News, December 2007 • December 12, 2007, 2:45 PM

The last two months have seen even more change. Soul Review Board, for example, never did play the October 19 gig at the Rainbow, because it had not been promoted enough and because we had had difficulties securing a drummer. Rather than folding outright, the band went on indefinite hiatus. And Hotter than Ice still has yet to resume operations.

Meanwhile, Uwe Liefländer and the Sacred Music Society continue to keep me busy. We are currently completing preparations for a two-performance Christmas concert on December 14 and 15, which will feature the SMS' own Sinfonia Sacra Orchestra and the World Youth Day Choir, along with Sparrows choirs from Ottawa and Peterborough and the adult choir of the SMS' Ottawa branch.

While this work has to some degree kept me from finding time to keep my creative juices flowing, I've still been doing some composition. Uwe will be reducing my work hours in the new year in order to help cut back on his expenses, though, and I should then be able to devote more time to my solo career. I'm also in the process of upgrading my multitrack audio equipment, so that I can record and release my new material. This involves getting a new desktop computer, which I hope to have by the end of this month. The Christmas season is usually a busy time of year for us all, but let's not forget that there are those who will be having difficulty getting through the holidays—the lonely, the bereaved, the less fortunate. I believe that when we celebrate the holidays, we tend to take our fun for granted. These people have no fun at all because they feel left out—they feel as though they are, as Kira puts it, "the half of nothing at all and in the middle of the ice". Let's all do our part to help warm their hearts.

"People are always telling me that change is a good thing. But all they're really saying is that something you didn't want to happen at all has happened...In fact, someone, some foolish person will probably think it's a tribute to this city, the way it keeps changing on you, or the way you can never count on it, or something...The truth is, I'm heartbroken. I feel as if a part of me has died...and no one can ever make it right."—Kathleen Kelly, You've Got Mail

These last two months, particularly the last few weeks, have seen lots of change, both in my professional life and in my overall work environment.

First of all, a lot of changes have been made at St. Augustine's lately, far too many to list here. One notable change is that Bob Boulanger, the parish's longest-serving organist, will be going into semi-retirement from his position after 45 years of service, effective at the end of December. He was instrumental in helping the parish make the transition from Latin to English in the early post-Vatican II period, going so far as to write and implement his own settings of the parts of the mass. He will be taking January and February off and supervising the music for the 9:00 mass for the rest of the season. I will be playing the organ for that mass while he is away.

I have not heard from Stone Soul Picnic in over a year, and as a result I can only assume I am no longer with them. Moreover, Hotter than Ice is still on hiatus. And to top it all off, Soul Review Board is folding after its October 19 gig at the Rainbow. As our leader, Horace Roxborough, writes on the band's blog, all the band members have "different projects and directions that have taken them away from this one."

With all this change happening, and partly out of inspiration from Kira now being in the studio working on her third album, I've started doing a bit of composition myself. As of this writing I have a few songs in various stages of completion. I'm continuing to plug away at the German material, and I hope to have some of the material ready for performance soon. Stay tuned.

Ah, those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer. Just about everything I'm involved with has either gone into summer mode or taken a break. However, this gives me more flexibility for gigs that typically pop up more frequently in the summer than at any other time of year, such as weddings and house parties.

Hotter than Ice has gone on indefinite hiatus. Our drummer builds houses for a living, and has gotten into situations where one of his employees either doesn't show up at a given work site at all, gets there late or doesn't stay there for as long as he is supposed to for a given shift. The same thing has been happening with our bass players over the last year or two. Our drummer comes to band practice to relax and have fun, and he finds it stressful to find at practice the same level of unreliability he sees at work. I don't blame him for wanting to take a break.

Soul Review Board has slowed down a bit for the summer, but still has gigs on the horizon. Our next appearance will be at the Rainbow Bistro on October 19.

With the Sparrows gone for the summer, the Ottawa branch of the Sacred Music Society has gone into summer mode with a reduced adult choir roster. We do, however, have a gig on August 15 at St. Augustine's Parish that will involve the adult choir and the Sparrows. It's a special mass for the Assumption of Mary.

In September my old alma mater, St. Rita School, and quite possibly Our Lady of Fatima Parish as well, will be joining the Sparrows program. However, since we are in a provincial election year, it remains to be seen whether the schools will still have the provincial funding they need to support the program.

So the bottom line is that while it's a slow summer, I'm hanging in there. Stay tuned.

Just when I thought I wouldn't get any busier, I have. For the 4:30 mass at St. Augustine's I'm now working with an Oshawa-based choir director of German descent, Uwe Liefländer, who years ago co-founded the Sacred Music Society in Toronto and is now starting a branch of it here in Ottawa (he is moving to Ottawa at the end of July). Along with the Sinfonia Sacra Orchestra, the SMS consists of several choirs, including the 500-voice World Youth Day choir which sang at the World Youth Day celebrations in Toronto in 2002. The SMS concept also includes the Sparrows Choir School, a children's choral training program in which the students sing at weekly mass, thus gaining performance experience as well as training in basic theory and classical vocal techniques. The idea is to have them eventually graduate into the adult choir. The Ottawa branch of the Sparrows, currently consisting largely of students from St. Augustine's School and Maryvale Academy, was introduced at St. Augustine's Parish on April 27 and began singing at the 4:30 mass on May 12. They will wrap up for the summer on June 30 and start up again in September.

