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The Far End of the World

By Brian Carpenter on January 12, 2012 10:44 AM

I'll be traveling to Tucson, Arizona in a couple weeks to mix The Confessions debut record The Far End of the World with the great Craig Schumacher. Craig is probably best known for his work with Calexico and Neko Case over the last couple decades.

We've setup a tumblr page to document the making of this record here. We'll be playing shows on Friday January 20 in Maine and Saturday March 3 in Boston. You can find more information on the tumblr site.


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Remembering Sam Rivers (1923-2011)

By Brian Carpenter on December 27, 2011 11:55 PM

samrivers3.jpg Sam Rivers was a musical hero to me. He was an important part of my life and I wanted to share some of his history and my memories of him.

For those not familiar with him, Sam Rivers was one of the most important musicians in jazz and led one of the most remarkable careers in all of jazz history. A master saxophonist, flautist, and pianist, and composer for small ensembles and jazz orchestras, he was born in 1923, joined the Navy in the 1940s, and shortly thereafter studied at the Boston Conservatory. He was of a musical family. There is gospel in Sam's family and you hear that in his voice, his playing. He has a particular cry on the saxophone that is unlike any other and you can hear that in his singing as well. A true original, he created an entirely unique language on the saxophone, which, by the way, is completely consistent with his vocabulary on the piano. This style of improvising is also mirrored in his writing for jazz orchestra.

Thumbnail image for samrivers2.jpg It was in Boston where he met Tony Williams, the 13-year old drummer who would bring him into the Miles Davis Quintet in 1964. Sam was clearly not a great fit for the quintet, however, and the stint did not last long. As Sam once told me, lamenting about having to play "shit like My Funny Valentine" in Tokyo, "I was beyond what they were doing." Sam is probably the only musician in history who played with Miles to say something like that (and it was very true).

In the mid-60s Sam led a series of incredible free-bop Blue Note recordings with Williams, Jaki Byard (another Boston cohort) and Ron Carter, starting with "Fuchsia Swing Song". "Beatrice" is the composition Sam Rivers is most known for, named after his wife of 50 years.



In the '70s, Sam and Bea led and maintained perhaps the most central loft space for creative music in New York City, Studio RivBea. Studio RivBea was located on Bond Street in lower Manhattan. Bassist William Parker described the scene to me in 2002: "In the early 70s, you had a lot of musicians coming to New York. New York has got a particular energy already, because you have so much happening. But around that time, you had musicians coming in from Chicago, St Louis, Los Angeles, and they were all coming to New York ready and wanting to play. So people were finding storefronts, lofts, and creating and producing their own concerts because the established clubs were not that receptive to hiring them. So you had all of these musicians who instead of staying at home, came out and created work for themselves, performing and recording their music. So it was very lively at that time. And there was a lot of energy in the air...it was a nice fever-pitch happening...and a lot of it was because of RivBea and places like it."



In the '80s Dizzy Gillespie hired Sam to play in his quintet. On a tour in Florida, Sam and Bea enjoyed the warm weather so much they decided to move there. And having met several musicians based in Orlando who were very interested in developing his jazz orchestra pieces, they made the move later in the decade. Sam quickly formed a trio with bassist Doug Mathews and drummer Anthony Cole.

I met Sam in 1995. I was studying engineering at University of Florida and playing in bands at night. The trombonist in one of my bands, Jerry Edwards, also played in Sam's orchestra in Orlando. It was through Jerry that I met Sam and saw the RivBea Orchestra for the first time. Seeing the RivBea Orchestra for the first time is one of those things you would never forget. I was stunned. It was out, it was funky, it was jagged, it was edgy, it was all sorts of crazy time-signatures, all coming at you from 16 musicians. As strange as it first seemed, it had all of jazz history in there too, with Sam fronting the band like some kind of rock star, dancing and screaming vocalizations out front. God, I felt like I was on another planet. I immediately started to work with Bea to help book shows for Sam in the Southeast. This went on for about four years, prior to my leaving for Boston in 2000. The first show was at a jazz festival I produced for five years in Gainesville called the Gainesville Jazz/Pop Festival. Through that festival Sam would meet many future collaborators, including trumpeter Steven Bernstein, who I met in 1996 and invited to open for Sam in 1998.

