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My wife and I are very excited to inform you, dear readers, that we are expecting our first child in October!

Here's my favorite picture so far:

When this ultrasound was done, the baby was around 4cm long, with a heart rate of 161 beats per minute. I'm amazed at how quickly and precisely the child has grown; you can find all sorts of statistics about this online so I won't rehash the details here, but suffice it to say, the process is nothing short of miraculous.

Funny sidenote: the baby's heartrate has tracked pretty well with the tempo of my big band arrangement. During the final readthrough Jamie was across town at a doctor's appointment; that day the baby clocked in at around 158 bpm, which is right where my big band recording settled in. This, of course, proves without question that the child will be a jazz musician one day :)

It's been a busy few months. Among other things, I've been finishing up my second semester of jazz arranging at UNT, which included two major projects I'd now like to share here.

First, I've written my first big band arrangement since high school. The assignment was to arrange a jazz standard, so I chose an old favorite of mine: Rogers and Hart's I Could Write a Book. The following recording was done by the UNT Three O'Clock Lab Band last week; I believe the trombone soloist is David Winniford.

I Could Write a Book

I felt pretty good about the project overall. Still a few things I'd fix if I had it played again, though—for one thing, I don't think I really understand how to use the trumpet section in the middle register. For a first go-round, though, this isn't half bad.

Immediately following the big band project, we were assigned something a bit simpler: write an original 32(ish)-bar tune, get it recorded, and turn in the lead sheet. I named my project "Like Waking Up," which is how I've sometimes described the experience of studying music again after such a long hiatus. The personnel on this recording are me on trombone, Tim Chernikoff on piano, Cliff Chen on bass, and Greg Sadler on drums.

Like Waking Up

Also, for what it's worth, I've added a Facebook "Like" button to all of my blog pages; if you enjoyed these recordings and you want to share them with your friends, click the button and a link to this blog post should show up in your Facebook news feed. At least I think that's how it works; haven't really tested it yet :)

Thanks for listening!

Although my day job is in IT, I've also got a very strong background in music. I am available for gigs and recordings as time allows; this post serves as a partial list of my various musical endeavors to date, for those interested.

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I mentioned awhile back that one of my coworkers and I were considering putting together a simple resource site for Drupal users in educational contexts; today, http://drupaledu.org is live (many thanks to Acquia for providing the hosting)!

The initiative was born out of discussions at DrupalCamp Austin last fall; many of the folks we spoke with there were frustrated at how infrequently universities share information with one another on web issues. Since we at UNT CWS believe Drupal is a very useful tool in solving a lot of the typical web problems educational institutions face, we figured this kind of site would help tear down the silos and improve things for everyone.

At the moment, the site is very simple—authenticated users can post links to relevant outside sites, participate in forums, and vote on the usefulness of other user-contributed content. We hope the community will really get involved in this; the more people contribute content, the more useful the initiative becomes.

If this sounds interesting to you, please take a moment to check out http://drupaledu.org. And of course, if you have some Drupal-in-education-related content to share, please do; the more the merrier!

The first major project in this semester's jazz arranging class was a simple, 8-bar melody orchestration for brass and rhythm section—all told, no more than 15 seconds of music. The idea was to give us an opportunity to hear how we're doing before applying what we know to a full-length big band chart. The project was due on Monday, and we recorded them all live in a two-hour demo session Wednesday afternoon (I got to play in the trombone section, which was both fun and repetitive).

In keeping with tradition, I thought I'd post a recording of my project, along with a few comments. To tell you the truth, before I heard it out loud with the right instrumentation, I thought I had done a pretty good job. Once I did hear it, it still wasn't terrible—but there are a few things I wish I had done differently. Here, to begin with, is the recording:

Just Friends, 8-Bar brass orchestration

And, for reference, the score:

And now, some comments:

1. In bars 4-6, I decided to go with unison trumpets supported by trombones in density (one of several stock techniques we've been learning). I do like the effect, but the trombone harmonies I decided on are extremely plain. If I did this exercise again, I'd probably change the chord on beat 3 of bar 5 to add some extra color. Either that, or have the trombone chord slide up a half step and then back down again with the trumpet lead.
2. The trombone rhythms in 4-6 are completely out of sync with the trumpets. If nothing else, move both half notes back one eighth note to line them up with the trumpets, and take out that silly punch on beat 1 of bar 6 (the rhythm section can handle the setup for beat 2 just fine on its own).
3. I'm also not a fan of my trombone lead lines; I chose them more with regard to their intervallic relationship with the lead trumpet than for their own melodic integrity. I'm especially unhappy with beats 1-2 of bar 6, where the lead trombone actually moves down a third at a key climax of the passage—it just doesn't seem to fit. Either of the above two corrections, however, would seem to fix this problem by keeping the intensity relatively high until after bar 6.

