At the close of this first day aboard the Grand Princess, I feel like I've lived a week between sunrise and midnight. This was surely one of the longest days I've lived, a point in my life like the first day at college or the first day of moving to a new town.

It started with getting off the hotel shuttle bus, when I found that a bottle of Dr. Bronner's peppermint soap had exploded in one of my bags. The soap had made it intact through the ordeal of two flights and transfer to the Terminal A baggage claim at Houston Intercontinental. I know it did because I opened all of my bags to check that my instruments were safe, and I didn't detect any soap leakage. I think the explosion happened in the back of the hotel shuttle bus when the driver piled up baggage from several passengers—with mine on the bottom.

Comment (0) Read More...

At this point, I'm caught in a tractor beam, hastening toward the Grand Princess on an airline and shuttle van itinerary arranged by Princess Cruise Lines. I'm not entirely sure how I feel. I have some inkling of some ways I might feel: anxious, excited, adventurous. My head still reels from a crush of activity to get ready to leave, however, and my emotions are strangely absent.

Earlier this morning, as I showered with my partner, Stuart, who would ferry me and more than 120 pounds of baggage to the airport, I realized that I have subsumed in worry my sadness over leaving loved ones behind. I have worried the details of shutting down the small business I have run for the past 10 years. I have fretted whether I have enough musical skill to impress my new employers with my competence. I have found myself distraught thinking about leaving Stuart behind to manage the household. I have worried mostly about failure while downgrading the possibility of success.

Comment (0)

I jumped through all the hoops. Auditions for a booking agent and then a cruise line talent recruiter. A ship's medical exam. A criminal background check. Contracts with my agent and with the cruise line. And then I got a ticket to ride. It came today via email: my Joining Letter.

In cruise ship parlance (which I'm slowly learning), the Joining Letter is the document that establishes a person as a member of a ship's crew. My Joining Letter notes that I'm to join the Grand Princess at the port of Galveston, TX on April 28. Transport from my home city (which means San Jose, CA since it's the nearest commercial airport) to Galveston will be via American Airlines on April 27. After a night's stay at a Doubletree Hotel in Houston, TX, Princess Cruise Lines will shuttle me to the ship at dawn on my joining date.

Comment (1)

Four months ago is mid-December of last year. Four months ago, I had finished up a fun gig at the downtown Museum of Art and History with my swing band, the Jazz Birds. The weather had turned cool and autumn-like, but neither cold nor wet, as December sometimes becomes in Santa Cruz. My partner, Stuart, and I had finally worked out the details of a trip to Washington, D.C. we would take in January to visit his sister and brother-in-law to see their new daughter. I looked forward to turning 40 years old at mid-month.

Four months ago seems like a long time ago. And I've been trying to get my head prepared for such a long time away from home. My upcoming gig aboard the Grand Princess, the ship I will join at the end of this month as a contract orchestra musician, will take me across the Atlantic Ocean, into the Mediterranean Sea, up the coast of Western Europe, around the British Isles and North to Norway and Iceland for four months.

Comment (0)

Maybe it's from a mid-life crisis. Maybe it's from exasperation with my current freelance web development business. Maybe it's just time to move on to something new. Whatever the reason, I've decided to make a radical change in my life. I've been thinking about trying to do more music. Performing, after all, really gives me a charge--something I've known almost as long as I can remember. When thinking about what I would do with my life if I started over, I thought about what young musicians do to get started on a performing career after just graduating college. One common thing they do that I've always thought about doing is to take a gig performing on a cruise ship.

So, off I go.

Comment (0) Read More...

Off-handedly a saxophone-playing friend told me he'd been inspired by seeing me play jazz clarinet, and so he'd started working on the clarinet himself. Flattered, I suggested he check out Benny Goodman. "It all starts with Benny Goodman," I said. "Oh," he said. "I'm trying to listen to guys who are better than Benny."

