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music

10

Saturday 14 May 2022

The Boy — 10 years old today. A decade of the Boy. Double digits.

In the morning, we had his breakfast of choice: bacon, eggs, and cinnamon rolls. Healthy choices. In the evening, dinner too was his choice: crab legs and shrimp.

After cheese cake and ice cream, he and I went to the local guitar store to spend all his present money in one shot:

A third guitar — a bass.

The Girl and I spent the afternoon at a tournament only half an hour away — quite a change.

She’d probably rather not talk about that, though. Let’s just say it didn’t go as well as the team was hoping.

Previous Years

Happy Mess Day

Second Time Around

Third Party

Celebration Day

Birthday

Fifth Birthday Party

Sports and Ice Cream

Seventh Birthday

Day 60: Eighth Birthday

Nine

Recital

Saturday 7 May 2022

The Boy had his first recital today. He’s been fretting about it on and off since he decided he wanted to participate in his music school’s annual recital, and he was particularly worried about it once we arrived at the venue — it was all too real then. But once he got in the warm-up room, he seemed fine.

“Do you want me to stay here with you?” I asked. He glanced up at his teacher.

“No, I’ll be fine.”

I went into the auditorium and found the girls. It wasn’t hard: there weren’t more than fifteen to twenty people in the audience.

Once he and his teacher worked out a little cord issue, he began, and though he later said his hands were shaking, you can’t really hear it in his playing.

Afterward, of course, it was time for some family pictures.

And then the Girl drove us home — on the highway.

Hydropiekłowstąpienie

Wednesday 16 March 2022

One of my favorite — if not favorite — Polish bands is Lao Che. Clever music, clever lyrics. Their masterpiece, in my opinion, is “Hydropiekłowstąpienie” from their album (titled in English) Gospel. From the title to the final line, that song is sharp.

It begins with what sounds like a squeaking door being closed as someone shrieks, “Jesteś wszechmogący więc jak mogłem / Obrazić Cię następującymi grzechami?” It’s a problem essential problem of Christianity: “You are all-powerful, so I could I offend you with the following sins?” Indeed, why would an almighty god be so upset with most of the silly things that Christianity calls sins? Upset enough to torture them for eternity as a result? It’s just silly.

The song itself begins with God addressing Noah:

Słuchaj, Noe
Chciałbym na słówko:
Wiesz, tak między nami,
To jestem człowiekiem zaniepokojonym.
By nie rzec: rozczarowanym.
Bo miałem ambicję stworzyć
Taką rezolutną rasę,
A wyście to tak po ludzku,
Po ludzku spartolili.
Jestem piekielnie sfrustrowany

“Listen, Noah,” he sings, “I’d like a word with you.” He explains that he’d had such high hopes for humanity but that humanity, in typical human fashion, screwed it all up. “I am damn frustrated,” he concludes, though the word he actually says (piekielnie) literally means “hellishly.”

Then comes what will develop later into the pre-chorus: “Płyń, płyń Noe płyń i żyj, a utop to kim byłeś. / Płyń, płyń Noe płyń i żyj, jak nawet nie śniłeś.” A simple command: “Swim, swim Noah swim and live, and drown who you used to. Swim, swim Noah swim and live, like you’ve never even dreamed.”

The second verse continues with the ironic commentary:

Wiesz sam, jak nie lubię radykałów.
Ale, na Boga, nie spałem całą noc
I podjąłem decyzję:
Zsyłam na Ziemię potop,
Mój mały Noe, mój Ptysiu Miętowy.
Zsyłam potop, potop!

“You know yourself how I don’t like radicals,” God explains just before declaring that after staying up all night, he’d made a decision to send a flood upon the earth.

Then the oh-so-clever wordplay begins: “Utopię waszą utopie,” he promises. “I’ll drown your uptopia,” punning on the fact that the first-person future of “drown” is only slightly different from the properly-declined “uptopia.” But the punning doesn’t stop there. Describing the flood, God declares “Zarządzam pełne zanurzenie” — “I’m appointing a full immersion,” a clever allusion to baptism. The masterpiece: God declares that his flood will be a “hydropiekłowstąpienie,” a smart play on the word “wniebowstąpienie“, which is the Polish term for Jesus’s assumption — The Assumption. Literally, it means “to heaven ascending.” “Hydropiekłowstąpienie” would then be translated “hydro-hell-ascension.”

