So I spent last Friday in Valdosta in order to catch Betsy’s faculty recital on euph and baritone. I started off the morning by sitting in with her studio class and trying to do 45 minutes or so of “The Breathing Gym,” which is a video put together by a couple of really good tubists and consists of exercises designed to teach musicians how to breathe effectively. Seems like a good program if practiced regularly.
Sunset Hill Cemetery, Valdosta
After that, Betsy had to teach her regular lessons, so I took off to entertain myself in the rain. I spent a bit of time in a cemetery near the school, then grabbed some lunch, waited for the sun to come out (it did eventually), and went back to the cemetery. The stones weren’t all that interesting, but the trees – dripping with Spanish Moss – made for great photography.
Sunset Hill Cemetery, Valdosta
The recital itself went really well for Betsy, but no so great for her student quintet. Apparently, the guy playing the 1st trumpet part doesn’t do a lot of practicing (or at least didn’t practice his part for the recital piece much), and it showed. Overall, however, the performance was worth the drive; and I had a great time listening to a wide range of euphonium music and taking pictures – stills and video. Once I’ve had a chance to synch my video up with the official audio recording, I’ll put some of the tunes up on YouTube.
Yesterday, I drove home and basically did nothing. I took a nap immediately upon arriving at home, then went grocery shopping, had dinner, and went back to bed.
As you might have deduced, this was during the rehearsal for the recital.
I took this during the recital by shooting through a crack in the acoustical shells.
See that mute on the chair? It got used for about 2 measures. I think the composer just wanted to mess with the performer’s head.
This shot was from just off-stage. The bottom half of it is obscured by the piano top. I like it.
Looks pretty proud of herself, doesn’t she? I guess she’s entitled. Well done, Betsy.
Today is beautiful – high 60s and sunny – and I feel somewhat guilty for still being in bed (it’s 11:30 am). I’ll probably try to get out and about at some point.
I successfully dealt with a coding problem today that had me completely flummoxed for about 24 hours. In a nutshell, I was asked to take an existing report, which contained a chart, and break it down into 5 separate reports which would add up to the whole. It was requested that I put each of the separate reports into tabs on a single page, such that the user could click on a tab and see, for example, all of the information for “Group A,” and click a different tab for “Group B” and so on. Each report was to be laid out exactly as every other report.
Gravestone near my Sylco, TN, campsite
No problem, right? That’s what I thought, too. I just added some url variables to the existing report so that the underlying queries would be limited by that variable. Took about 10 minutes, and I could call any of the 5 reports and they would display perfectly.
Until I put them into a tabbed framework. At that point, the chart – which is about 85% of the report – stopped showing up on any except the first tab. I fought with this stupid problem for just about all of yesterday and a good portion of today, trying different tab layouts, different variable combinations, different underlying pages, different chart libraries…
I spent a lot of time on Google. I was about ready to just give up and tell the client that I couldn’t do the tabs.
Then I got a brainstorm – I changed the name of the underlying query based on the variable that was received in the URL.
Bingo. It took some additional tweaking to make things work out, but in the end I figured out that the chart, which is created by javascript, had to have different names for every variable in every instance of itself.
Success is sweet at times.
Saturday night campfire, Sylco, TN
After work, I got home and realized that I’ve more or less neglected my tuba for the last week; so I practiced, on and off, for about 2.5 hours. When it got to the point that I was physically unable to play anything above a 2nd-line F, I decided that I’d worked myself enough. That was about 30 minutes ago.
Tomorrow at work, I’ll just be rewriting some old queries for my PM (the data was coming from an Oracle database and it’s been moved to a MySQL one, so all of the reports have basically stopped working). That should take up most of the day and be a fairly relaxing, non-thinking, type of thing. If I get time, I’ll watch a couple of the stupid training videos that I have to watch.
I’ve taken Friday off in order to go see Betsy Jones give a faculty recital on her euphonium at Valdosta State University. I’m not sure about the rest of the weekend. There’s a possibility that I’ll stay in Valdosta on Friday and head to Savannah on Saturday, but nothing’s really set in stone.
Rehearsal with the band went okay last night (on alto horn). I spent some time last week working with the horn, playing Arban studies and long tones and generally not looking at the actual band music at all. I’m more concerned with tone and intonation than anything else at this point.
I like playing. Wish I’d figured that out 25 years ago.
It got quite cool last night. I don’t know exactly what the temperature was, but I was forced to actually zip up my sleeping bag – which I hate doing – at some point during the night. I woke up at around 7:00 this morning, cleaned up my area and drank coffee for about an hour, and then made the trek back to Duluth, arriving home at about 11:00 this morning.