Sam had a great sense of humor and a very generous spirit. He lived to 88 years old and I'm no pot evangelist, but he and Bea smoked more weed than anyone I've ever seen. And they never got caught. They were practically on fire. His wife Bea (of over 50 years) was a sweetheart and his biggest supporter. They were always together. If you went to a Sam Rivers concert, you'd always hear this woman yelling "WHOOOOOOA!" That was Bea. Bea would also play the bad guy and front all the business decisions so Sam could focus on his music. God, if we were all so lucky to have a Bea. I heard her yell just as loudly as she did in concert when she was on the phone with bookers. Hell, she even yelled at me once. Sam called me up to apologize later. "You know, take it to heart. But don't take it personally. She's yelling at you because you're part of the family." Some of the things he would say, you'd be scratching your head about later. He would bring people into his band based on connections, he would try people out, give them little bits of advice. "Develop your own exercises." "Find your voice." "You gotta work on that part, you know?" I was never good enough to play in the RivBea Orchestra, but because I was helping him out with shows, Sam allowed my band Beat Science to rehearse in the Musicians Union space prior to RivBea Orchestra rehearsals. One evening trumpeter John Castleman was out and since I was the lucky dope who happened to be there, he let me sit in on a rehearsal. I'll never forget that. It was a thrill. The music was very difficult reading. It's hard to describe in writing except to say you have to hear it to believe it. Here's a video of Sam singing the parts in rehearsal prior to a show in New York shot by Alan Roth:



I learned a great work ethic from three people in my life, all who worked hard in different ways: my mother, whose work as a teacher redefined "above and beyond", my father, who rose out of near poverty as a farmer by hard work and determination, and Sam Rivers, whose musical output is staggering. Sam was writing music all the way into his 80s; he never stopped writing. For Sam, there was no such thing as retirement. "Retire? I don't even know why we have that word." Sam wrote hundreds of compositions for jazz orchestra. Every week at rehearsal he'd have two or three new pieces. In an interview with NPR a few years ago, he contemplated on the fact that he'd never have enough time to finish all of the ideas he had. "There's never enough time."

In 2000, I asked Sam to play my wedding in Gainesville. Over the years, Sam got to know both Caroline and I well. I told Sam he could play anything he wanted. He generously accepted and even asked us to make a request toward the end. I didn't need to make requests. He could make it work for people, his own version of dance music. Just seeing him adapt to a situation like that was incredible. The generosity of this man continued to astound me. Bea passed away in 2005. He was a remarkable human being and left a great legacy for all musicians.

Here are some of my favorite recordings Sam led or was a part of:

"Fuchsia Swing Song" Sam Rivers (1964)
"Conference of the Birds" Dave Holland (1972)
"Crystals" Sam Rivers (1974)
"Sizzle" Sam Rivers (1975)
"Black Africa" Sam Rivers (1976)
"Contrasts" Sam Rivers (1979)
"Inspiration" Sam Rivers & the RivBea Orchestra (1998)
"Culmination" Sam Rivers & the RivBea Orchestra (1998)

A full discography was compiled by Rick Lopez here.




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Ghost Train Orchestra on NPR's Best Jazz of 2011

By Brian Carpenter on December 12, 2011 11:04 AM

The Ghost Train Orchestra's debut Hothouse Stomp appears on NPR's top ten list for 2011, compiled by Patrick Jarenwattananon. You can read the list and listen to tracks here.

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On the Genius of Alec Wilder

By Brian Carpenter on November 22, 2011 3:44 PM

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The Ghost Train Orchestra played a show last weekend performing all new arrangements of the music of Alec Wilder, among others. The band sounded incredible on some very difficult and adventurous arrangements. I'm very excited about the new direction in which the band is headed.

