Showing posts with label sing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sing. Show all posts

Sunday, January 13, 2013

Brewer's. . .

(
  (from Rod Deacey, Frederick (MD)-area musician, songwriter, performer, impressario)     
 ". . . At Brewer’s Alley Songwriters’ Showcase this Monday, Jan 14, we are delighted to welcome back JASON MYLES GOSS, who I first met when he played for me at the late, lamented WestSide café. Since those days, Jason has been busy touring around the U.S. and recording. He moved from Massachusetts to Brooklyn, NY, about six years ago and his latest CD, his fourth, called Radio Dial, has met with critical acclaim across the country…He’s really good – come and check him out!

         “This one-man-show reminded everyone packed into the small venue what live acoustic performances are all about and why the up-and-coming deserve to be heard.”
– Dissolver Magazine

          We are happy that COLETTE ROHAN has changed her working hours, so she is able to come and play some piano preludes for us this year! She starts this week – come out and hear her play!  As per normal, come early to find good seats for the evening and to catch the entire prelude. You can come upstairs at 7:15 pm (maybe 5 minutes or so earlier than that if we’re ready; performers can come up when they arrive).

          For three-song cameo performers this Monday, we are happy to see the return of RICARDO – THE DIVINING SAGE, plus BASSWOOD, and advertising his Feb 18 feature spot, BRETT BARRY! Brett is also helping me tweak the sound this week, so if you see him lurking behind the soundboard – that’s why! We will be also hearing from the regular crew; poet JOHN HOLLY, reciting his poems between other performers, and TODD C. WALKER, who also takes photos, helps emcee and helps run sound. TOMY WRIGHT is with us for the first time this new season, and will play some guitar and sing after the feature. . . "




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Monday, September 24, 2012

Stick to your guns. . .

Stick to your guns
Stick to your guns
Don't let nobody make you run
Just stick to your guns

I'm not talkin 'bout weapons
automatic and such
If you have some conviction
Principles mean so much
Principles mean so much

Stick to your guns
Stick to your guns
Don't let nobody make you run
Just stick to your guns

I just want to sing
Hear the many vibrations ring
Maybe my music's not your kind of thing
I've got to get the others listening
I've got to get the others listening

Stick to your guns
Stick to your guns
Don't let nobody make you run
Just stick to your guns

I don't need no pickup truck
Don't do much haulin' or that kind of stuff
My masculinity and I are okay
I'm what you see don't need to look that tough
I'm what you see don't need to look that tough

Stick to your guns
Stick to your guns
Don't let nobody make you run
Just stick to your guns

It's a human thing
We're eas'ly led when there are two or three
Yes two is company and three is a crowd
That group of voice can be very loud
Those other voices can be very loud

Stick to your guns
Stick to your guns
Don't let nobody make you run
Just stick to your guns

©2009 Raymond M. Jozwiak




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Saturday, July 14, 2012

Tips . . .

. . . are always welcome. . .
(From SAW Note, July 2012)
Doug Sedgwick is a widely-traveled poet, Army veteran, high-energy live performer and spiritual (Unitarian) musician based in Reston, Virginia. Doug is also a longtime Songwriters' Association of Washington (SAW) member and winner of 2 Mid-Atlantic Song Contest Honorable Mentions (Jazz/Blues/Instrumental 2005, World 2006). He hosts a monthly open mike at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Reston every second Friday of the month. According to music critic / blogger Wildy Haskell, Doug has “tremendous songwriting talent and the ability to project different personalities/voices into his songs, like soliloquies in a one-man Broadway show. This folk/rock singer-songwriter might be one of the best of the genre, and you’ve probably never heard of him.”

As part of promoting his 2008 CD “Committed,” Doug was asked by the California-based “On Songwriting” blogger Rick Jamison for an interview – but instead of a Q & A, session, Rick ended up publishing  a set of twenty insights Doug had put together and labeled as his songwriting“principles.” Here they are – slightly updated for your perusal and enjoyment. 

(Paraphrased and edited for space)
1. If it works as a piece of art and doesn’t adhere to the “principles” - go for it! Never let anyone tell you what rules you should be following. Develop your own set of principles.