Since May 4 I've also been working with Herr Liefländer's senior choir downtown. Because I'm involved with so many other music projects, the time involved in learning new material is at a premium for me, and to speed up the learning process I generally enter the music scores note-for-note into Musicator, the music software I use. This approach is also advantageous for those situations where Herr Liefländer wants me to play in a different key from the original. At first I thought the combined repertoires between this choir and the Sparrows might end up being large enough to create an excessive workload for me in that regard, but as it turns out, there's some overlap in repertoire between the two choirs. So far it consists mainly of sacred music by Bach, Schubert, and Wolfgang and Leopold Mozart, and Herr Liefländer has mentioned the idea of having us do Händel's Messiah in August. (Thank God I know where to find MIDI files of that!)

On the band front, Soul Review Board, following a less-than-perfect gig at the Rainbow Bistro on April 20, rebounded with a much stronger performance at the Château Montebello on June 1. The band will begin a series of outdoor patio gigs at the Metropolitain Brasserie on June 8.

Meanwhile, Hotter than Ice is continuing its preparations for a house party gig on June 16, and is once again working with its bassist from the Good Companions gig it did last November.

In the early part of July I will be going on vacation in Toronto, primarily to attend Polaris, a convention formerly called Toronto Trek. It's a pity I can't go a couple of weeks early—I'd love to visit Sam the Record Man at Yonge and Dundas one last time before it closes down at the end of June...

After a devastating latter half of February, I'm back on my logistical feet. At St. Augustine's Parish we have a back room behind the stage in the parish hall, where the senior choir stores its choir gowns. I'm a member of this choir, and when we sing upstairs we leave our coats in this room. On February 11, while we were upstairs for the 9:00 mass, someone entered the room and stole my Palm Pilot, a Tungsten E, along with its Lexar 512MB memory card. I had taken the Palm Pilot into Best Buy just after Christmas to have its battery replaced and had only had it back from them for four days. Fortunately, there was nothing on it that hadn't been uploaded to it from the data backup—I'd been using an older Zire 21 during January. And all that was on the card was a handful of Kira MP3s.

I wasn't in a position to simply buy a new Tungsten E, because that model isn't being made any more. The Tungsten E2 is available, but when it comes to buying a new one, once you add the sales taxes and an extended warranty plan the price balloons to about $400 or so—far more than I was prepared to pay. Besides, the E2's synchronization software requires Windows XP or Windows 2000, and my computers have Windows Millennium Edition and the original version of Windows 98. Buying an upgrade on eBay would have jacked up the final cost even more.

Fortunately, a San Jose eBay dealer by the screen name of allprices was offering several used Tungsten E's with 512MB cards for about US$200 after shipping, and it was only because I'd put some money away per the "pension plan" idea I talked about in my last newsletter that I was able to buy one from him without much of an impact on my other finances. I was so happy when the unit arrived on March 5 that I nearly cried. Except for those four days in early February, I'd been without a Tungsten E for over two months.

I've since had to buy a larger-capacity memory card for it, however. Soul Review Board is expanding its repertoire somewhat, to the point where my existing card wouldn't hold the new material without me converting all the 170 or so existing MP3s to 64k resolution (they'd already been down-converted to 96k). We've added another singer and are gearing up for our upcoming April 20 show at the Rainbow Bistro, which was moved back from its original March 10 date. Other dates are in the works, and I'll post them on my main web page as soon as I have them.

Although Hotter than Ice resumed rehearsals on March 11 and is working toward a CD, it continues to be in a state of flux. We will likely be looking at finding yet another bass player. In the meantime we tentatively have a house party gig scheduled for June 16.

I'm continuing to plug away at preparing my German pop repertoire, a process that has been given an inspiration boost by Kira's "Fast wie Sommer" tour, which began on March 30 in Berlin (see my personal Blogspot and Bebo blogs for her full schedule).

As you may have noticed in the last few weeks, I've added a "Chalk Talk" page to my blogs. I had written a couple of articles for my professional Bebo site, but I guess after a while Bebo felt they were too long, and so I decided to move them to their new home. The articles are only in English at the moment, but I hope to have time soon to translate them into German. Stay tuned!

Well, welcome to 2007. In this new year I've made a resolution: I'm reorganizing my finances so that I can begin saving and investing more of my professional capital. All of my regular income from the churches will still go into the same account, but my irregular income—income that I earn by doing funerals, weddings, band gigs and so on—will now go into another account altogether, from which I can make contributions to my RSP. Other companies have pension plans for their employees; why not mine? :-)

In the meantime, I've been moderately active in the music scene these last few weeks. Soul Review Board played an extremely successful gig at the Rainbow Bistro on January 26 and has been tentatively booked for another gig there on March 10. I also did a couple of funerals, notably including that of Jean-Guy Villeneuve, Ottawa's first heart transplant recipient. Meanwhile, with regard to my German pop recording project, I've completed my transcription of Kira's song "Rettungsboot", arrangement and all, and will soon start work on the next tune, "Filter". It isn't always easy to find the time to transcribe the material, but I'm trying!

As far as I'm aware, Stone Soul Picnic continues to be dormant for the time being, and this leads me to conclude that the logistical problems I outlined in my December newsletter have resulted in the outright cancellation of the Thursday gigs we were supposed to play. Meanwhile, Hotter than Ice has been on hiatus since our November gig at the Good Companions Centre, first primarily because of the Christmas break and then as a result of an illness our drummer contracted either during or following a trip he took to the Caribbean for the Christmas holidays. We're looking to start rehearsing again at the beginning of March, with perhaps a new name and a new direction for the band. Stay tuned!