Ths song continues with God promising to drown everything: roads and bridges, tax offices, households. Everything.

Clever, clever song.

A live version:

“Does it bring back memories?”

Wednesday 9 March 2022

Exploring Spotify’s “Indie Bluegrass” playlist last night, I discovered her — Sarah Jarosz, a young singer/songwriter whose music excites me more than any music I can remember from the last ten years or so. I began wandering through her catalog, continually impressed and pleased, and then I heard it. Her cover of Dylan’s “Simple Twist of Fate.” A voice; a pizzicato cello — nothing else. Perfection.

I played it for the Boy this evening and he was asking me about it. “Does it bring back memories?” he asked.

“None at all,” I smiled. I guess he’s used to me reveling in the memories particular songs bring to mind, but this song, this performance — no memories at all. And that’s what makes connecting to new music so magical. For me, the new music that hook me have a certain timeless sense to them. They feel like they should have memories dripping from them.

Over the course of the last twenty-four hours, I’ve managed to listen to about four of her albums, but the first one I listened to remains my favorite: World on the Ground. The whole thing is available as a playlist on YouTube.

She’s also released a video of completely-stripped-down versions of some of the album’s best songs (undoubtedly in their original composition state).

Her Discovery

Friday 4 March 2022

I was in L’s room playing a game of chess with her, E looking on, when she decided to put some music on. “Who knows what this could be,” I thought, but said nothing. Imagine my surprise when the opening lines of one of the best albums of the 1990s, one of the best albums of all time, Radiohead’s Ok Computer, began. It turns out, she’s discovered this masterpiece on her own.

“What’s your favorite song on the album?” I asked.

“Exit Music,” she said.

Good choice.

Floyd Rose

Monday 27 December 2021

The Boy has wanted it for some time — a guitar with a Floyd Rose bridge. I didn’t really know what makes a Floyd Rose bridge a Floyd Rose bridge. I knew that in practice it meant that pulling up on the whammy bar of such a bridge would raise the pitch of the strings just as pushing down on it would lower it, which meant that the bridge had to go in both directions. I didn’t think it through, though: that means the bridge has to be a floating bridge, which means that the pressure of the strings itself must be countered by something other than the guitar body. In a FR bridge, that pressure is countered with several springs under the bridge. But that means that if you change the gauge of the strings, you put more or less pressure on the bridge, making a previously well-adjusted bridge completely mal-adjusted.

Add to it the difficulty of stringing this guitar — well, it became obvious that the Boy had to learn how to do it all and learn quickly.

Genesis 2021

Sunday 21 November 2021

My best friend D and I took the Boy to his first concert last night: Genesis. With that show, I’ve achieved the concert trifecta the two of us always dreamed of: U2, Pink Floyd, and Genesis. D is missing the Floyd, but he last night was his second time seeing Genesis, so I guess we’re more or less even.

After the show, the Boy and I had a final memorial picture:

Of course, I took a few short videos and stitched them together:

Then I did it again with my friend’s clips included.

Book Fair

Monday 8 November 2021

The Boy wanted to go to the bookfair. For someone who doesn’t like reading, or at least claims he doesn’t like reading, he certainly does get excited about getting new books.

The trick, as with every reader, is to find books he likes — and in his case, that means books that make him laugh. The Dog Man series is a favorite, so he bought the newest installment, Grime and Punishment. Yes, it is making the allusion you’re thinking. Other books in the series include:

  • Mothering Heights
  • Fetch-22
  • Lord of the Fleas
  • A Tale of Two Kitties
  • For Whom the Ball Rolls
  • Brawl of the Wild

I don’t know how many other kids know the allusions, but I explained them all to the Boy. I couldn’t talk intelligently about two of the books, though: For Whom the Bell Tolls (which I’ve never even attempted to read) and Catch-22 (which I tried to read in high school but just never got into).

