Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

Do you play music? Or do you wish you played music?

What instruments do you play, or wish you played?

Sometimes I think I'm James Galway and sometimes I think

I play the flute like Jack Benny played the violin.

This is not a poll but a survey.

What do you play and what do you wish you could play?

Wish i could have played drums like Gene Kruppa.
Also wish i could have played piano like Glenn Gould.
Sing Nessum dorma like Pavaroti , Conduct an orchestra like
Leonard Bernstein ,well ,you need to know how to play many
instruments to become a conductor.

And if i was to play the flute , i would probably sound like
inspector Clousso playing the violin. A-O.

I read where Leonard Bernstein said that he would give up all his musical skill and knowlege of orchestration etc. if he could just sing.

........ah!........well maestro let's talk bout instuments ........bred in the every boy get in a garage band early sixties beatle-mania craze.....started out as john in a beatle copy band......all of ten, we'd play teen clubs and school lunch time shows......this got me into the garage for sure.....it also turned me onto the up on stage....the kundalini rush that puts ya on the spot......sweating.....the do or die......the chance to fly.........after a couple a years this all wore off for awhile and the jock syndrome took hold....I guess it was in 1970 and my canned heat introduction to the blues that I finally picked up a harmonica and started studying my tony lil sun glover book, that I found the blues.....sonny boy ..lil walter.....sonny terry...howlin' wolf.....jimmy reed....amd BOOM!...off to the races I was...........at this time I read a book by sam charters ....the poetry of the blues and I believe it was this and a dose of jack that set me on my wired writing ways.....and o yeah...jim morrison too!.....well I played them marine bands for around 25 years wearin' em out whilst I wailed alone.....a blues hound ready to be reborn......and in 1996 it happend all the writing and all the playin' came to the fore and the up on stage came back ....that rush of spinal ecstacy set me on my WIREMAN ways for sure.......I got a train whistle and started using it in my act....next came a bamboo flute ....and an assortment of wood and cane whistles from all over the world.......I hooked up with any giuitar player who'd have me and played every chance I got ......jumpin in with my words whenever I could..............open mikes both perfoming poetry with or without music honed my skills and playing with a vartiety of musician taught me to let it flow........it was a poetry reading by amiri baraka that set me on the drumming path....he used the podium to create a primal accompaniment to his poetry that blew me away......needless to say I got a drum...now I've got a mini arsenal of djembes doumbeks and an asst. of other hand drums and percussion instruments......every solo
instrument has a performance in it....and I now have 2 kalimbas.....an egyptian mizmar........turkish spike fiddle.......snake charmer......and more world instuments are on my horizon......I love exotic sounds and every chance available to develop a poetic perfomance piece with em.......mark

I used to play drums in symphonic band in high school.... the biggest challenge was trying not to fall asleep. I never took it any farther than that.

Music appreciation is more my thing.... though at times I wish I played bass in some big spliff roots reggae band in Jamaica.

I've always wished that I could play the piano. That is a wonderful, versatile instrument.

I tried the guitar when I was a teenager, like everyone else did. I never got very good. I've thought about starting back up with that instrument, but I just don't want calluses on the tips of my fingers.

in my school years i studied the violin for a few years, and the organ for a few years longer than that. nothing took, nothing lasted, i never developed any kind of flair for improvisation.

until my dance lessons finally evolved into middle eastern dance and i was taught to play the finger cymbals. and that's when i realized, I'M A PERCUSSIONIST! and drumming i can improvise with. i can still bang out those cymbal rhythms, and new rhythms are born from me, on bongos to ice buckets.

kt recently discovered a place close to our home which has a drumming circle every saturday. but i work saturdays, so i'm still on the hunt for my circle.

If I could play an instrument well, I'd be in business. As it is, I hack at guitar. I fool around with my voice a bit to garner laughs. I've even attempted arranging. Give me a little more time and I'll finally "get it" on something - little is the operative word - perhaps 60 more years.

mnaz--my wildest dream is to have a reggae band

WIRED--I knew you were a multi instrumentalist

cat--the piano is my new preoccupation

P-Jell--I know you can play those symbols

S Bob--you wish you had sixty more years, you old fart.

Do I play MUSIC!!?? Damn man, I play music as much as I can. I've been playin' music ever since I could turn on the radio!

But as far as playing an instrument - well, that's a different topic. I took piano lessons as a young boy, and boy, I got so sick and tired of doing those scales and matchin' the click/clack of that metronome I thought I'd go crazy if I continued. The teacher was a woman a block away from my house.. and she was kinda cute. I enjoyed having her sit next to me, but that was about it. Her goddamned metronome drove me to quit going over there.

Then in high school I thought I'd like to play the saxophone. Yeah, the tenor sax at that... not something small and encouraged like a clarinet, but a heavy tenor sax. I wanted to be as proficient as Eddie Harris ( I loved that man's sound). But toting that hunk of brass around, plus the blowhard I had to be to even get a whine outta that thing left me with a broken dream. After no more that two months and the sax was returned to the rental company and I played Eddie Harris on my stereo.

I soon agreed with my conclusion that the best music I would ever play would be recorded music. That gave me the ability to experiment with many musical styles... from which I still have many diverse styles that please my tumbleweed mind.