I discovered Alec Wilder's music after stumbling across a footnote in Gunther Schuller's massive jazz history book The Swing Era. Largely self-taught, he studied briefly at the Eastman School of Music but left without completing a degree. By all accounts Alec Wilder was a real character. As a teenager, he split from his family and lived in and out of the Algonquin Hotel throughout most of his adult life. He loved to laugh, loved his friends, and loved alcohol, which he struggled with. He was known to run in large circles -- he had friends in the jazz, classical, and popular music worlds and was clearly at ease composing in all these genres.

assets/img/photos/mitchmiller-oboe.jpgIn 1937 Wilder, with the help and organization of Eastman classmate and oboist Mitch Miller (who later became head of A[&]R for Columbia Records), recorded several strange and beautiful sides in New York City. Wilder imagined an octet with unusual instrumentation: oboe, flute, bassoon, clarinet, bass clarinet, harpsichord, bass, and drums. The octet recordings ("Octets") preceded by decades the Third Stream movement of the 1950s that Schuller spearheaded by combining jazz and classical concert music.

Wilder's music is not easily classifiable. The Octets are essentially chamber miniatures performed by musicians adept at swing. His music fell through the cracks and as a result his work is not as well-known as his contemporaries. In the 1930s, however, word soon got around to musicians in New York that Wilder was a composer to watch out for. It wasn't long before Frank Sinatra heard one of Wilder's classical pieces and approached Coumbia Records on Wilder's behalf to get him recorded.

assets/img/photos/sinatra-conducting.jpgThe record executives agreed to record the pieces but only if Sinatra himself conducted the session. At the session, Sinatra immediately disarmed the orchestra by telling them he knew nothing about conducting, but that he desperately wanted this music to sound its best, and appealed to their leadership. Sinatra had never conducted a note in his life and here he was headlined as conductor on a 78 cover with Wilder, the composer and bandleader, reduced to second billing. On seeing the cover, an irate Sinatra called the heads of Columbia to insist Wilder's name appear in the same type size as his own. The change in billing never occurred, but the album Frank Sinatra Conducts the Music of Alec Wilder went on to be successful both musically and commercially.

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On first listen, it was immediately apparent to me why a young Sinatra would be so captivated by Alec Wilder: Wilder had an ear for melody, beautiful song-like melodies. Like Sinatra, I too became a Wilder evangelist, collecting as many 78s as I could find and asking nearly every musician I knew if they had heard of him (most had not). I began arranging the Octets for the Ghost Train Orchestra. Wilder's music is deceptively simple -- it is dense with rapid form changes and rather difficult to comprehend on a first reading. I heard all sorts of things in the Octets that appealed to me. Wilder's music was so lyrical, it felt to me that the Octets were almost gasping to be sung. It also occurred to me that Wilder's music was very modern and should be approached that way. I find that Wilder's music is continually rewarding on subsequent listens. The more you listen, the more is revealed and it is revealed very slowly over time. I hope you too will experience the beauty and wonder of Alec Wilder's music through these new arrangements.


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Ghost Train Orchestra to perform at Kennedy Center

By Brian Carpenter on November 6, 2011 10:01 AM

From November 11-26, The Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. will present Swing, Swing, Swing, a celebration of the various musical styles which grew out of the swing rhythm. The Ghost Train Orchestra, Asleep at the Wheel, The Red Stick Ramblers, and the Firecracker Jazz Band are all part of the event. The Ghost Train Orchestra will perform Wednesday November 16th at 6:00pm on the Millennium Stage. A video of the concert will be streamed live here.

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The Sound of Horror to air tonight

By Brian Carpenter on October 21, 2011 11:05 AM

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Tonight I am hosting a radio program called "The Sound of Horror". It will air this Friday night October 21st on WZBC 90.3 FM at 7-11PM EST. This is a 4-hour radio broadcast I produced last year on sound design in science-fiction and horror films.

This program has been revised from the original broadcast to include sound design in films outside the horror genre, with special focus on the work of sound designers Walter Murch (THX 1138, The Conversation, Apocalypse Now) and Alan Splet (Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet). I'm joined by co-hosts Mike Frengel, a PhD in electroacoustic composition who teaches film sound design at Northeastern University and filmmaker Michael Neel, the
writer/director of Drive-In Horrorshow, which Horror Hound Magazine called "a creative spin on throw-back anthology horror".