Afterward, a bit of guitar practice. D, my best friend since forever (as my kids would say), is coming to town next weekend for a Genesis concert in Charlotte: it will be a boys’ night out, just the three of us. The Boy’s first concert. He’s preparing a little concert for D with a few little surprises sure to make him smile.

As for the girls this evening? They’re at L’s third and final club tryout. She’s been offered positions in the top teams of the other two clubs she tried out for this weekend, and I expect the same from this club. It is, after all, Excell, for whom she’s played for two years now, playing sand, grass, and indoor with them. I have a feeling, though, that she’s not going to go with them this year.

Take 1

Friday 3 September 2021

If it were anyone other than Tommy and Joscho (the two greatest living guitarists — there’s no way to argue differently), I’d never believe this was the first time they played this song together.

Tommy

Thursday 19 August 2021

We bought the tickets back in May, when Papa was still here, still relatively stable. Things were relatively normal. But when a death comes, you start to second guess things.

Still, K and I have been so impressed with how the Boy has taken to guitar, how much he practices it, how interested he is in discovering new guitarists, that we decided that instead of it being a date night it would be a father-son-Mexican-feast-Tommy-Emmanuel evening.

I wish I could have gotten a picture of the Boy’s expression at times. “How is he doing that?!?” was a common comment.

Just listen to his show-closing (non-encore) version of “Guitar Boogie” to see what the Boy meant:

Birthday Present

Monday 17 May 2021

He’s been begging for it for ages now.

“I really want an electric guitar!” became the Boy’smantra. Yet we were afraid that, like so many other interests, it might just fade away, so we told him to use L’s old pink guitar to show that he’s really interested in playing, committed to playing, disciplined enough for playing.

I’m not entirely sure he proved all those things, but he made a valiant effort. He learned a few chords (really mastering a couple of them) and got to where he could switch back and forth between them. He practiced chromatic scales to get single-string control along with finger sequencing. And he talked about it a lot.

Of course, he had a point: an electric guitar, with its lighter gauge strings, is easier to play than a steel-string acoustic. A nylon-string acoustic/classical guitar would be the easiest and the gentlest on his fingers, but he wanted an electric guitar. Passion is important, and he was passionate about this, and we want him to keep that passion.

First Concert

Wednesday 5 May 2021

The first concert I ever attended was in Johnson City, Tennessee in about 1985 or 1986. The band was Huey Lewis and the News, and even though I was not the biggest fan, I joined two friends (who were brothers) for the concert. Their dad dropped us off and then met us once it was over.

It wasn’t until a few years later that I went to a concert because I truly loved the band and not simply because I had the chance to see someone live. It was R.E.M. in Knoxville, and it’s a concert I remember to this day.

In college, I got to see a number of bands like the Pixies and U2, but the most exciting for me was Pink Floyd.

But there was always one band missing, always a single concert that I thought, “If I ever get a chance…” My first love. Genesis. Now, there’s no way I’ll ever see the Genesis I’ve always truly loved — the Genesis of the early- to mid-seventies with Peter Gabriel on lead vocals and Steve Hackett on lead guitar. But the genius of the band, musically speaking, has always been the keyboard player, Tony Banks. He’s still with them. Phil Collins can no longer stand for long periods, and Mike Rutherford — who knows? But they’re coming out of retirement for one last tour. And my best friend and I have tickets to see them in Charlotte. And we have an extra ticket, for the Boy’s first concert.

“I’m a little nervous,” he confessed. “It is my first concert. Mama said it will be very loud.”

“It will be,” I confirmed. “But you’ll have ear protection.”

Liszt and Beethoven

Friday 30 April 2021

Possibly my all-time favorite piece of symphonic music is Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6. No, not because it was in Disney’s Fantasia — I knew it before I ever watched that film. Perhaps that’s why I love it so much: it’s one of my first musical memories.