2. The basis must be emotion and the subconscious goal is movement of the listener. Move yourself emotionally and the listener will be moved.

3. The idea to get across should be simple. It should fit into 3 or 4 minutes - maybe longer if it requires a solo or extended bridge to help emphasize the point.

4. Stolen from Andrew McKnight: Your most favorite song in the entire world is the one you’re singing at the time you’re singing it. Put every ounce of your feeling into the performance.

5. A new song should begin with the words. The cadence of a phrase brushed against the cockles of your heart ought to get a back and forth rhythm going. Seek out the chords after the basis of the melody springs up from the motion of the words themselves.

6. Go to the musical fourth for the chorus. Get as much melody worked up from the words as possible – then see if you don’t naturally go the fourth for the chorus anyway. If not – see # 1.

7. [From “This is Your Brain on Music.”] Studying the brain waves of jazz musicians in the act of improvising shows a close correlation with the brain activity of dreaming. Dreaming and writing music are intertwined. Find where your intersection of the two activities helps you produce.

8. Even though the best songs are the usually the ones that seem to flow from a higher power, you should still attempt to work through and finish any song you start. Determination to solve musical challenges in lesser songs will help develop your songwriting skills.

9. Seek inspiration wherever you find it. If listening to Dylan gets your juices flowing – don’t be afraid to take in chunks from YouTube or your old vinyl. There’s no infringement in stealing an IDEA for a song that came from listening to another song.

10. Learn to let go and not judge what starts to happen when moments of inspiration kick in. Follow your instincts. Ignore your reason. (Paraphrased from songwriter friend Philip DeStefano, I believe.)

11. Rhythm rules. The beat trumps the melody. Greater is the sin to play offbeat than to play off-key. Develop rhythm EVERYWHERE in everything.

12. Learn to believe completely in your own magic.  If Spielberg doesn’t put his own faith on the line, the audience will sense it the same way a dog senses fear. Your FAITH in YOU is what carries.

13. Your unique view is valuable. Your experiences and views are no less important than the 'virtuosi' - your execution and expression is just different - but must be here to satisfy SOME need in the universe. Revel in your ability to express yourself in a manner unlike any other.

14. Pitch matters - but not the way you hear it. No two people hear the same. No single person hears the same their entire life.

15. Zoom out. A painter with his nose inches from the canvas sweating the texture of a cloud may have lost sight of the true focus of his own painting. As the song develops, keep trying to step back from the easel a few feet occasionally.

16. Take all criticisms with a grain of salt. What if Tom Waits (or Bob Dylan or Neil Young) - attending song circles had been told he really needed to learn a new way to sing? Part of that which makes them truly unique would have been lost.  But be polite and not vengeful. 

17. Keep the child inside alive. If your musical knowledge and depth of understanding have grown SO VAST that you have lost the sense of wonder and the willingness to be fooled into believing in magic (see #12) - you should give up the craft.

18. Never stop learning. There is something to be learned from everybody you encounter – both inside and outside the realm of songwriting.

19. Give of yourself by listening to people. Especially in these times when we’re bombarded by the media talking at us, there is a deep hunger in the population at large to just be heard anymore. Lend a sympathetic ear.

20. Practice self-discovery and self-improvement. Take a spiritual path, and let your own self-awakening surprise you with songs inside you never knew were there.

You can reach Doug (who enjoys both writing AND talking about himself in the third person) via email through bugsunplugged (at) comcast.net. . . "






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Wednesday, November 9, 2011

Good or bad. . .

. . . music brings something out of EVERYBODY. . .


(from http://www.quotegarden.com/music.html)
Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life. ~Berthold Auerbach


All deep things are song. It seems somehow the very central essence of us, song; as if all the rest were but wrappages and hulls! ~Thomas Carlyle


If the King loves music, it is well with the land. ~Mencius


Without music life would be a mistake. ~Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche


Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons. You will find it is to the soul what a water bath is to the body. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes


If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music. ~Gustav Mahler


Why waste money on psychotherapy when you can listen to the B Minor Mass? ~Michael Torke


And the night shall be filled with music,
And the cares that infest the day
Shall fold their tents like the Arabs
And as silently steal away.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Day Is Done


He who sings scares away his woes. ~Cervantes


Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness. ~Maya Angelou, Gather Together in My Name


Were it not for music, we might in these days say, the Beautiful is dead. ~Benjamin Disraeli


Music is what feelings sound like. ~Author Unknown


There's music in the sighing of a reed;
There's music in the gushing of a rill;
There's music in all things, if men had ears:
Their earth is but an echo of the spheres.
~Lord Byron


Musical compositions, it should be remembered, do not inhabit certain countries, certain museums, like paintings and statues. The Mozart Quintet is not shut up in Salzburg: I have it in my pocket. ~Henri Rabaud


Music is the poetry of the air. ~Richter


If I were to begin life again, I would devote it to music. It is the only cheap and unpunished rapture upon earth. Sydney Smith


There is nothing in the world so much like prayer as music is. ~William P. Merrill


If in the after life there is not music, we will have to import it. ~Doménico Cieri Estrada


Men profess to be lovers of music, but for the most part they give no evidence in their opinions and lives that they have heard it. ~Henry David Thoreau


Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life. ~Ludwig van Beethoven


I have my own particular sorrows, loves, delights; and you have yours. But sorrow, gladness, yearning, hope, love, belong to all of us, in all times and in all places. Music is the only means whereby we feel these emotions in their universality. ~H.A. Overstreet


My idea is that there is music in the air, music all around us; the world is full of it, and you simply take as much as you require. ~Edward Elgar


Alas for those that never sing,
But die with all their music in them!
~Oliver Wendell Holmes


Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. ~Charlie Parker


Life can't be all bad when for ten dollars you can buy all the Beethoven sonatas and listen to them for ten years. ~William F. Buckley, Jr.


Music cleanses the understanding; inspires it, and lifts it into a realm which it would not reach if it were left to itself. ~Henry Ward Beecher


Play the music, not the instrument. ~Author Unknown


Music is the wine which inspires one to new generative processes, and I am Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for mankind and makes them spiritually drunken. ~Ludwig van Beethoven


Music is the cup which holds the wine of silence. ~Robert Fripp


[An intellectual] is someone who can listen to the "William Tell Overture" without thinking of the Lone Ranger. ~John Chesson


Music's the medicine of the mind. ~John A. Logan


You are the music while the music lasts. ~T.S. Eliot


Music is the universal language of mankind. ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Outre-Mer


Music rots when it gets too far from the dance. Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music. ~Ezra Pound


He who hears music, feels his solitude peopled at once. ~Robert Browning


You can't possibly hear the last movement of Beethoven's Seventh and go slow. ~Oscar Levant, explaining his way out of a speeding ticket


The Irish gave the bagpipes to the Scots as a joke, but the Scots haven't got the joke yet. ~Oliver Herford


What we provide is an atmosphere... of orchestrated pulse which works on people in a subliminal way. Under its influence I've seen shy debs and severe dowagers kick off their shoes and raise some wholesome hell. ~Meyer Davis, about his orchestra


Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent. ~Victor Hugo


...where music dwells
Lingering - and wandering on as loth to die...
~William Wordsworth, "Within King's College Chapel, Cambridge"


Music has been my playmate, my lover, and my crying towel. ~Buffy Sainte-Marie


Music is an outburst of the soul. ~Frederick Delius


Music is the art which is most nigh to tears and memory. ~Oscar Wilde


In music the passions enjoy themselves. ~Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886


Music is what life sounds like. ~Eric Olson


If this word "music" is sacred and reserved for eighteenth and nineteenth century instruments, we can substitute a more meaningful term: organization of sound. ~John Cage


Its language is a language which the soul alone understands, but which the soul can never translate. ~Arnold Bennett


Music expresses feeling and thought, without language; it was below and before speech, and it is above and beyond all words. ~Robert G. Ingersoll


Music is the literature of the heart; it commences where speech ends. ~Alphonse de Lamartine


There is in souls a sympathy with sounds:
And as the mind is pitch'd the ear is pleased
With melting airs, or martial, brisk or grave;
Some chord in unison with what we hear
Is touch'd within us, and the heart replies.
~William Cowper