Other interviews and special guests include sound designers Craig Henighan (Black Swan), Ren Klyce (Seven, Fight Club), Ron Nagle (The Exorcist), Sound Dogs supervising sound editor Stephen Barden, and Steven J. Schneider, author of the books "Fear Without Frontiers", "1001 Films You Must See Before You Die", and "Dark Thoughts: Philosophic Reflections on Cinematic Horror". Our bibliography for this program includes Michel Chion's "Audio Vision" and Elizabeth Weis' "Film Sound: Theory and Practice".

You can tune in remotely via the online streams at the link below.

Friday October 21 2011
7:00-11:00PM EST
WZBC 90.3 FM
Live streams here:
http://www.wzbc.org/listen.html


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Beyond The Veil: A Victorian Murder Mystery Ball

By Brian Carpenter on September 20, 2011 10:54 AM

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The year is 1901, and guests from around the world flock to Riverside Church to see the latest opera "L'ultimo Bacio", starring the venerable Italian opera diva Comtessa Valentina Badalamenti. You are among the invitees to this exclusive performance, but upon arriving, you find yourself witness to a very different show altogether...

The Ghost Train Orchestra will be performing as a part of the highly anticipated Halloween event "Beyond the Veil", a murder mystery ball on Saturday October 29th beneath the Neo-Gothic arches of the Riverside Church in Manhattan. Guests are invited to take part in an interactive murder mystery theater game. The early bird ticket is $25 and can be purchased here through 10/9/11.





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Boston Globe feature

By Brian Carpenter on September 13, 2011 10:17 AM

Andrew Gilbert wrote a great piece for Sunday's Boston Globe on the beginnings of the Ghost Train Orchestra. This article is in advance of our show in Cambridge on October 18th, our first show in the Boston area since the band's debut in 2006. You can read the whole article here.


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GTO Plays Chamber Jazz from 1937-1942

By Brian Carpenter on September 4, 2011 11:08 PM

Since last December I've been developing some new arrangements for the Ghost Train Orchestra based on the work of three bands active in the late 1930s and early 1940s: the Alec Wilder Octet, the John Kirby Sextet, and the Raymond Scott Quintette. We'll be playing some of these arrangements with the core orchestra plus bassist Todd Sickafoose and guitarist Avi Bortnick on Friday September 9 at Jalopy in Brooklyn and Friday October 28 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I'm very excited about this band. The music we're exploring from these three bandleaders is adventurous, ambitious, strange, and beautiful. There is a lot of commonality between these three bands but they each created their own unique worlds. These bandleaders were unafraid to bridge jazz and classical domains into seamless works of art. We hope you'll be able to see this band live as we fine tune it.

Here's an Alec Wilder Octet original from 1941 for harpsichord, flute, clarinet, oboe, bass clarinet, bassoon, bass, and drums. (The painting is David Hockney's "Interior with Lamp".)


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New Ghost Train Orchestra site up

By Brian Carpenter on July 25, 2011 8:41 PM

We just launched the new website for the Ghost Train Orchestra. Designed and illustrated by the folks over at Maricar/Maricor. We'll be performing some shows this fall out of NYC for the first time since the inception of the band in 2006. Make sure to sign up on the mailing list -- we're adding more shows soon.


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The Confessions In The Studio

By Brian Carpenter on June 25, 2011 10:11 AM

Last weekend we finally tracked basics for the new Confessions record. Really excited about this music. It's a very different direction for me and the guys sounded amazing. Andrew Stern on guitar, Gavin McCarthy on drums, Jef Charland on bass - three of the finest musicians in Boston. We recorded at Q Division Studios with Rafi Sofer. We recorded 11 songs, 9 of which I think we'll end up using on the record. Some of these songs have been around for years and it's a good feeling to get them onto tape. I'm currently arranging strings for the songs and we'll be back again next month.
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The Genius of Hartzell "Tiny" Parham

By Brian Carpenter on May 25, 2011 11:12 AM

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Hartzell "Tiny" Parham stands out as one of the most original composers for the jazz orchestra as it was being developed in the late 1920s. Parham was one of the four bandleader/composers I selected to cover for the new Ghost Train Orchestra CD Hothouse Stomp. When we were putting together the CD of material, I asked illustrator Molly Crabapple to work up some illustrations of the bandleaders for the booklet. She provided this illustration at left and really knocked it out of the park. Last month I spoke with NPR's Terry Gross a bit about Tiny Parham and she played our version of his piece "Voodoo" on NPR. You can hear it here.

