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Divagatious.com

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Divagatious

Last July, I bought Veron­ica a domain name for her birth­day. (What can I say? I’m old-fashioned when it comes to gift giv­ing.) I installed Word­Press, and we spent a while cus­tomiz­ing themes, installing plu­g­ins, and get­ting the site look­ing just how she wanted…

…Then the semes­ter started, and she had more impor­tant things to do than start blog­ging. But in the new year, she’s started writ­ing on a vari­ety of top­ics, from book reviews to run­ning tech­nique, to a new nation-wide stu­dent group she’s started. So, go check her new site out at Divagatious.com!

The Burbank Philharmonic

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The Burbank Philharmonic

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I hap­pened upon this record at a thrift shop in Madi­son. It was in the Easy Lis­ten­ing (slash things-that-defy-categorization) bin. The photo of Civil War brass play­ers on the front caught my eye. Then, I noticed the track list: “Hey Jude,” “Spin­ning Wheel,” “Light My Fire,” “Michelle,” “You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feel­ing,” etc. Those tunes in com­bi­na­tion with the photo and the name of the group con­vinced me to add the record to my stack. I don’t think I really looked at the back of the album until I got home. The back has a pic­ture of some Union offi­cers, and a cou­ple of para­graphs of com­plete B.S. that doesn’t give much of any real infor­ma­tion about the disc’s con­tents or the musi­cians who appear on it.

The one bit of real infor­ma­tion — which would itself have been enough for me to buy the disc — is that one mem­ber of the group plays a con­tra­bass sax­o­phone. This beast of the sax fam­ily (pho­tos here, here, and here) is pitched in E-flat, one octave below the bari­tone sax­o­phone (and two octaves below the famil­iar alto). Here, the con­tra is part of an mix of instru­ments — trum­pet, clar­inet, banjo, trom­bone, string bass, Ham­mond organ, accor­dion, and drums that cre­ate sort of a psuedo-neo-Dixieland band. The whole record is quite strange, but most of it falls squarely into the good/funny-weird cat­e­gory. Here’s my favorite track from the disc, one that promi­nently fea­tures the mas­sive con­tra­bass sax:

Lis­ten to The Bur­bank Phil­har­monic — These Boots Were Made for Walking

Bassoonian Rhapsody

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This past week­end was the annual Dou­ble Reed Day at UW-Madison. DRD involves two con­certs, mas­ter­classes, and a huge dou­ble reed ensem­ble. Our guests this year were Nancy Ambrose King (pro­fes­sor of oboe at the Uni­ver­sity of Michi­gan) and Alain de Gour­don (the head of Lorée). As usual, the whole event was a lot of fun.

We grad bas­soon­ists were asked to assem­ble a quar­tet to play on the evening con­cert. As it turned out, only 3 of us (out of 5) were going to be around the week before DRD, so we asked our prof., Marc Val­lon, to join us. For the occa­sion, Brian and I spent a few after­noons cre­at­ing a bas­soon quar­tet arrange­ment of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhap­sody.” Our per­for­mance was very well received, and a num­ber of audi­ence mem­bers approached us later to say, “that should be on YouTube!” We liked that idea, and so here it is: