More Experiences with MuseScore

As related in a couple of previous articles, I have become something of an evangelist for MuseScore, the free and open source music notation software that is positioned to completely replace Finale for me. Version 1.0 had shown tremendous promise, and I described my impressions very favorably in my initial article on MuseScore. Based on this, I was motivated to work with the developers in implementing some significant improvements for the 1.1 release, as described in a followup article and also in a tutorial I put together.

With the 1.1 release, I felt confident enough in MuseScore to undertake the task of going through my existing charts and re-creating them with MuseScore. My "book" consists of more than fifty original compositions that had previously been scored in lead sheet form with Finale. Over the course of the past few months, I have been replacing these with MuseScore versions. I finished just this weekend, and as I have been taking advantage of the score sharing site musescore.com to post these charts online, I can post a link to the full set for your perusal and enjoyment:

http://musescore.com/marcsabatella/sets/leadsheets

In honor of the occasion, I would like to share a little about my experience with this project.

The compositions involved range from simple blues heads to multi-page scores of some complexity, incorporating both lead sheet and grand staff (piano) notation as well as some non-traditional notation styles, plus the use of background figures, irregular and multiple meters, and other elements that had pushed the capabilities of Finale when I created them originally.

I am pleased to report that MuseScore did not disappoint. The simple scores were simple to create - easier and faster than with Finale - and the complex scores never required me to compromise my musical intent for the sake of notatability on account of any limitations in MuseScore. And the results were always beautiful. Kudos to the developers of MuseScore for creating such a powerful and eminently usable application!

As an example of one of the more complex lead sheets I created, check out the first page of Down (click the image below to see it larger, or click here to view the full chart on musescore.com):



This arrangement demonstrates the basics of melody, chords, and lyrics, but also shows off more advanced features like switching between single and double staves, notation of accompaniment rhythms using slash notation, time signature changes, etc. All of this is easily accomplished in MuseScore. Although it might not be obvious, this score also presented a number of layout challenges in order to fit it on two pages while keeping it at a readable size. This is one of several compositions for which the MuseScore version is actually a significant improvement over the earlier Finale version.

I have worked on and off for a major publisher over the past few years, producing and editing charts for what has become perhaps the most popular legal fakebook series in the jazz world. I have thus become something of an expert on the preparation of lead sheets for professional publication, above and beyond my own personal experiences as a composer and as a gigging musician. I know what is required in order to produce a good lead sheet, and I can honestly say that MuseScore is the ideal tool for creating charts like those in The Real Book - to name a popular fakebook series that may or may not have been the one that I worked on :-).

I teach at two universities where both Finale and Sibelius are in use, and I often work with students struggling to learn these programs and to produce decent jazz charts with them. This year I started having my students use MuseScore, and I am amazed at how quickly they have been able to produce charts that look far better than those their predecessors created in Finale or Sibelius. Note this isn't to say that Finale and Sibelius are not capable of producing results just as good, or that this process cannot be made easier through extensive customization. But many people don't make the effort to improve on the defaults, and the lead sheet defaults in MuseScore are definitely much better.

During the last few months I also produced several arrangements for larger ensembles (eg, octet and big band). Again I found MuseScore to be the equal of Finale or Sibelius for the most part, although I am looking forward to the "linked parts" feature that will be coming in MuseScore 2.0. I hope to write an article on creating larger scale arrangements will MuseScore sometime in the near future.

Speaking of which, I will be giving a couple of hands-on workshops with MuseScore at the upcoming JEN (Jazz Education Network) / TI:ME (Technology Institute for Music Educators) conference in January. The sessions will cover lead sheets and arrangements. I hope to see some of you in Louisville for this event!

Anyhow, for anyone out there are still wondering if MuseScore is suitable for serious use (particularly in jazz): as someone who has been using it seriously for several months now, I can say most emphatically that it is!