So, hopefully by writing this down I will have solidified these particular lessons in my head, and might be able to avoid them on my full big band chart. That's due in April, so if you follow along, I imagine you'll get to find out if I succeed or not.

This past month's ITA Journal included an article titled "What's on your iPod?" The article featured the must-have playlists of several high-profile trombonists, and I think I'm going to be referring back to it frequently as I expand my music library over the next several months.

In the spirit of that article, though I am a much, much lower-profile trombonist than anyone featured in it, I thought I'd share a few of the albums I've been listening to lately. Here goes:

Of these, I'd like to call special attention to two: Jiggs Whigham and Wolfgang Kohler's Two-Too and Joshua Redman's Back East.

The former (Two-Too) is an excellent example of what I love about the trombone: it sings. Whigham has been one of my favorite trombonists for a long time (I even play his signature trombone), in no small part because his melodies are all so convincing. Oftentimes improvisers (myself included) sound like they're just stringing together a battery of go-to licks; Whigham, however, always seems to be relaxedly composing beautiful new ideas. He really highlights the vocal qualities of the trombone, and this album's duet format helps that shine through even more than usual.

Redman's album (Back East) shares a lot of the same qualities, though it's quite a bit more adventurous on the arranging side of things. The artist has taken great pains to refresh several old standards with playful new rhythms (including a lilting 7/8 rendition of East of the Sun), but never loses track of the heart and soul of the original when doing so. His sense of time and groove are impeccable (see especially The Surrey With the Fringe on Top), and his improvisations unique and engaging.

So that's what I'm listening to these days. It's kind of nice to be hearing new music again; ironically, I'm doing a lot more listening now that I'm not a full-time music student …I have (a bit) more money to spend on it, and a lot more time to listen (since I'm in front of a computer all day). No complaints here, though—I love music, and if I get to hear more of it, that's a wonderful thing.

Hope you enjoy these albums as much as I do.

Yesterday evening I spent a lot of time hammering out some new lead lines for various sections of my jazz arranging project. This is probably the longest piece of music I've ever written, so I'm finding it a bit difficult to keep my eyes on the big picture; instead, I'm discovering I have a tendency to "chunk" things too much, such that each successive section of the piece follows right after the one before it with very little transitional material.

Actually, in Wednesday's class we talked about this issue quite a bit; the lecture was given by guest artist Lyle Mays, and he spent most of his time discussing how each section of his piece proceeded naturally from the next. It was a bit eye-opening for me; up until now we haven't really spent much class time on how transitions are supposed to work.

That said, the topic has come up from time to time; here are some of the techniques I've learned so far, some from my lab instructor and some from the Lyle Mays session on Wednesday:

1. Overlap. Before switching to a new texture, introduce it as a background, while the original texture is still going on. For instance, if you're about to hand the melody off from the brass to the saxes, bring the saxes in with background figures a couple of bars beforehand. This one has been suggested quite often, and works quite nicely.
2. Pedal point. Kind of an obvious trick, but it's one of the few I know at this point: when transitioning between choruses, adding a vamp of several bars over a pedal bass note can help build tension. (I think I overuse this.)
3. Sequencing (and other development strategies). Again, towards the end of a section, it's kind of nice to take a piece of the last melody phrase and pass it around to different instruments in different keys/registers. This seems to help build tension and volume; I'm using this technique to introduce my shout chorus. (Seems like this is often combined with pedal point.)

If you need melodic material for a transitional section (or background figures), take a look at the themes you've used already, including the head melody. There's probably material there you can adapt (or just flat reuse) to make your transitions work. You might think you're cheating, or that the audience will be annoyed at having to hear the same material again, but if you don't overdo it, it actually lends a great deal of cohesion to the piece.

So that's what I've learned so far. Anybody else have any ideas?

