Wow, it's been a while.

Since I only ever post about music or books, this time it's music.

Lessons have been going well. Lately, there's been a lot of struggling with ear training, especially on how to pick up on chord changes as they're coming so that I don't get out of tune with the rest of the band.

The big news, however, on the music front is that I've been playing out about once a month or so. The founder of the school where I take my lessons has put together a band to play a couple times a month out at a barbecue joint, the Cele Store. At this point I think I've played there 4 times or so.

We mostly play country, which I would have never imagined that I'd be playing, but I'm having fun doing it. Before I played with the rest of the band, I'd never even met most of them, so playing with a bunch of strangers was a challenge. But since I've been playing I've noticed a few changes for the good. The first time out I was nervous as all get out. Before our latest gig last Friday, I hardly had any nerves at all. I'm amazed that I'm not really nervous any more about playing (and potentially screwing up) in front of people. I also seem to be a bit more confident about playing with other people.

It's still not perfect. I notice screw-ups that I make, but the audience seems to be having fun and no one throws beer bottles at us, so it can't be that bad. (In fact, I think there's more and more people showing up every time we play.)

In case you hadn't seem them, I've even got a few pictures from the first show, and I only look like I'm going to puke because of stage fright in a couple of them. I'll try and remember to post here when we're playing, and maybe you could come out and see us.

Two things I learned at my lesson this week.

1. I'm really not so good at the whole 16th note funk style.
2. It's amazing how surly a mood a cruddy lesson can put me in.

Barry White is much easier to play along with than Miles Davis.

This week, I butchered The Girl From Ipanema much less than last week. Instead, it was Miles Davis' turn on the butcher block tonight.

16 bars should not be this difficult.

Monday's lesson was another frustrating one. Recently, we've been looking at walking jazz lines with a couple of goals. One, to work on my reading, which still is terrible, and two, to analyze what's going on. Most of the lines have been based on jazz versions of 12 bar blues, so we've been looking at the chord substitutions that jazz players use and how to negotiate over those chord changes.

The first couple of weeks were ok, mainly because the lines were rhythmically fairly simple. Some skips, some triplets, nothing too exotic and not really much played off the downbeat. Monday's lesson was a little more difficult. Since it was a piece I'd never seen before, reading it was the equivalent of sounding out "See. Dick. Run." and my normal performance anxiety kicked in. (You'd think I'd be over that somewhat after studying with my teacher for several years now, but no, I'm not.) So I struggled just to read the piece, and then I struggled some more to get a handle on the rhythm. It doesn't seem like there's anything too nuts about the line. The thing that keeps throwing me is that there's a lot of it placed on the upstroke, and I still have trouble playing there. Sigh.

So this week is going to be spent struggling with 16 bars of music. Hopefully I can figure it out before Monday.

In my quest to learn to play the bass, I've picked up a book of transcriptions by Donald 'Duck' Dunn of Booker T. & the MG's fame (and Stax records and The Blues Brothers fame). Man, he's a really good bassist. And it turns out that I really like playing R&B. The songs in the book are a lot of fun to play.

Also surprising to me, I really enjoy playing bossa nova. It's not to hard to make it sound ok, but even I can manage to do some (to me) interesting things over it. Now if I could just improve my funk sensibilities, I think there's a lot of interesting possibilities in funk - bossa nova fusion. (although I'm sure someone has explored this territory far better than I could ever hope to.)

And just in general, if there's anything in these genres (or others) that you think I should be listening to, please let me know.