Steady as she goes • September 24, 2013

Well, I've been really busy over the last several months. This spring I finished a lyrics-gathering project that I had been working sporadically on over the last several years. Then in June, July and August, amid work with the Afro-Fusion Band (now renamed Afrodiction) and Nile Groove, I did preparations for a trip to Toronto, mainly to visit some friends. Then I went to Toronto for a week, and ever since I came back I've been going through the entire analog subset of my music library, evaluating what to keep, what to keep and transfer to digital, and what to discard—and I've got a lot of material, the list thereof spanning 37 pages single-spaced and 70 pages in tabular form. I've gone through my 10" and 12" 78s, my LPs and over half of my 8-tracks, and done a preliminary sort of my 45s. Though I have over 100 cassettes, I don't imagine I'll need to discard much in that regard.

I'm trying to ram my way through this material as quickly as possible because since mid-March I've been planning to work next month on a repertoire development project. In March I was asked to do the music for a ham supper gig at St. Augustine's, but since the organizers wanted me to do Irish material and I didn't have enough of that to sustain a whole show, I had to turn the gig down. In case I'm asked to do this again next year, I want to spend next month entering into my music scoring software the entirety of Morton Downey's Collection of Favorite Irish Songs in order to create pilot MIDI backing track files to build my own arrangement of them against.

In addition, I'm working on reintroducing to the repertoire of the choir at St. Augustine's Parish. I spent a couple of days over the last two weeks going through our choral repertoire, determining page count, density of music notation per page, and complexity of choral configuration in order to get a ballpark estimate of how long it will take to enter all that stuff into my scoring software. To try to flatten the learning curve for the choir, I'm aiming to make a series of part-specific MIDI files of this stuff—and we have about 150 pieces that are still liturgically feasible to do, many of which even I never encountered in the whole time I sang in the choir. I've done the initial time estimates, and this music entry project should take me four months to complete rather than the entire ten-month season that I originally budgeted.

Meanwhile, the bands are still going ahead. Hotter than Ice just did its first gig in thirteen months at the Jim Robillard Union Centre, and has been asked to do a gig for the St. Lucia Society on October 26. Nile Groove has played the first annual Vanier Festival of Nations and, as a result, is featured in the September 2013 edition of Perspectives Vanier. Upcoming gigs in the works include D'Arcy McGee's in Orleans on December 7 and Zaphod Beeblebrox on January 25. Afrodiction played Irene's Pub on July 19 and Sparks Street Summer Sounds on September 13, and is trying to line up a gig at Zaphod's on December 14. For the latter band, there are some tunes we do that are not very keyboard-heavy, and so I've pulled my clarinet out of mothballs in order to join the horn section on some of their lines. I don't want to do this for too many tunes, though—I haven't played that horn regularly since high school, and while I remember how to form the embouchure, sustaining it these days is a stamina issue for me.

So it's steady as she goes. Stay tuned!

The last five months, particularly the last few weeks, have seen an explosion in my activity. We now have a new bassist in Hotter than Ice, and though he's occasionally absent from practices due to work commitments, he seems to be learning our material very well. Meanwhile, through my association with Jerome Herbert's Community Band in April of last year, I was invited last month to participate in a gig with the Afro-Fusion Band, which is coming up June 2 at Major's Hill Park as part of the World Partnership Walk. As an indirect result of that invitation, I was invited to join the R&B-Caribbean fusion band Nile Groove, with whom I just played a gig on May 11. Already I have subsequent gigs lined up with Nile Groove for tonight, June 15, June 28 and July 6. Check out my calendar for further details!