Glenn Gould also recorded it, but as usual, when he plays Beethoven, he slows everything down radically.

Arrival in Knoxville

Friday 19 February 2021

We made it to Knoxville for the next tournament. Two weekends in a row — that would be exhausting if K and I didn’t split the duty.

On the way here, L and I played music for each other: she selected one song, then I selected the next. I think we were both trying to find something the other liked. I liked a few of her songs; she “mehed” most of mine.

“I’m into alternative and indie stuff,” she said. And then very little of what she played sounded like what I would have considered “alternative and indie.” That was one of my staple genres growing up, so I played some R.E.M. for her. They are the godfathers of alternative. “Meh.”

At one point, she claimed I didn’t choose my song quickly enough and so that meant she got two songs in a row.

“That’s fine,” I said.

My next song: Genesis’s “The Musical Box,” which clocks in at just over ten minutes.

She was shocked and aghast.

“Next I’ll go with Pink Floyd’s ‘Dogs,'” I suggested, “which is 17 minutes long. After that perhaps Genesis’s ‘Supper’s Reader,’ which is 24 minutes long, and then maybe ‘Echoes’ by the Floyd again, which is 23 minutes long. We’ll end it with Jethro Tull’s ‘Thick as a Brick,’ which is a full album — one song, 44 minutes.” She was horrified.

Treble Clef

Wednesday 2 December 2020

Today the Boy had music for his related art class in school. They’re working on the treble clef.

“I took the after-lesson quiz,” he explained, “and I got 3 out of 20 right! I took it again and only got 4 out of 20 correct!” His frustration was mounting to the level I’m sure it achieved when he was struggling with the material in class.

Checking school lunch. “Daddy, this is what I’m having tomorrow! It’s delicious!”

After dinner, I printed out the old methods of memorizing the treble clef: “Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge” and “FACE.”

We went through his work together, and he made a perfect score. “That was easy,” he decided.

He noticed, though, that there are two D notes on the treble clef: one just beside middle C, and one almost up at the top of the clef.

“Two Ds?!”

So we went to the piano and started poking around. We talked about the patterns of the black keys and used that as a way to show which keys corresponded to which note.

“This is D,” I said. “See how it’s between the two black keys? Now show me another D.”

Day 71: Playing and Counting

Monday 25 May 2020

Games We Play

This morning, E and I decided to play a game we hadn’t played in ages: Pentago. It’s a simple concept: Get five marbles of your color in a row. But the challenge is that each of the four nine-by-nine quadrants can be rotated. It’s a great game for the mental manipulate of objects because players have to turn those quadrants in their heads and make plans to try to surprise their opponent with an unseen 5-row connection.

At first, the Boy just tried to connect five in a row. I showed him quickly how easily stopped that could be, and how I could simply build on my efforts to stop him and create my own row with a twist here or there. Then he got it.

Did I “let him win”? Well, not so much. Once he figured out the importance of the twist, I played a while without really paying attention to anything other than his obvious efforts and he sneaked one or two by me.

After each game: “Can we play again?”

Snack

In the afternoon, the kids brought the old Rummikub satchel out: “Can you teach us how to play this?” they asked.

Indeed — I could barely remember myself. Something about runs and threes- and fours-of-a-kind. That was about all I could remember, and there were no instructions in the game.

It’s moments like that which make me really appreciate YouTube. A quick search, three minutes of watching the video, and off we went, playing a game I hadn’t played in decades.

I last remember playing it in Nashville with Uncle N and Aunt L over the Thanksgiving weekend. We might have played it the last time we were there for Thanksgiving, which would have been 2005. Though we could have just played dominoes and Uno — that’s all I have photographic evidence for:

Uncle N passed away less than a year later from ALS, and we never went back there for Thanksgiving. So it might have been even longer since I played Rummikub. At any rate, the kids loved it. The Boy, less so because he couldn’t see all the combinations and such. L, however, fit into the game perfectly: that type of kombinowanie is just what she does best.

