community. There are lots of great players out there, but only a special few for whom passing on their knowledge is important. These are people that understand the therapeutic effect of practicing and playing music. I’ve never met Shaheed, but I think I have a pretty good idea of what sort of a human being he is. I wish I could be in the Bay Area this coming week to attend the benefit show for Shaheed at Yoshi’s in Jack London Square. Keep on Keepin’ on, Khalil.

As the Oaktown Jazz Workshop’s rhythm section, made up of boys and girls ages 9 to 17 and three adult instructors, vamps on the Charles Lloyd tune “Sombrero Sam,” director Khalil Shaheed blows the opening phrase of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “The Sound of Music” on trumpet and asks alto saxophonist Sade Kammen, 13, to repeat what he’d just played. She flubs it on the first try but nails it on the second. She and Shaheed then play it in unison as a riff while the others groove.

“You have to be able to read, and you have to be able to pick it up by ear,” Shaheed, 61, tells the class when the song ends. “This music was originally passed on by oral tradition.”

The after-school class at Oakland’s Dimond Recreation Center in many ways resembles an old-school jam session. While Shailla Head, 11, delivers Nat “King” Cole’s 1946 hit “The Frim Fram Sauce” with the confidence and flawless timing of a professional vocalist, Shaheed and Kammen riff behind her. They sway together from side to side as they blow, much as he did in the 1970s when he toured the world as a member of singing drummer Buddy Miles’ horn section.

The trumpeter’s obvious joy in teaching jazz to young people, as well as the warmth of his tone and the clarity of his improvised solos, has remained undiminished since he was diagnosed in December with lung cancer. Other than having dropped four of his 13 private students, for whom he says he was “basically just doing day care,” he maintains a very busy schedule.

Via: SFGate


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