When words leave off, music begins. ~Heinrich Heine


Truly to sing, that is a different breath. ~Rainer Maria Rilke


Music is the shorthand of emotion. ~Leo Tolstoy


Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together. ~Anais Nin


There is no truer truth obtainable
By Man than comes of music.
~Robert Browning


Most people use music as a couch; they want to be pillowed on it, relaxed and consoled for the stress of daily living. But serious music was never meant to be soporific. ~Aaron Copland


What passion cannot music raise and quell! ~John Dryden


The joy of music should never be interrupted by a commercial. ~Leonard Bernstein


Music is forever; music should grow and mature with you, following you right on up until you die. ~Paul Simon


Music, when soft voices die
Vibrates in the memory -
~Percy Bysshe Shelley


A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges. ~Benny Green


The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes - ah, that is where the art resides! ~Artur Schnabel


The pause is as important as the note. ~Truman Fisher


The city is built
To music, therefore never built at all,
And therefore built forever.
~Alfred Lord Tennyson


Silence is the fabric upon which the notes are woven. ~Lawrence Duncan


Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without. ~Confucius


Rock music in its lyrics often talks ahead of the time about what's going on in the country. ~Edmund G. Brown


Music can noble hints impart,
Engender fury, kindle love,
With unsuspected eloquence can move,
And manage all the man with secret art.
~Joseph Addison


My whole trick is to keep the tune well out in front. If I play Tchaikovsky, I play his melodies and skip his spiritual struggle. ~Liberace


Music that gentlier on the spirit lies,
Than tired eyelids upon tired eyes.
~Alfred Lord Tennyson


Life is one grand, sweet song, so start the music. ~Ronald Reagan


The discovery of song and the creation of musical instruments both owed their origin to a human impulse which lies much deeper than conscious intention: the need for rhythm in life… the need is a deep one, transcending thought, and disregarded at our peril. ~Richard Baker


Jazz will endure just as long as people hear it through their feet instead of their brains. ~John Philip Sousa


Music is the medicine of the breaking heart. ~Leigh Hunt


Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune. ~Frank McKinney "Kin" Hubbard, Comments of Abe Martin and His Neighbors, 1923


Country music is three chords and the truth. ~Harlan Howard


An artist, in giving a concert, should not demand an entrance fee but should ask the public to pay, just before leaving as much as they like. From the sum he would be able to judge what the world thinks of him - and we would have fewer mediocre concerts. ~Kit Coleman, Kit Coleman: Queen of Hearts


I think sometimes could I only have music on my own terms, could I live in a great city, and know where I could go whenever I wished the ablution and inundation of musical waves, that were a bath and a medicine. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


Are we not formed, as notes of music are,
For one another, though dissimilar?
~Percy Bysshe Shelley


Music, once admitted to the soul, becomes a sort of spirit, and never dies. ~Edward George Bulwer-Lytton


A song has a few rights the same as ordinary citizens... if it happens to feel like flying where humans cannot fly... to scale mountains that are not there, who shall stop it? ~Charles Ives


The pleasure we obtain from music comes from counting, but counting unconsciously. Music is nothing but unconscious arithmetic. ~Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz


After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music. ~Aldous Huxley, Music at Night and Other Essays


Music is love in search of a word. ~Sidney Lanier


It is incontestable that music induces in us a sense of the infinite and the contemplation of the invisible. ~Victor de LaPrade


Music is moonlight in the gloomy night of life. ~Jean Paul Richter


All the shopping malls and restaurants and airports are riddled with low-fidelity loudspeakers, which apparently have developed the ability to reproduce by themselves; these are all connected to a special programming service called Music That Nobody Really Likes, and you cannot get away from it. ~Dave Barry


Music is a friend of labor for it lightens the task by refreshing the nerves and spirit of the worker. ~William Green


If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance, and then doesn't have to go to an osteopath, then there's something wrong. ~Simon Rattle


Bach opens a vista to the universe. After experiencing him, people feel there is meaning to life after all. ~Helmut Walcha


I worry that the person who thought up Muzak may be thinking up something else. ~Lily Tomlin


