Jazzberry (Stick) jam.

I had a fantastic time at the Stick Seminar this weekend. Our teachers included luminaries like Virginia’s own Greg Howard, Bob Culbertson from San Jose, California, Jim Reilly from Canada, and Virginia Splendore from Rome (yes, Italy). I got to see my good friend Chris for the first time in maybe a year, and we both learned a LOT.

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p>My personal high watermark for the weekend was my small session with Bob Culbertson. I was never fortunate enough to study jazz performance in high school, although I did a lot of classical and symphonic performance on clarinet and alto clarinet. So my theory tended to break down in the more complex modern forms; I know my dominant major and minor, dominant 7th, major and minor 7th, major and minor 6th. But when someone says, “just play a D7♭5,” I just kind of glaze over. In two minutes, Bob not only taught me how to decipher those chords, but also how to PLAY them on the Stick using skills I already had.

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p>With the Stick, you can do some very interesting and complex chord stacking to build all those nice spicy jazz constructs. You can do this by using simply three-note chords in each hand. Thanks to the Stick’s uniform tuning intervals this works for any root, so I’ll use X instead of C, G♭, or what have you:

• Play a X7 in the left hand, which ends up being the root, the third an octave up, and the dominant 7th above that. The wider voicing is due to the Stick’s unique reversed fifths in the bass.
• In the right hand take the standard inversion of X (ascending as root, 3rd, 5th) and slide the 5th down a half step.

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p>Voila, that’s a X7♭5! You can manipulate the chord into all sorts of greasy jazz inflections by simply moving the root, the 3rd, or the 5th accordingly:

• Drop the 3rd a whole step and you’re using a X7add9.
• Change the left hand to X major and now that’s a X9.
• Change the left hand back to X7, move the right hand back to the normal X, and then in the right hand move the root up a half step; now you’re playing X7♭9!

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p>Now arpeggiate or grab whole chords as desired! Learn the three basic inversions in the right hand, and where root, third, and fifth are located for each one, and you now have the ability to do some stunning arrangements!

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p>My sincere gratitude to Bob Culbertson for filling in a missing link in my music education and giving me a great new challenge for my personal Stick practice regimen!

Back on track.

Thanks to memtest86, I was able to pin down some of the flaky behavior I’ve been seeing in both Linux and Windows recently. Turns out one of my DIMMs was bad, so I’ll be replacing it pronto through Newegg, which I highly recommend for parts and accessories. Heck, you could build a whole computer with parts bought from Newegg — which this computer is, for instance.

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p>The 2004 Mid-Atlantic Stick Seminar is coming next weekend! I’m excited and looking forward to meeting other players, even if I’m leery about exposing my lack of expertise. The concert on Saturday night should be amazing given that our instructors are sure to show off their mad Stick skillz.

A gorgeous day, and good to be off work! I am picking up my Stick today for the first time in… um… a long time. I’m hoping that I haven’t lost so many of my already meager skills that I get laughed out of the seminar. Aw, the heck with it, I’m sure there’s somebody who will be at the seminar as awful as me. Or almost as awful…

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p>I also discovered that my computer is having spurious fits that are due to memory errors. Now I have to figure out whether the problem is in RAM or in the L1 or L2 cache on the CPU die. Yeeesh. I hope it’s memory; that’s probably cheaper to replace, I would think.

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p>Wait a minute, I thought this was supposed to be my day off!

Bill Gates can kiss my black ass.

Last night I missed the vice-presidential debate, thanks to Bill Gates and his cadre of ace (ass?) programmers at Micro$oft. I was trying to simply reinstall my Windows operating system, with which I still have to share disk space on my Fedora Core system. The Windows installer popped up a message (without any opportunity for me, the user, to intervene) that it was “repairing my disk,” and proceeded to trash my entire partition table setup.

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p>Partitions on an Intel x86 hard disk are set up as a linked list, with additional tables spread down the length of the disk. The more partitions you have, the more tables there are. Windows managed to screw up almost all of mine without even asking me if it was OK to make those changes. When it finished, not only could I not boot Windows, but I couldn’t boot my pre-existing Linux system either.

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p>Fortunately, with Linux and a couple hours of time, which I would have preferred to use watching Vice President Cheney open a can of whup-ass on Senator John “Gone” Edwards, I was able to reconstruct the partition setup. I used the Linux rescue image from Red Hat Linux 9, along with ssh (to one of my other Linux systems), GNU bc, and sfdisk.

Last night’s show at the Velvet Lounge in D.C. was great. We had about as good a crowd as one could possibly expect on a Sunday night at 11. A personal highlight was seeing the magnificent performance of one Edie Carey. Engaging personality, lovely voice, talented musician, and a uniquely personal songwriter. I picked up her gorgeous album When I Was Made, which I would highly recommend. You can pick it up through her site or at CDBaby.com. (Obligatory self-promotion: You can also pick up Leah’s album there too.)

I have been superbusy lately between catching up with work and a bunch of out-of-town gigs. Last night (Saturday) we did a set at the Dewey Beach (DE) MusicFest, which I thought was very cool and tight. We had to go on without Tom because he was previously committed — and he really ought to be committed, I think — but it was still seriously phat on stage. We received many adulations so I suspect the audience liked it too. Tonight we are at the Velvet Lounge in DC. Ack, late out on a school night!