Didn’t do much between then and now, other than a couple of loads of laundry and a pile of dirty dishes. I also watched Let’s Make Love, which I’m pretty sure is the first Marilyn Monroe movie I’ve ever seen. I’ve decided to watch old movies for the next month or so – the ones that feature people that I’ve heard of but have never actually seen. On my list so far are named like Rudolph Valentino, Bette Davis, Montgomery Clift, Clifton Webb, Joan Crawford, Clark Gable and Carol Lombard.
I think I did see part of Mommy Dearest (that’s Crawford, right?), and I know that Gable was in Gone With the Wind – but that was such a horrible movie that I don’t think I can count it.
Waterfall near Jax Creek, on the GA side of the mountain
The band, it seems, is being officially invited to perform in Vermont this June. I am pleased by this, and I hope Bob doesn’t do anything to make it a disaster. I’d hoped that most of the band could get together at Cy’s place on Friday night, but Joe seems pretty intent on playing in Boston on Friday and – God knows why – having the band spend a day being touristy on Saturday.
Should that plan fly, I think I’ll probably drive to Boston for the Friday night gig and then either go back to Vermont or head for Canada for a couple of weeks. I’ve been to Boston. It’s a nice place. Historic, even. I just don’t know that I really want to spend a day there for anything other than the old cemetery – and I know I don’t want to pay for a hotel room anywhere near it.
Must grab some sleep now. I love hanging out in the woods, but I know I’m going to be a tired puppy at work tomorrow.
The weather in Atlanta has been beautiful for several days, and I decided yesterday that I haven’t gone camping in far too long, so after work I threw some basic supplies – and my long-unused camp kitchen – into the car and hit the road for one of my favorite car-camping spots, Sylco Campground. After a few hours on the road (and my trip was made about 15 minutes longer by the police department of White County, GA…54 in a 40), I arrived at my chosen spot and set up my tent in the dark.
It’s currently about 9:30 Saturday morning. I woke up at 4 this morning and the moon was so bright inside my tent that I thought it was about 8 and overcast. Once I figured out that it was still the middle of the night, I went back to sleep (and sleeping was wonderful), not to wake again until 8:45.
So far this morning, I’ve gotten things organized, gathered a bunch of firewood and made a pot of coffee. The sun came up over the mountain about 30 minutes and, by all indications, including my weather radio – it is going to be a glorious day to be in the middle of nowhere by myself.
I’ll let you know how it goes.
1:30 Saturday afternoon. I just got back from an easy 2-hour walk along the Sylco trail, during which I discovered an old graveyard that I never knew was here. The stones were mostly from the late 19th and early 20th century, though there was one from the early 1800’s as well as a number of uncarved markers that might have been older. The residents seemed to be members of three or four families – probably those who farmed the land around here 100 years ago.
Also found some bear poop, which is always fun.
I first discovered Sylco on a Memorial Day weekend in about 2003. During that weekend, I’d planned on going to a large campground nearby called Chillowhee, but it was completely packed. I spotted a sign near Cleveland, TN, for Sylco; and after what seemed an interminable drive up a twisty, bumpy, scary mountain road, I nearly drove past it.
Sylco is a fairly primitive camping area – in fact, I’ve often opted to just pull off the road and set up camp rather than stay at the campground proper – which is comprised of about 8 picnic tables and fire rings spread over about 2 acres along Old Highway 2 between GA and TN. In addition to the tables, there’s a pit toilet, which – I don’t care who you are – is a nice amenity.
At any rate, before my walk, I watched as 3 folks parked across the street and unloaded 3 horses. While they did this, I entertained their two dogs, Laser and Hobo, who brought me a stick and insisted that I throw it for them. Over and over and over.
Cute puppies, but they left with their owners, who rode off on the horses shortly before I went on walkabout and who have yet to return.
As I’ve been typing this, a family of three has started to set up camp about 100 yards away from me, and one if them is scrambling around looking for wood. Glad I took care of that this morning.
More later.
Got a nice fire going after typing, then made some hot dogs and munched pretzels while reading. The folks who’d come in near me were just here to roast marshmallows and they left after 45 minutes, but another couple showed up shortly thereafter and set up a tent across the road by the horse trailer.
A few minutes ago (it’s about 4:45), the horse people rode back to their camp, loaded up the horses and dogs, and summarily left. So now it’s just me and the new folks.
