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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In
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.
The
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Our 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.
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.
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.
On 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.
Less 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.
Since 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.
A 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.
I 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.
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 sound 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.
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.
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...
Someone 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.
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!
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.
In
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. 
The
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.