Born in Canada in 1900, Hartzell, ironically nicknamed "Tiny" (one record noted he weighed well over 300 pounds) got his start in Kansas City as a pianist and began touring with territory bands until making his way to Chicago in 1926, where he worked as an arranger and recorded piano on a few blues recordings with Ma Rainey and Hattie McDaniels. He played organ and piano in the vaudeville houses, most notably the Savoy Ballroom.

tinyparhamandhismusicians-md.jpg It was during this time that he cut 38 sides for Victor with his own orchestra under the name of Tiny Parham and His Musicians. These recordings left quite an impression on me. His use of violin on the melody in the high register combined with slow, lumbering low brass lines created an atmosphere rivaled only by Ellington. His music is at turns atmospheric, creepy, and beautiful. Most of the musicians he recorded with are not well-known, with the exception of banjoist Papa Charlie Jackson and the great bassist/photographer Milt Hinton, who played tuba on at least one recording (one of his first recordings, I think).

After the band disbanded in the late 1930s Tiny found work playing organ in a Chicago roller-skating rink. He died in a dressing room in Milwaukee during a show in 1943 at the age of 43, not surprisingly, due to his weight. It's hard to believe that Tiny Parham is not more well-known. His compositions for the jazz orchestra were some of the most original pieces of the time; a Tiny Parham piece is instantly recognizable.

One of the first pieces of music of Tiny's that really blew me away was a piece from 1928 called "Voodoo". It has an exotic element to it in the toms and the band does this unison moaning thing at the end. It's creepy, atmospheric stuff. I remember listening to that and immediately wanting to bring it to people's consciousness again live. My interpretation was to underline the exotic nature of it by adding the saw and adding more voices at the end, and it's always a real crowd-pleaser live.

Thumbnail image for tiny-crumb.jpg Robert Crumb, besides being a famous cartoonist and illustrator, is also a purveyor of old time blues, jazz and country, a musician and a 78 collector. In 1982, he illustrated a great collection of trading cards called "Early Jazz Greats" with Tiny Parham. The book of cards was re-released in 2006 with a bonus cd which included "Mojo Strut" by the Apollo Syncopaters. Below is a youtube of the original "Mojo Strut" by the Pickett-Parham Apollo Syncopators, a band led by Tiny and violinist Leroy Pickett. They recorded two sides in 1926 on Paramount. This vinyl he's making such an effort to show off is just a compilation. When you listen to this, you hear that great introduction, followed by the violin way up in the high register. When the trumpet solo begins, the rhythm section changes abruptly to offbeats. Later on the trumpet leads the whole band through a series of chromatic triplet figures, another odd move for a jazz composer during this time. With all of the 2-bar stop time interruptions on throughout, the piece has this feeling of abandonment. It's a incredible piece of music for 1926 and a signature Tiny Parham piece.


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Rave reviews for "Hothouse Stomp"

By Brian Carpenter on May 13, 2011 3:36 PM

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The new Ghost Train Orchestra CD Hothouse Stomp: The Music of 1920s Chicago and Harlem (Accurate Records) has been receiving all kinds of praise. AllMusic rates it 4 stars, raving "this thoroughly winning disc...all adds up to a relentlessly rollicking good time". Downbeat Magazine says "the only thing better than hearing this recording would be seeing the band live". All About Jazz raves the band "heats their surroundings with a radioactive warmth, infectious and viral in the modern-media sense of the word." The Boston Globe raves "this is a crazy-beautiful living-history lesson." Blogcritics.org raves "one of the few jazz albums I would recommend to non-jazz listeners." And if you missed my spot on NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross, you can now stream it here. The CD is available now on Accurate Records at all the usual places, including on this website.

powerhousestompII.jpgOur next show is Wednesday June 29th at the Highline Ballroom in Manhattan. We'll be performing again at "Powerhouse Stomp", a musical tribute to classic cartoons of the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. The first of these events was presented back in February. Shien Lee, the amazing promoter of a hugely popular Manhattan dance series called Dances of Vice, and I had a conversation about what kind of event to do. I told her I was working on music from early American cartoons and she jumped at the idea. We'll be performing music from our new CD "Hothouse Stomp" as well as new arrangements of music by composers Carl Stalling, Raymond Scott, and Sammy Timberg. Tickets are now available here. Hope to see some of you there.