It has gotten chilly now that the sun has gone behind the mountain. I’ve had to put the legs back on my pants, roll down my sleeves, and I recently put on a jacket.
Still, it’s very quiet and peaceful here, and my fire is doing a great job keeping the chill away.
Those of you keeping score at home may have noticed that I haven’t added a new entry here in several days. There are a number of reasons for that, but they can all be summed up in two words: “Everything broke.”
I bought the cats some new toys a couple of months ago. This is where they decided to keep them.
Actually, I didn’t post anything between Monday and today because my DSL went out at home (along with my television and phone) sometime Monday afternoon and I wasn’t able to get service restored until last night. And the only reason I got it restored last night was because I jumped all over ATT when they told me that I’d probably be good to go by next Monday. Think about this: the phone company cut off all of my services (except cellphone), without giving me any advance notice, and figured that I’d be cool with waiting for a full week before said services came back on.
In point of fact, I’m sure that I would have been cool with that scenario, but there are principles at work here – the main one being that I work for the same company that the technicians who caused the outage work for, I have take most of the same training that the technicians who caused the outage have to take, and I had taken a course at work on Monday (one of the annual courses, in fact – Monday was the fourth time I’ve taken it) in which it is very clearly stated that, “You must inform all parties who could be negatively affected by your work – and you must have a backout plan in place – before any work can commence.”
This is common sense stuff. I used to laugh that anybody would actually have to be taught something that’s so blatantly obvious. If I’m going to reboot a server, I tell everyone who uses that server what’s about to happen, and I make damned sure that I can route everyone to a backup server if, for some reason, the original one doesn’t come back online.
So for Ma Bell to just shut off everything that keeps me connected to the world and think I’m not going to notice for a week….you get the idea. I jumped down their throats, I let them know that I’m a manager with their company, I let them know that I’m quite capable of troubleshooting my own phone lines, and I let them know that a freaking WEEK wasn’t acceptable.
Damned if it didn’t work.
This dog sits on the roof of the sextant’s office at Rose Hill Cemetery in Macon
Making this particularly annoying for me was the fact that my football website has been experiencing a lot of spam traffic and other problems and I really wanted to install some new security patches on it and tweak some of the code. My office has FTP services locked down, so I was counting on working on the website from the house. Instead, I had to keep responding to emails (on my iPhone) about how the website was getting slower and slower and logging people out and yada yada yada, and there was nothing that I could do about it before last night (which is why I didn’t get a blog entry typed up last night).
I managed to get everything working okay on the site last night and today (I can do some things from the office) – which is a good thing, because, for reasons that I have not been able to determine, my iPhone’s battery went completely dead this afternoon. So dead that, when I plugged it into my computer to charge, the computer didn’t even recognize it for about 20 minutes. Now, this phone was fully charged when I left the house this morning – as it always is – and for it to totally die like that in less than 6 hours is troubling. I just got the stupid thing about three months ago. So, I’ll be keeping an eye on it. Maybe I accidentally had the camera running while the phone was in its holster. I just don’t know.
At work today, I got basically nothing done. Oh wait – I got this blog entry typed up. That’s something, right?
Today’s pictures are things that I have on my work laptop.
As the title of this entry would suggest, I got out and about this weekend and had a nice time playing with my camera while exploring some new (and some familiar) places. Both yesterday and today were beautiful days to be outside, and I took advantage of sunshine and warm temperatures and had one of the nicest weekends I’ve had in quite some time.
Yesterday, I left early and headed up to Rome, GA, to visit Myrtle Hill Cemetery. A quick Google search of this place yields the following, accurate, summary:
Monument to (I think) Nathan Bedford Forrest at the top of Myrtle Hill
One of the most beautiful cemeteries in the nation sits atop Myrtle Hill at the confluence of the Etowah and Oostanaula Rivers. Offering an unimpeded view of downtown Rome, Georgia, to the northeast, the Etowah Valley to the east, and the Appalachian foothills to the south, the cemetery boasts spectacular vistas and historic significance which combine to make it one of the most unique in the world, and a “must see” stop on the Blue and Gray Trail.
As promised, the views from the cemetery are incredible. Good enough so that I almost didn’t feel terrified while looking through my viewfinder at graves and realizing that there were 200-foot drops immediately behind me. The monuments in the cemetery are also quite interesting, and the sky – an amazing cerulean color boasting a very bright morning sun – added some great contrast to my shots.