Yesterday

We watched last night the 2019 film Yesterday, in which a failing musician somehow enters an alternate reality in which only he knows anything about the Beatles. He subsequently recreates their catalog as his own. As expected, there are lots of Beatles songs in the film.

“Is that a Beatles song?” L asked as one started.

“Is that a Beatles song?” E asked with the next one.

“Yes, they’re almost all Beatles songs,” I explained.

“How many songs did they write?!” the Boy asked incredulously.

As a result, we listened to a lot of Beatles music this afternoon. They kind of liked it — we kind of encouraged them.

It did inspire some musicality from them. The Boy has a little guitar that he suddenly became interested in. However, it is missing strings, so I suggested he play my mandolin, which I bought in high school because R.E.M. had released Green, which featured the mandolin on a number of tunes. It’s a $100 plywood job that’s a perfect size for him.

Tonight, I worked with him on some basic ideas: pressing down strings just behind a fret to change the pitch. Chords? They’re a long way off. (Besides, I can only remember four or five chords on a mandolin.)

The Girl, who has been toying with a ukelele from time to time, gave it a try only to be shocked at how very different it was tuned from her uke. (When she first got the uke, I was surprised to find that, like a five-string banjo, the highest string is actually in the position where the lowest string is for most other instruments. They both just have that one out-of-place string that always gives me fits.)

We’ll see how this develops, but hopefully, the interest will remain.

When do I stop counting?

When is this quarantine officially over? When do I stop prefacing every post with “Day X”? I started the first day we were supposed to go to school and yet didn’t — March 16.

Day 1: Achievement Gap

Yet because we don’t have any coordinated national approach and since every state is easing restrictions step-by-step, there’s really no firm date for me to stop doing that. When we head back to school on a normal routine? (Will we do that in the fall?) I’ve decided that the most logical date to stop doing that is June 4, which would have been the last day of school were this a normal year.

On the other hand, I’m fairly certain that we will see an enormous uptick in cases after states have eased these restrictions. Just look at Cocoa Beach in Florida this weekend:

florida beach memorial day coronavirus

It’s concerning, to say the least:

On the Sunday talk shows, Dr. Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the White House coronavirus task force, said she was “very concerned” about scenes of people crowding together over the weekend.

“We really want to be clear all the time that social distancing is absolutely critical. And if you can’t social distance and you’re outside, you must wear a mask,” she said on ABC’s “This Week.” (Source)

If we have an explosion of cases, the very thing we were trying to avoid, then this entire 70+ lockdown will have been for nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Are we smarter than that as a species? Most days I have my doubts.

Counting

I’m on a run: I’ve never posted so many consecutive days on this site. Not even close. I’ve posted daily since December 21, 2019. Counting roughly, that’s 130+ consecutive days. Why? Why not?

Not only that, but for the month of May, I’ve written an average of 1,047 words a day. That’s like my journal writing when I first arrived in Poland and everything — everything — fascinated me endlessly.

Of course, I have cheated a few times: I included long quotes from books I’m reading, in part because I was honestly interested in writing a little something about them, in part (at least once) because I just wanted to reach that arbitrary number (like I just did in this paragraph). One thousand words. At least. Every day.

I can’t possibly keep that up. The quarantine is helping with that. But daily posts? Could I make it a full year? Probably. Will I? No idea.

Soundtrack

Tuesday 4 February 2020

The kids and I stumbled into a new little game this evening. The Boy and I were playing cars, and I’d taken my phone with us to listen to some music. He made a request for “Kid A,” a Radiohead song that he finds amusing.

As the music played, I asked him, “Which of these cars goes with that music?” He picked one out, and we talked about why it seemed to fit.

And that was the game…

The Girl heard us and came into E’s room to join us. Some of the choices were obvious: a Billie Holiday song led to fingers straight to the ’40s roadster in the collection; Creedence Clearwater Revival pulled everyone to the pickup truck; a Gorecki string quartet led to the oddest car in the collection.

The real blessing of it all was not only that we were encouraging the use of musical and visual imagination but also that we were spending that time together — the three of us. It’s a rare thing these days with our crazy schedules.