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Fresh Air segment

By Brian Carpenter on April 29, 2011 9:44 AM

For those who missed my spot on NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross, you can listen to the archived stream here. Topics of conversation range from the musical landscape of late 1920s Chicago and Harlem to the incorrect usage of the term "carnival barker". Take heed, President Obama.


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The End of the Shuttle

By Brian Carpenter on April 22, 2011 6:08 PM

I'm here in Florida visiting family and the penultimate launch of the Space Shuttle is next week. President Obama will even visit here to watch it, probably for his kids. This was a common part of growing up here on what is known locally as The Space Coast: everyone goes outside and watches the shuttle launch into space.

watching.jpgOn January 28th, 1986, I was in 7th grade Algebra class with Mr. Keith Breithaupt at DeLaura Junior High School. He was a great teacher, super enthusiastic. I remember the principal came on the PA and announced the shuttle was going up and we all went outside to watch it. This was a special one -- the Challenger.  A teacher was on board, Christa McAulliffe along with 7 other astronauts.

It's one thing to watch a shuttle launch on television. It's quite another thing to experience it live with hundreds of people outside watching it with you. After the shuttle goes up, there is a huge rumbling sound and the ground shakes. When you're a kid, it's "awesome"! I suppose it's awesome no matter how old you are. Watching fireworks always seemed kind of boring after seeing so many launches of the Shuttle.

challenger.jpgLess than two minutes after take off, we saw something very strange. We couldn't hear what was happening, but a big plume of smoke appeared and the Shuttle just disappeared. Everyone stood around looking stunned and concerned and walked back inside. An announcement came on shortly over the PA that the Shuttle had disintegrated and all seven members of the crew were killed. It was shocking. I think we were all sent home early that day. I think Mom tried to keep the news from her 1st grade class or break it gently. It's hard for young kids to see something like that and understand what's going on.

feynman2.jpgSince then I've always been fascinated with the Challenger. Recently I finished a great book by Richard Feynman, the physicist, called What Do You Care What Other People Think? A few days after the accident Feynman was called to become a member of a panel whose job was to investigate the cause of the explosion. I've always been a big admirer of Feynman and have read all of his books. He was one of the great physicists of the 20th century. He won the Nobel Prize in 1965 for his breakthroughs in quantum mechanics. His books on physics are wildly entertaining and some of this lectures at Caltech are even available. His enthusiasm is just infectious.

If you're an engineer and you've ever worked for the government as I have, a lot of this book is very funny because you've been through this kind of bureaucracy before, but it's also exciting to read about what NASA engineers were up to in the '80s. I would have preferred more technical details but the book is more geared for the general public. There was a huge disconnect between NASA engineers and management and he concluded that the NASA management's space shuttle reliability estimate was fatally unrealistic.

challenger3.jpgA lot of gumshoeing around at NASA led Feynman to discover a problem with two rubber O rings which are part of the field joints connecting sections of the solid rocket boosters. Photographs taken of the Challenger launch show puffs of black smoke coming from exactly the location where the flame was observed seconds before the disintegration. Feynman discovered that the rubber O-rings started to break down in cold temperatures and it was an unusually cold morning that day. I even remember standing outside shivering and this is in Florida! Most sources that the air temperature had dropped to 18°F the night before and 32°F on the morning of the launch. No previous flight had been attempted below 51°F, and the manufacturer, Morton Thiokol, had insufficient data on how the boosters would perform at lower temperatures.


In a now famous demonstration during a public panel, Feynman showed that the rubber which was used to make the O-rings on the shuttle, when subjected to temperatures of 32°F, showed no resilience. Then he took the rubber O-rings he had put in icy water earlier, and smashed them to pieces. What's devastating about this demonstration is that Feynman was just demonstrating what many engineers at NASA knew was a problem all along!

