I actually have a fair bit to say

Hmmm. . . Where to start. . .

Let's start with the sad news.

On Wednesday, August 23, 2006, jazz trumpeter Maynard Ferguson died. I was lucky enough to see him in concert twice during the 1990s. The first time was while I was in high school. He performed at SDSU in Brookings, SD (I think it was 1993). The second time I saw him was in a concert held in New Ulm, MN (probably in 1998). Man that guy could make a trumpet scream.

I’ve been a fan of jazz for a good chunk of my life and I can trace the origin of that to school. The K-12 school system in the rather small town I grew up near (I grew up on a farm out in the country) had a very good music system (especially on the instrumental side of things). Towards the end of the 4th grade all the children were strongly encouraged to go out for band. Those that went out (I don’t know how it is these days, but when I was in school the majority of the students were in band) had summer lessons before the 5th grade. Once school started up the 5th and 6th grades had a concert/pep band that had daily practices, and weekly lessons. The 5th and 6th graders performed at the school’s Christmas pageant, and if I remember correctly also a spring concert. After the school year ended the weekly lessons continued during the summer. In junior high (7th and 8th grades) they added marching band to the mix, and gave anyone interested a chance to try out for jazz band (more on that later). The weekly lessons continued, and marching in the homecoming parade was added to the Christmas and Spring concerts. In high school they started getting serious about the marching band aspect of things. Two weeks or so before school started there would be practice for both marching band, and the homecoming halftime show. The band director also sent us off to at least one state college’s homecoming parade (usually Hobo Days at SDSU). The pep band side of things also picked up a great deal. The band played at every home football game, boy’s and girl’s basketball game, and one or two wrestling matches, gymnastics meets, and volleyball matches. In addition the Christmas and spring concerts, there was graduation to play for.

Now when I started junior high there was just one jazz band featuring 7th - 12th graders (but mostly 10th - 12th graders), by the time I graduated high school there was a Jazz I and Jazz II for high school, and a junior high jazz band (if not a junior high Jazz I and Jazz II). The band director had even started giving jazz improvisation lessons to teach students how to improvise a solo. There were three main jazz band trips each year. A one day trip to the South Dakota Jazz Festival at Northern State University in Aberdeen, SD, a three day trip to the Black Hills Jazz Festival at Black Hills State University in Spearfish, SD, and another three day trip to either the Jazz on the Upper Great Plains Festival at Augustana College in Sioux Falls, SD, or the Coyote Jazz Festival at USD in Vermillion, SD. In any event six years of jazz band left me with a healthy respect for the genre.

My taste in jazz leans towards, but is hardly limited to bebop. While I don’t think I will ever grow tired of listening to the likes of Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Thelonious Monk (who may have one of the greatest jazz musician names ever although Cannonball Adderley is also a pretty damn good jazz musician name), I also enjoy Stan Getz, Dave Brubeck, Wynton Marsalis, Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong, and I could keep going, but lets not forget Maynard Ferguson since his unfortunate death was the genesis of this whole post.

So enough about jazz. . .

I haven’t watched any more of The Twelve Kingdoms because my online DVD rental service hasn’t sent me any more yet. I haven’t watched any more Tenjho Tenge, because I just haven’t been in the mood. I received disk five in the mail early last week, but so far it has just sat next to my TV quietly whispering its desire to be played. “Please put me in your DVD player,” it says to me. However I make it a policy not to listen to the pleadings of inanimate objects so I haven’t given in.

I have been watching some anime however. I’ve been indulging in what may be the greatest guilty pleasure anime of all time. I’ve been watching, lord help me, Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z. Actually Dragon Ball isn’t all that bad, it has a nice balance of humor and action. Plus I’d only seen a very small part of it before (I caught a few episodes when it was on Toonami on the Cartoon Network). DBZ on the other hand, Oy, it is so bad on so many levels that it just transcends to a sublime level of truly mindless, truly amusing fun. The basic DBZ story arc is as follows:

1. A powerful threat arrives and beats the crap out of Goku and friends (possibly killing some of them)
2. Goku and friends manage to either
      A. Eek out a victory only to learn an even greater threat is coming
      B. Stall, escape, or otherwise buy some time
3. Goku and friends train and become more powerful
4. Goku and friends fight the powerful threat
5. Goku (or rarely one of his friends) finally defeats the big bad villain.
6. Any dead friends not brought back to life in steps 3, 4, or 5 are brought back to life.
7. Repeat (possibly through in a filler episode or two) with even stronger villain.

The main reason I’m watching these now is because for the first time since I received them as a Christmas gift a few years back I can actually watch them at my leisure. I couldn’t easily watch them before because they aren’t legal copies of the shows, but rather downloads burned onto CD-Rs, and until this month I didn’t own a computer. I couldn’t watch them at work, so if I wanted to watch them I had to make a trip to the campus of the local university and watch them in one of the computer labs there.

So yes as the above implies I bought a computer. For those curious I bought a Dell XPS 400. I ordered it on the 11th, it arrived on the 18th, and I got my Internet connection set up on the 22nd. The fact my Internet connection wasn’t set up until the 22nd is the other reason I’ve been watching those two shows (you can only play so many games of solitaire and minesweeper).

My new computer has allowed me to indulge the closet CSci geek in me. I’ve been taking a bit of a nostalgic trip back to my college days when I’d play around on the university’s Unix system. This has led me to install several programs I have no real use for. I’ve added Pine and Pico, Vim, Gnu Emacs, XEmacs, and Cygwin. If I were an actual programer (especially one in the early 90s) I’d be set to go. I on the other had simply fiddle with them, but it makes me happy.

I have done a few of the more traditional things one does with a computer these days. I’ve ripped a few of my anime OSTs onto my computer. I’ve also installed iTunes and even purchased some music. Bringing this post to a nice circular close I’ve bought three albums from iTunes: Horace Silver’s Song for My Father, The Dave Brubeck Quartet’s At Carnegie Hall, and Maynard Ferguson & Big Bop Nouveau’s One More Trip to Birdland.