I spent probably three hours at Myrtle Hill before heading back towards Atlanta. I took a roundabout way home, stopping first at the Georgia National Cemetery (a truly boring place), after which I took a side road looking for the Sweetwater State Park. The campground was closed, but I found an interesting little cemetery near it and spent another hour looking for shots there. It is called, I believe, the Fields Chapel United Methodist Cemetery, and one of my favorite shots from yesterday came from there.
Betsy and I test out my wireless shutter release
Got to bed fairly early last night, but woke up for no reason at around 1:30 and couldn’t go back to sleep. I must have been giving off vibes, because Chris called me about 5 minutes after I woke up and we talked until close to 3:00 this morning. I finally fell asleep at around 4:30, then got up two hours later to tend to the cats. At about 9:00, I decided that I wasn’t going to sleep, and so went grocery shopping and had a massive breakfast at a buffet near the grocery store.
Euphoniumist extraordinaire. You wouldn’t believe the sound this horn made coming off of that crypt.
After I got home, I got an invitation from Betsy Jones to join her at Rose Hill Cemetery and take some shots of her with her euphonium – she’s headed back to school this year and needs some publicity shots, I guess. Since it was a gorgeous day and Rose Hill is one of my favorite places, I headed down to Macon and spent all afternoon goofing around there before Betsy treated me to sushi and hot chocolate (not at the same time) and I ended up getting back home at around 9:00 tonight.
Not sure what’s planned for work this week, but I’m actually sort of optimistic about it. I made some good strides with jQuery last week and am looking forward to seeing what else I can do with it. Also hope to jump back into Android development, which I’ve pretty much abandoned for the last month.
Yes, indeedy. We got a dusting of snow around Atlanta last night – enough to be noticeable when I left for work this morning, but it was mostly gone by mid-afternoon. Work today began with a lot of promise – I finished up a couple of projects that had been shoved at me Tuesday – but ended with a whimper when I completely lost interest in coding and started reading about how to build a tilt-shift lens using an old medium-format lens, a plunger, and some glue. Then I spent even more time reading about tilt-shifting in general – how it works, what happens to depth of field, etc. Fascinating stuff, but I got nothing done in terms of work. Maybe I’ll have more energy tomorrow.
New Hope Cemetery Dunwoody, GA
I practiced my tuba tonight for the first time in close to a week. Sounded okay. I’ll take it. Now I’m looking around for a trumpet method book so I can dig into the tenor horn a bit more seriously.
I’ve been trying to figure out something interesting to do this weekend. Chris and Betsy are pretty much booked, and I’m really jonesing to go someplace where I can take some decent photos. I’ve read that there’s a pretty cemetery in Rome, GA, so I could drive up there and check it out; but I’ve also got this weird idea in my head to find some “ghost towns” around the state and visit them. I know where a couple of them are between where I live and Dahlonega, GA (site of the country’s first gold rush), and I’ve read about a couple more within a 2-3 hour drive. I’m just not sure how interesting they’ll be. I mean, if there are actually abandoned building there are stuff, that’d be completely cool, but if it’s just foundations, well…
There’s also the possibility of going to a beach somewhere. Savannah has a cemetery that I’ve wanted to see for years, and the weather down there on Saturday is supposed to be amazing. Jekyll Island, GA, is always a fun place to visit. The coast of SC is only about a 5-hour drive.
Or I could grab a tent, a lantern and some food and go find myself a nice quiet piece of forest somewhere – though it might be a bit chilly in the mountains this weekend.
Nothing’s going to happen anyway if my renter doesn’t give me some cash tomorrow. I got carried away on my bills earlier this week and overpaid a few of them – effectively leaving me broke until next payday. Oh yeah – my property taxes went up again last year, so my escrow payments also went up (about $75 more a month). Oh, joy.
Am hoping to get to bed pretty early tonight, so I guess I’ll slap a picture in here and call it good.
It is mid-morning on a beautiful autumn day. My mother is doing something in the front room – “the hall” – of our 19th-century Vermont farmhouse. The world around me is bathed in a light amber haze. I am in “the den,” a room which, to someone looking at the house from the road, is to the left of the hall. Why we refer to it as a den is something that I don’t understand. Its floors are constructed of wide barn-boards, covered over with so many layers of paint that they are basically unrecognizable as wood. Judging by the various shades that can be seen through chips in the paint, this floor has been white, gray, green, red, brown, and maybe even orange at some point in the past. Its current color is a deep brown with a hint of red. Almost a maroon. The den, which is separated from the hall in front of me by a lovely dark-stained sliding wood door, and connected via an open doorway on my left to “the library,” is home to my mother’s sewing paraphernalia and arts supplies, many of which are scattered across the surface of a ping-pong table which dominates the room. The light fixture in the room is of the hanging variety. It resembles an inverted extra-terrestrial vehicle, often occupied by three or more deceased flies. Currently, that light is turned off; but the den is still brightly lit by the sun, which is streaming in through a large picture window on the front of the house. A strip of stained glass decorates the top of the window. I am wearing my overalls, feeling neither overly happy nor overly sad. Perhaps I feel a bit mischievous – I know where my mother is, but she seems to be unaware of my presence. There is good reason for this: I’m standing underneath the ping-pong table.