There were more investigations done later (outside of the commission that investigated the cause) which suggested that the crew cabin, which was reinforced aluminum, stayed solid until it hit the sea's surface, riding its own velocity in a ballistic arc, reached the top of its curve, and then began the dive toward the ocean. It was only when the compartment smashed, like a speeding bullet, into the sea's surface, drilling a hollow from the surface down to the ocean floor, that it crumpled into a tangled mass. This indicated the passengers were likely alive all the way until the crew cabin hit the ocean.

crew.jpgI remember Dad shaking his head about being an astronaut sometime after that. "You couldn't pay me to do that". If you're interested in reading more about the Challenger and the investigation or more about Feynman, you can start with What Do You Care What Other People Think? I'll miss the Shuttle. I mostly remember it as just a part of growing up.







Continue reading The End of the Shuttle.

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The Farfisa, Children of the Corn, and the Top 5 Songs For A Jealous Man To Play...

By Brian Carpenter on April 12, 2011 7:17 PM

I love vintage organs. For the last year I've been playing a Farfisa organ with my new band The Confessions. I have the mini-compact, which is really the only portable organ in the Farfisa family, with 4 octaves, a multi-tune booster, 3 footages, and a solid-state preamp. Even just using the technical jargon makes it sound so space-age. The vintage organ soundfarfisa.jpg you heard a lot in the 60s with bands like The Doors and two of my favorite songs, "96 Tears" by ? and the Mysterians and "My Little Runaway" by Del Shannon.

"96 Tears" sounded so cinematic and urgent to me and the lyrics were so violent that I was inclined to add it to my "Top 5 Songs For A Jealous Man To Play On His Stereo Cassette Player While Driving To A Hotel To Murder His Wife And Then Her Secret Lover And Then Maybe Himself, Too, While He's At It".  I always wanted to make a movie with this scene, showing the jealous man driving in a rage and cutting back and forth to the lover while this song was playing.




When I first heard the song "Runaway" it was on the radio, but shortly afterward I heard the song in two scenes from this pretty silly horror movie called "Children of the Corn". This little orphan girl was obsessed with this song and was playing it on the phonograph, and that sound came on in the bridge...it's a Musitron organ and it was so eerie...you can get really close to this sound with a Farfisa and a pitch shifter. Incredible. That image of the girl in the abandoned warehouse stuck with me.



There are 12 oscillator boards embedded in the organ, one for each note. I've been debugging a problem with the C# oscillator board and found a group to help me out with it. We vintage organ freaks have to stick together. Well I take it to rehearsal and the C# mysteriously starts working again! Then I realize it must be a bad solder joint, so I should go in and resolder, not to mention the cable. Anyway, enough nerding out on this. You can't get this sound on a synthesizer. Come see my band The Confessions on May 4th at the Middle East and I hope you'll love the sound as much as I do.



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On Fresh Air with Terry Gross

By Brian Carpenter on April 6, 2011 9:07 PM

I will be on NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross on Thursday, April 7 to talk about Beat Circus, the Ghost Train Orchestra, and more. You can listen online or check your local NPR affiliate.


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Choose Your Own Adventure?

By Brian Carpenter on April 4, 2011 9:31 AM

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When I was around 9, I used to read this series of books called "Choose Your Own Adventure" by Bantam Books. The books are told from a second-person narrative with the person reading as the protagonist. At the end of a couple pages, the reader is faced with two or three options, each of which leads to more options and multiple endings. I was fascinated with these books when I was little; I thought they were super exciting and I liked the game aspect of them, feeling in control somehow. I would read them with my brother and we would try to get through them.