That caught me off guard. My introduction to jazz was via Benny Goodman. My dad's record collection had a single Goodman album from the 1950s, and until I discovered Charlie Parker during middle school, Goodman was all I knew about jazz. So I really didn't question whether he was the best or not. I just assumed it. Still, I think I could make a strong case supporting Goodman as the best jazz clarinetist. Not just the best of the swing era, but one of the best ever.

Just as Lester Young reshaped the concept of the tenor saxophone as a solo instrument in jazz after Coleman Hawkins established it as a formidable voice, Goodman developed an approach to jazz clarinet that would set the benchmark for all who would follow. Goodman in his youth certainly followed the styles of the early masters--New Orleans players like Jimmy Noone and Johnny Dodds. Goodman's earliest recordings reveal remants of this influence. See, for instance, "Clarinetitis" and "It's Tight Like That."  But even then, during the 1920s, Goodman had started to integrate his classical training into his "hot" playing. His sound is smoother than the New Orleans style, and his amazing technical facility is already evident.

Comment (0) Read More...

My frustration with the same old-same old jazz in Santa Cruz (see entry below about Cabrillo College) inspired me to seek out and start playing the music that I wanted to play rather than relying on joining bands led by other people. The thing was, few of the really good jazz musicians I knew in the area could relate to the musical influences I wanted to explore. I realized that the solution was to write the music, then assemble a group to play it. I'd have to teach the band about the sound I had in mind, but if successful, I would have an excellent opportunity to play music that I found challenging.

Well, after nearly six months of writing, reading about jazz composition, rewriting, demoing and transcribing, I've managed to complete nearly half a dozen original tunes and put together a group to play them. I've posted some demos and written transcriptions here.

Comment (0)

For many jazz musicians in Santa Cruz County, Cabrillo College stands as a great bastion of jazz. With Ray Brown teaching jazz improvisation and arranging and with a legacy of excellent jazz groups led by the now retired Lile Cruse, Cabrillo College can rightly be considered as the wellspring of jazz for the northern half of the Monterey Bay region. I owe a great debt of gratitude for the excellent education I have received from music classes I have attended at Cabrillo College. However, I have realized during recent months that the time has come for me to find other schools and other teachers of music.

The tipping point was a concert I performed in early November 2006 with the Cabrillo College Jazz Ensemble. The group, led by Jon Nordgren, is an intermediate-to-advanced community jazz big band with a couple of area pros as well as skilled amateurs and advanced students. I've worked with the group off-and-on for more than 15 years. During recent years, though, playing in the band had become a chore, a duty performed as much out of personal loyalty to Nordgren as for a weekly excuse to work out on large-format jazz ensemble material. I started to feel that the group offered me few challenges and few opportunities to advance my musical skills.

Comment (0)

Every jazz musician must early on learn about the great American songbook, songs from Tin Pan Alley and Broadway from early- and mid-twentieth century songwriters like Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart and Geroge and Ira Gershwin. No agreed-upon canon of these songs exists, but so-called fake books have by default established which ones have endured.

Every jazz musician must early on learn about the great American songbook, songs from Tin Pan Alley and Broadway from early- and mid-twentieth century songwriters like Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart and Geroge and Ira Gershwin. No agreed-upon canon of these songs exists, but so-called fake books have by default established which ones have endured.

Comment (0) Read More...

After a mild quarrel with a dear friend over the merits of a classic of American musical theater, Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein's The Sound of Music, I've tried to understand just what appeals to me in the beloved show and film. Like many other fans of musical theater, I long considered it as merely cloying family-oriented fare. Strangely, though, reading a couple of histories of the Cold War and trying to understand how American has come to understand its role in the world that has piqued my admiration of The Sound of Music.

My thinking about the show evolved from reading academic studies of musical theater penned by Raymond Knapp (The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity) and Andrea Most (Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical). Influenced by Knapp and Most, I started to view musicals as vehicles for constructing a sense of American nationhood, and it's in that light, I've come to believe, that The Sound of Music has much to offer. For me, The Sound of Music is a testament to American exceptionalism, both a cautionary tale to Americans to honor simple folk traditions above urban sophistication and a celebration of American detachment from the wicked political entanglements of Europe.

Comment (0)