It is 1969 and I am three years old. This is the first clear memory of my life.
I was going to continue in the same vein tonight – talking about old jobs – but opted instead to practice the alto horn a little bit, and now I don’t feel much like writing.
Tomorrow being rehearsal night, I probably won’t have time to do an entry then, either…so you get two days off!
Time to dive back into jobs that I’ve had over the years, and I’ll focus on two that I really enjoyed and one that’s been an on-again/off-again thing since the time I was about 15 years old.
Before I get started, I’d like to interject here that I finally figured out what the song is that’s been running through my brain for the last month, when I heard it playing in the background during a scene in Family Guy. It’s Erich Korngold’s theme from Sea Hawk, and it rocks. Wonder if there’s a brass band arrangement of it:
So. Now that that’s out of the way (feel free to play it as you read, but it probably won’t match the narrative), back to the matter of my employment history.
I was a switchboard operator for 4 years in college. It was a work/study job that I actually started a few weeks before beginning my freshman year, and it was longest I ever worked at one job until I eclipsed that record with BellSouth in 2003. Maybe I’m just really enamored of phones or something. I enjoyed the job for several reasons, not least among them being my boss and her assistant, Cheryl Ellis and Phyllis Green, respectively. Cheryl was probably in her late 30s when I started, and Phyllis was maybe 10-12 years older. Both of these ladies treated me like an adopted son almost from my first day on the job. While I haven’t heard from Phyllis in many years, Cheryl and I still trade the occasional email and catch up with each other. Sweet ladies who had my back on more than one occasion.
It was also a fun time to be involved with phone systems, as they were really just starting to take off. You may have read stories about how the original computer hackers were hacking phone systems. This was right around the time that I got involved with things at the switchboard. AT&T was being broken up (ironically, with the purchase of BellSouth a few years ago, “Ma Bell” is pretty much back to where she was to start with), and the college was expanding its phone systems, tinkering with options, just getting computerized, putting phones into students’ rooms for the first time…in short, it was cutting-edge stuff and a lot of fun. I had an aptitude for computers and networks and my two moms really did not, so I was able to help them keep up with the technology while they taught me about dealing with people on the phone and handling billing complaints and other interpersonal crap.
I also got to spend one extremely interesting weekend working on the original switchboard, which was housed in the attic of the campus science building, when there was work being done on the new computerized switchboard. I’d always thought that the days of operators sitting in front of punch-down boards, pulling cables from one section and connecting them to others in order to transfer calls, was something that disappeared before I was born; but that’s exactly the way things worked on the old switchboard. I’d take incoming calls on a headset, find out who wanted to speak to whom, and physically connect the incoming calls to the port on the switchboard that went to the requested phone. It was boring in a completely fascinating way – and yes, I made my share of mistakes.
By the end of my sophomore year, the new system was fairly stable and I new it inside and out, so I began to train new operators (I was the first student who worked on the switchboard) for the day shifts, and once they could handle things, I took more night shifts – which allowed me to do my homework, as there were very few incoming calls after the college administration left for the day. I also used the college’s matriculation file, which we had a copy of for billing purposes, to learn details about girls that I liked – what their parents did for a living, what their social security numbers were, etc. I didn’t use this information for anything malicious: I’d just start up a conversation with them by saying something like, “If I can guess the last four digits of your home phone number, will you go to the coffeehouse with me tonight?” You’d be surprised how often that worked. I guess they liked that I took enough interest in them to, basically, stalk them.