I read one of these to my son, who is 7, last night, #2 in the series called "Journey Under The Sea", which was originally published in 1980. I remember reading this one when I was a couple years older. The idea here is you're a diver and you're supposed to find the Lost City of Atlantis. So we get down deep into the ocean, we escape from this giant squid, and then we get to this section where a shark has started circling us. And the choices presented were these: Do you fire up to the surface quickly, in which case we might get the bends? Or do we wait around and hope the shark goes away? Well, we decided to wait around and wait until the shark went away. BIG MISTAKE. a horrible image of the diver's face as he's being eaten and my son was so scared by it! He jumps over to the other side of the bed and hides his face in the pillow and shouts "Daddy, noooooooOOOOooooo!" And so I calmed him down (I don't remember it being this scary!) and I said, okay, let's go up to the surface. And we get up to the surface okay and back to the ship but we never find the Lost City. So Alexander says "I don't know if I like these books, too scary!"

So I thought, geez, we tried a bunch of options and were either killed or didn't make it to the Lost City. I don't remember it being this difficult. Well, I started doing a little digging and found this...

chooseyourown.pngSomeone had taken a look at this book (someone with too much time on their hands, clearly) and mapped out all possible paths. It turns out that death and unfavorable endings are in fact much more likely than the rest. Here's a full-size version of the flowchart:
CYO-2-Flowchart_8.pdf

So I started thinking wow, this is really negative in a lot of ways. And maybe this wasn't such a great book series for 7-year olds, or maybe it would be better when he was older, so he wouldn't get so scared and/or frustrated by it. In general, I love the concept of Choose Your Own Adventure, but the flowchart could be designed differently so every outcome is a positive and worthwhile one and maybe less on the shark attacks and and explosions and killings and so forth. In fact, my son mentioned something called Club Penguin which I think is one of the popular books at his school library, modeled after Choose Your Own Adventure but with more positive outcomes and geared more toward younger kids.




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Ghost Train Orchestra's "Hothouse Stomp" releases today

By Brian Carpenter on March 8, 2011 6:32 AM

The day has finally arrived. We're excited to announce that our new album, Hothouse Stomp: The Music of 1920s Chicago and Harlem, is available now on Accurate Records at all the usual places, including on this website, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble.

Don't miss our big CD release show on Saturday March 26th in Brooklyn. This is in conjunction with Gemini and Scorpio's 3rd anniversary of Swing House, featuring lots of great vintage acts and performers. For more information about the party (and to get the secret loft location), please RSVP to the event here.

A little history behind the record and the band:

The idea for the Ghost Train Orchestra came about in 2006 when I was asked to serve as musical director for an event at the historic Regent Theater in Arlington, MA, marking its 90th anniversary. Here was an opportunity to arrange and perform music from one of the most exciting periods of jazz, the late 1920s. The music was transforming from the sound of New Orleans, mostly centered around small ensemble group improvisation, into more sophisticated arrangements which would become a template for the big-bands of the 1930s and 40s. Featuring smaller horn sections and less standardized rhythm sections than the later big bands, these bands had colorful and eccentric sounds. Four of my favorite bands from that era are Charlie Johnson's Paradise Orchestra, McKinney's Cotton Pickers, Fess Williams' Royal Flush Orchestra, and Tiny Parham and His Musicians. I went about rearranging this music for GTO and after several years of performing live at Brooklyn's intimate Barbes, we finally got our act together and recorded.

You could wait until the album is available on iTunes, or you could buy it now and hear it much sooner. The lovely booklet design was created by Heung-Heung "Chippy" Chin, photographs of the era were collected from The Library of Congress and the Chicago History Museum, and illustrations were created by our super talented friend Molly Crabapple (including the one in this email of yours truly.) You can also read my liner notes on the fascinating history behind this music and the bandleaders represented.

We hope to see you at the party on Saturday March 26th!


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Powerhouse Stomp

By Brian Carpenter on February 11, 2011 9:31 AM

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Looking forward to this one. On Saturday February 19th the Ghost Train Orchestra will perform two sets at "Powerhouse Stomp", a musical tribute to classic cartoons of the 1920s-1940s. We'll be playing two sets of hothouse jazz from the 1920s plus excerpts of early work by from composers Sammy Timberg (Betty Boop) and Carl Stalling (Willie Whopper), music by novelty jazz composers Raymond Scott and John Kirby, plus some music from my score to animator Lorelei Pepi's "Happy and Gay".  This show starts at 10pm at Liberty Hall at the Ace Hotel in Manhattan.  More info and tickets here.





















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