Raving Amicks

Yeah, I finally got to go to band camp!  :)   It was a week-long Jazz Workshop at the Fort Worden State Park in Port Townsend, WA. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Worden)  Spent an exhausting week in workshops, listening to faculty perform and ourselves perform.  Food was bad, accommodations were sparse (tiny dorm-like rooms with shared bathrooms).  Here’s some pictures.  Went up with Bob, who also attended (he’s the guy in one of the pictures).  There’s a picture of the corner of the dorm/barracks I stayed in with the ocean in the background.  The trombone faculty member was Wycliffe Gordon – an amazing player (www.wycliffegordon.com).   He’s the large black guy in one of the pictures. There’s also a picture of me during our public performance.   Great fun!   Learned a lot.

As of last Friday, I’ve retired and I’m joining the Gorge Winds Band.  I’ll be playing baritone.  They have needs for both trombone and baritone, but need a baritone more.  I picked one up from the director ( a retired music teacher) yesterday and the dogs go crazy.  Monty peed all over his bed and the rest of the dogs won’t go near me.  Brewster just sits and shakes!  Anyway, it’s coming back, even with just 20 minutes or so.

The baritone I’m borrowing is a King 2266 with 4 valves.  I’d try a picture, but I don’t have a camera up here.

Jimmy came to Western last weekend and I made sure I wasn’t going to miss it. Here’s some pictures from the show, great music and cool lighting effects!

We had the Presidents come to Western last Friday and it was awesome, a little packed but awesome! The Love Lights, a local band opened for PUSA and they were great too, they had two trumpets and a bari sax which you don’t see to often.

Hey family! I’ve found a cool series on youtube, called
We Need Girlfriends ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omE_8VJN9Eo ), I think it’s hilarious and they’ve got like 12 videos of it too, I would recommend checking that out. Also one of their songs they feature on one of their video’s is great too, it’s by Plush Gun, called Just Impolite (http://www.myspace.com/plushgun).

Yeah, can’t sleep. Which isn’t all that bad really, it was raining heavily earlier, which is nice considering most rain here is in very very small droplets, so it doesn’t sound very cool. Anyway, I’m going to try and upload a song on here that I found today among my garage sale music list. The list has all these songs, two boxes of cds that I found at a garage sale last summer, so it takes a while to actively pick and choose the good stuff among most of the crap. This song is very different but now definitely one of my top songs out of my garage list. Its got a cool name too, its “Hamburger Cemetary” by Snowblow.