During the summer after my junior year, I was a fake pianist, singer, bus driver, handyman, babysitter and gopher for a rock band homed just outside of Washington, D.C. My brother Larry got me this gig. He was the regular pianist and manager for a band which had scheduled a D.O.D. tour in the middle east at the same time that they had a scheduled American tour, so the band found a bunch of people to replace themselves for the American tour and I got to play the part of Larry. The real band’s founder, lead singer, and financier – a man named George King – stayed at home to rehearse the new band, line up dancers, and sing lead vocals. In addition to me, we had a guy named Mark on drums (he was an excellent set player, by the way), and a guy named Shaun on rhythm guitar. The three of us, along with 3 dancers, were – theoretically – backup singers. As far as the singing went, however, it was totally Milli Vanilli. This is because my real job as a piano player was to run our 4-track tape system, which contained all of the real backup singers along with lead guitar, keyboards, and bass tracks. Before each song, I’d fire up the tape, Mark and I would get a click-track in our headphones, and then everyone except Mark and George would more or less fake the entire show.
Playing with George King in PA. That’s me behind the upright piano on the left.
Now I need to point out that it wasn’t completely faked. Going along with that statement, I’d also admit – to anyone who asked me – that the music they were hearing in the audience was, by and large, not coming from the people they saw on the stage. I did play the keyboard parts and all of us did actually sing; but we were completely covered up by the recorded tracks. When a guy asked me after one gig how I made my little Casio keyboard sound so much like a Rhodes, I cheerfully told him that I had a Rhodes setting on the keyboard – but that what he was hearing had been laid down by a kick-ass keyboardist two months earlier, and that that guy was currently on an aircraft carrier in the Dead Sea. When people asked me what I was doing with the tape recorder, I told them that it was our bass player…and keyboard player…and lead guitar….and backup vocalists. Nobody seemed to mind.
The only near disaster we had on stage happened during the gig which is pictured in this blog entry. We were playing at a mall in Pennsylvania, and when I started the track for the first song….nothing came through Mark’s or my headphones. He and I stared at each other for a few seconds and then I frantically pressed buttons on the 4-track, not having any idea what was wrong. As it happened, the cassette wasn’t seated firmly enough on the spindles and, when I started banging on the buttons, I managed to jar it enough to make it settle down fully. Music instantly blazed out of the speakers – about 6 bars into the piece. I don’t remember if I stopped the thing and rewound or if we just went with it. I do remember that, after that, I made sure that everything was working correctly before every other show.
When we weren’t playing (I don’t recall how many gigs we did or where they all were – D.C., MD, PA, IL, FL, and other places), I drove the band’s bus, helped George around his house – I recall spending the whole summer trying to make his pool water not be green – and explored Washington, D.C. nearly every day we were in town. I found a great parking spot outside the Department of Agriculture that I used just about every time I went into the city, and I generally would drive to town, park the car there, and walk around for several hours in the evenings. Georgetown was a great place for live bands, the mall had something going on just about every day, there were concerts by The President’s Own Marine band every Wednesday night and polo matches near the Lincoln Memorial on Saturday mornings. I must’ve spent a total of two full weeks wandering around the Smithsonian Institute that summer, and I rode the Metro to every stop at some point or another. For many years after that summer, I’d go back to D.C. at least once a year – it was sort of a second home for Jenny and me.
One of the dancers, Chris, I think had somewhat of a crush on me – truth be told, I sort of liked her, too, even though she was probably 10 years older than me. Neither of us ever admitted this to each other, and nothing ever happened between us, though we did have a fairly intense conversation, fueled by a bit too much wine, in a hot tub in Miami one night; and we traded a few letters and phone calls after the band broke up. The picture above was actually sent to me by Chris in one of those letters.
I should point out that the Chris of that summer is NOT the same Chris who is frequently mentioned in these blog entries.
The 9 O’Clock Brass Quintet held together for about 5 years in the early 1990s, and played quite a few gigs of all kinds. This one was actually on the back of a flat-bed truck in a July 4th parade.
The last job that I’ll talk about in this entry isn’t really any particular job, but rather a source of sporadic income and memories that I’ve had since I played my first professional gig on a tuba when I was 15 years old. On that day, I filled in for John Sizemore, a great tubist and the first adult who seemed to realize that I might be good at it, with the Foothills Brass Quintet. We played a lollipop concert in Greenville for some elementary school classes, and I’ve been hooked on brass quintets ever since. I played in one with my brother Greg for the last two years of high school, formed one (using some of the same musicians) for four years at college, had a relatively successful one for several years after I moved to Atlanta, played with another (pretty bad) one until about a year ago, and I’m always on the lookout for 4 other brass people who want to get together and play quintet literature – for money or just for fun.
I don’t know what it is about the 5tet that appeals to me so much. Maybe it’s that I can get opportunities to shine as a soloist without feeling nervous about it. Maybe it’s because, by virtue of my horn, I can have a bit of control over tempo and style for the group.