The scratches in Yoko Ono records are moments of relief. ~S.A. Sachs


Music is well said to be the speech of angels. ~Thomas Carlyle, Essays, "The Opera"


Opera is where a guy gets stabbed in the back, and instead of dying, he sings. ~Robert Benchley


The taxpayers cannot be relied upon to support performing arts such as opera. As a taxpayer, I am forced to admit that I would rather undergo a vasectomy via Weed Whacker than attend an opera. ~Dave Barry


No good opera plot can be sensible:... people do not sing when they are feeling sensible. ~W.H. Auden, Time, 29 December 1961





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Saturday, July 16, 2011

I can't help it. . .

. . . I just want to. . . PLAY!

Have you ever seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail? It's a hilarious spoof from the early 70's starring, written, directed, produced, conceived and whatever-else-you-can-think-of by Monty Python's Flying Circus (Michael Palin [no relation to you-know-who], John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones, Eric Idle and the late Graham Chapman) of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table mythology and their quest for the Holy Grail. There is a scene where a wealthy landowner has a son that he keeps sequestered in a tower as a result of his embarrassment. The son, who obviously does not measure up to the father's expectations of what a son should be, frequently states his ambition to SING! . . . at which time the father addresses the camera and puts the kabosh on the music swell that begins each time the son mentions his intention, and we hear the music die as if a turntable was switched off in the middle of the music.

Well, the piano is that way for me, like the son's burning desire to SING. What I mean is, I well understand the son's desire to SING! When I am creating music at the piano, I am taken away from all that is earthly. (Getting heavy here.) But seriously, music somehow has the ability to make me transcend my mortal circumstances and somehow soar to a place that's difficult to describe, but one that I like to visit frequently. The only (musical) thing better than that is doing the very same thing in front of an audience of people who are actually listening and apparently, somehow, moved also. (Hellava thing!)

This Monday Night, I will again appear at the Songwriters Showcase at Brewer's Alley Restaurant & Brewery in Frederick.
(124 North Market Street, Telephone: 301-631-0089, http://www.brewers-alley.com/) where I intend to impose Fractured Jazz and Improvisational Terror Tactics on the audience, much like this. . .



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Monday, June 27, 2011

But I only want to. . .

. . . SING!! NNNAAAHHHHHH! Not really.

Joe, of the American Flyer mentioned above, was himself branching out from country into other types of music. And Joe was also, in fact, a guitarist, which naturally led to a musical collaboration. Electric guitar and accordion. And no vocals. Although not striking me at the time, I find it amusing, in hindsight, that I never attempted (thankfully) vocals (of course, POST-Wyatt Earp [see prior blogs]). While all, or most, kids who play guitars, drums and various forms of keyboards as young bands in garages and basements or an occasional backyard in the summertime, want to and do sing, I quite naturally shied away from vocals. I did play with vocalists but never seriously attempted vocals after about the age of eight.

And of course, after hearing folks like this years later, why even try? I do attempt vocals on recordings these days, but this is merely in the interest of 'demoing' the songs since I do write lyrics quite frequently. It's not something I'm very comfortable with nor very adept.




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Sunday, April 10, 2011

Stick to your guns. . .

STICK TO YOUR GUNS
STICK TO YOUR GUNS
DON’T LET NOBODY MAKE YOU RUN
JUST STICK TO YOUR GUNS

I’M NOT TALKING ‘BOUT WEAPONS
AUTOMATIC AND SUCH
IF YOU HAVE SOME CONVICTION
PRINCIPLES MEAN SO MUCH
PRINCIPLES MEAN SO MUCH

I JUST WANT TO SING
HEAR THE MANY VIBRATIONS RING
MAYBE MY MUSIC’S NOT YOUR KIND OF THING
I’VE GOT TO GET THE OTHERS LISTENING
I’VE GOT TO GET TH OTHERS LISTENING

IT’S A HUMAN THING
WE’RE EAS’LY LED WHEN THERE ARE TWO OR THREE
YES TWO IS COMPANY AND THREE IS A CROWD
THE GROUP OF VOICES CAN BE VERY LOUD
THE OTHER VOICES CAN BE VERY LOUD





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