This semester in jazz arranging, I'm learning the basics of big band writing; in fact, the primary project for the whole semester is a single big band chart. The project is broken down logically into smaller assignments by chorus: for example, one week I might have to bring in the lead line for the head chorus, and the next week I'd follow it up with the melody for my sax soli. I like the approach; I think my brain is hard-wired to think of complex wholes in terms of small building blocks.

Sometimes, however, I find myself using too many different kinds of blocks. Each week my lab instructor has given me the same advice: "don't write everything you know all at once." Case in point: my original head chorus started with a simple unison small group melody, but expanded to harmony and then counterpoint within two or three bars. By the end of the first 32 bars, it had built itself up into one hot mess.

My lab instructor gave me the usual advice: "don't write everything you know;" in this case, he meant that using too many different textures in a single 32-bar chorus could be a bit overwhelming, taking away from the cohesion of the section and leaving you nowhere to go for the rest of the chart. Instead, he suggested, why not start the small group in three-part harmony and then have one instrument wander off into counterpoint occasionally throughout the chorus? So that's what I did, and the end result is a lot better.

I think this is sort of a common problem among artists in new mediums; we get so excited about the new expressive tools at our disposal that we forget simplicity. We also forget that the observer of the art will not pay it nearly as much attention as we did when we were making it; and so something that seems repetitive or over-simplified from the artist's standpoint may actually be just right in the eye (ear?) of the beholder.

This is not, of course, to say that complexity is to be avoided at all costs …it's just that it might be a good idea to build up to it instead of introducing it all at once.

Over the last few months I've been pretty dissatisfied with the performance of this blog. Not only were page load times sometimes upwards of 10 seconds, but occasionally my swap usage would max out and crash the server, requiring a hard reboot. And it's a blog, for crying out loud—nothing this simple should ever flat-out crash a server, even if it's only got 256MB of RAM.

Well, this past weekend my employer closed down for a couple of days due to our own little Dallas Snowpocalypse, and I had the chance to implement a single, simple fix I'd been planning for some time. Here are the results in terms of home page ping time:

So what did I do? Simple: I switched my web server software from Apache to Nginx. The hardest part was setting up the PHP FastCGI process; although there are lots of instructions online as to how to do this, most of them seem a bit outdated. I ended up using an init script from the Nginx wiki; once that was taken care of, it was a simple matter of converting my Apache confs to Nginx's syntax, switching the ports over, and watching my site's performance improve fantastically.

So there you have it—my blog is now practically readable again, and it turns out the performance problems had nothing to do with my programming! Good news on all fronts today.

Those who know me well know that I really, really hate to throw away data. I have all kinds of stuff sitting around on my home server, some of it dating all the way back to middle school, and most of it of very little interest to anyone today (even me). Well, the other day I stumbled across something that was sort of interesting: trombone practice recordings I'd made early on in college.

For as long as I've been a musician, my teachers have told me that one of the best ways to discover where you need to improve is to record yourself playing; for some reason, however, I've rarely bothered.

It's partly a discipline problem—I've never been as consistent a practicer as I should be—but I think it may also have something to do with my data obsession. When I make a recording, I don't just listen to it a few times, note the things I need to fix, and then throw it away. No, I think to myself, "what if I want to listen back to this five years from now and hear if I've improved?" And so I keep it, and not just as an MP3…no, I keep the original, huge, lossless WAV file. For-ev-er.

Now, this used to take up one heck of a lot of space, and a lot of manual backup effort too. As a result, I would rarely do it …too much effort to archive a daily audio practice session when I've got other things I need to store in that precious space.

These days I don't worry about that, for two reasons:

1. Storage is cheap. I have a 500GB RAID-1 network attached storage device in my living room. If it fills up (which won't be happening soon), I'll just get bigger drives; they don't cost that much in the long run.
2. Not all compression is lossy. If I re-encode my original WAVs to lossless FLACs via some automated process, I can store them in half the space and still play them back without uncompressing …no data loss, and very little loss of convenience.

As a result, I've started recording my practice sessions again. This has had a few important benefits:

1. I can listen to my playing after the fact, discovering issues I didn't notice the first time around.
2. I actually practice regularly, since I don't want my archives to be missing a day when (if?) I look back into them five years from now.
3. Also, I've found it a lot easier to notice the negative effects of skipping a day of practicing.

But at the end of the day, the best benefit is that I'm starting to recover some of my old improv chops. I've still got a long ways to go, but it's really encouraging to feel somewhat skilled at the trombone again.