I have no definite favorites, but there are some types that are less enjoyed (as a whole) than others. Classical music has been difficult for me to cultivate .. not that I haven't enjoyed some, but overall I find what I have chosen to listen to to be a little constipating for my free-wheelin' likes. I just can't seem to let myself go with that orchestrated, symphonic sound... maybe not likinig crowds has something to do with it, you reckon..?

But I can't play it worth beans.

I began on classical guitar at age 18 and took lessons from several teachers.

At nearly 60 my fingernails are so brittle I can't keep them properly and get a decent sound from nylon any more.

One of my great heroes is the Australian guitarist John Williams. And not just for his world-dominating classical technique. He can play many styles. His latest album of African music, which I recommend, shows that.

I played bass first-- acoustic bass. I worked my way through folk music and bluegrass in the 60's to play with a pianist and drummer. Businessman's bounce for coin.

I began playing the mandolin at age 44 after decades of guitar-- classical, jazz, folk, country, etc..

The mandolin is paradoxically, for a large human specimen like me, my best instrument. It is the easiest to be versatile on, probably because the four courses of strings make forming the complex jazz chords easier.

I also seem to have a weird facility on the little wooden box I can't quite manage on the larger wooden box.

The mandolin is often made fun of, until someone hears mandolinists like David Grisman, Chris Thille and Mike Marshall ( not the old Dodgers baseball player/manager!)

And it is a silly little instrument, but I love it.


Zlatko

The first sentence in my post is composed of a title and a second clause ( the first line of the post).

The title didn't appear:

It should read:


"The piano is my favorite instrument. But I can't play it worth beans."

After forty years of performing music, I didn't want to say I couldn't play MUSIC worth beans!


--Z

Z-ko--

I have discovered that if you just leave the title out in the response that it avoids this problem of truncated posts. Even on original posts the titles can only be so long (and I don't know exactly what so long is.)

but back to the topic. My first instrument was the clarinet, in my jr. highschool band. This is where I learned that music was a discipline and was very similar to athletics. We marched at six AM in the cold West Texas dawn. I learned theory and also the rules of performance. My band director told me that there are two reasons to miss a gig--Sickness and Death. And if it was one it had better be close to the other.

Then I noodled around on the guitar for some years before Mescalito handed me the flute one day. Of course my life was changed. It was like doing yoga and listening to the radio at the same time. I practiced eight hours a day.

Within a year I was the wunderkind of the flute in texas. People came from miles around just to get drunk while they listened to me play.

Then the piano came into my life. I went from being able to play one note at a time to being able to play ten notes at a time. It was a geometric progression.

Give me thirty minutes alone with any instrument and I can get a tune out of it.
Even the basoon.

but my signature will always be the flute

Dear Glorious:


I visited Halifax in 1986 on a much-needed sabbatical from teaching introductory classes in English Literature. It was a greenish-blue beautiful saltwashed and foggy coast town when I arrived in April.

The bus ride into the city from the airport was a midnight odyssey. I had friends who lived in Annapolis Royal, the Canadian novelist Janice Keefer

http://www.writersunion.ca/k/keefer.htm


and her family. What a magnificent landscape-- lake after lake, and the pine trees, dense and bushy, not like California where they stand aloof from one another.

I thought of you when I strolled with my wife down the Santa Barbara coast last night. It was one of those perfect coastal days-- untramelled sunshine with only a tiny group of cirrus-scrolled clouds overhead, and pure Channel Islands breeze.

At any rate, I'm writing this to report that we passed a drumming circle on the sandy greens in the long public area near Stearns Wharf. There were no Africans, but some of the fey whities were cooking pretty well.

The drums echoed from the glass-walled millionaire's daughter wedding reception at "Fess Parker's Almond Tree Inn" as we made our way back up the face of the cliffs and Shoreline Park.

The homeless, their curlings and creepings, fetal-ing up in a human spiral and bedding down for the night on concrete park benches with their shopping carts and empty plastic milk jugs beside them, were a truthful contrast to the wedding guests.

Such is California.

The drumming circle was the life of things, not the pasty-faced and tuxedo-ed dance band in Fess Parker's inner circle of Italian tile and pink champagne.

Drum on, drum on!


Zlatko

I started taking piano lessons when I was 6 or 7 years old. I played classical music (Bach, Chopin, Beethoven, Mozart... the usual), then moved toward an interest in Gershwin and jazzy type sounds toward the end of my lessons when I was about 15. I played sheet music... couldn't play a lick of improv. I could pick out a tune by ear but never attempted improv until recently. Now, I'm composing piano music and improvising and enjoying it very much. It's very freeing to lose the charts.

I miss playing a real piano. I do like the electronic piano but it's a totally different instrument than an acoustic piano. I'd like to get a baby grand. *smile*... i'd like to get an inground swimming pool and airline tickets to tour the world, too. I guess I'll just hang around here and play the electronic yamaha for now.

I decided to get the real piano tuned recently, but it didn't work out. I don't know whether it's too old to hold a tune or whether it's because the piano tuner wore a hearing aid.

I played guitar for many years, too, but rarely pick it up any more. I like to finger-pick, mostly. I've written a few pieces for guitar. I play a classical guitar with nylon strings.... I can't hold down the steel strings... You gotta be calloused to play music sometimes. I do like picking up an electric guitar and playing around on it for five minutes or so until my fingers give out. I miss my Martin D-28S. Somebody stole it.

There's nothing like live music in the house. I love playing with you.