MuseScore 1.1 released, lots of improvements for jazz

In an earlier article, I wrote at length about MuseScore, the free and open source notation software. The short version for those who missed it: I said that MuseScore can do almost everything that Finale and Sibelius can do, and I predicted that, despite a few minor limitations, it would completely replace Finale for me.

Since then, I have become more personally involved in the MuseScore project. I haven't done any actual programming - at least, not on the core application itself. But I have contributed some plugins, templates, and other configuration files, I have worked on one of the fonts, and I have helped with the documentation. So I no longer qualify as a completely unbiased observer.

With that said, today, MuseScore 1.1 is released. While it is mostly a bug fix release, we have managed to make some significant improvements with respect to creating jazz charts.

Two of the areas I had mentioned in my previous article where MuseScore needed improvement were in entering chord symbols in places where there are no notes and in creating slash notation. Both of these have been addressed in version 1.1. In addition, the new Jazz Lead Sheet template creates great looking charts right out of the box. An enhanced version of the MuseJazz font allows you to get a handwritten look for titles and other text markings as well as chord symbols. You can also select from a wider variety of chord symbol styles, and it is easier to customize these styles further.

I had written a tutorial on creating lead sheets in MuseScore 1.0, and I have now completely rewritten it for version 1.1. The new tutorial is in two parts: The Basics and Advanced Topics. If you hadn't already checked out MuseScore before, or if you had looked but had not gotten very far with it, now would be a good time:

http://musescore.org/

Here, for example, is the lead sheet I created for the advanced tutorial:



There are more exciting things to come in the MuseScore world over the next few months, and I plan to be sharing those with you soon!

Announcing The Marc Sabatella Octet!

On Saturday, May 15, I will be premiering a new jazz ensemble, the Marc Sabatella Octet, at Dazzle (930 Lincoln, Denver). There will be shows at 7 and 9 PM, with a $12 cover ($8 for students at the 9 PM show). The band will feature Brad Goode (trumpet), Josh Quinlan (alto), Peter Sommer (tenor), Tom Ball (trombone), Bill Kopper (guitar), myself (piano), Drew Morell (bass), and Mike Marlier (drums). Additionally, several of the pieces will feature vocalist Wendy Fopeano. This an extremely special performance for me, and I'd like to take a few minutes to write about it.



The music for this show has been in the works for a long time. One could say it began with my composition Mystic Reverie, written in the late 1990's as a tribute to the larger scale works of Charles Mingus. It combines fully composed chorale-like passages with sections for spirited improvisation. Although it has been performed occasionally in quartets and other smaller ensembles, I have always had in mind a larger setting for this, with Mingus' and David Murray's octets specifically serving as inspiration. Another composition from that same time period, “Venable”, is freer in structure but also episodic in nature, and I have always intended this to be played by a larger ensemble as well.

But the real motivator for putting together a regular working octet came when I went back to school in 2005 to get my Master's degree in composition from the Lamont School of Music at DU. While studying with Dave Hanson, Eric Gunnison, and Lynn Baker, I had the opportunity to regularly work with and write for ensembles of seven to nine musicians as well as big bands. Mystic Reverie and Venable were among the existing compositions I was able to arrange for ensembles at DU, and several brand new compositions were created as well. I also studied classical counterpoint and orchestration with Bill Hill and Chris Malloy, and I wrote pieces that were performed by classical chamber groups and the Lamont Symphony Orchestra.

Most of the music I wrote during this period was performed once for a school concert or student recital and never heard again. After graduating from DU in 2007, I hoped to find another opportunity to present this music. At the time, though, I had a steady quartet gig at Denver's famed El Chapultepec, and I was also writing music for this group. While some of the music written for larger ensembles at DU made the transition to the quartet repertoire, most did not.

After the El Chapultepec run ended, I turned my attention to forming a new ensemble of my own to perform the larger-scale music that I had been working on for the last decade. Although I had arranged music for ensembles of varying instrumentation at DU, I wanted to standardize on one configuration for this project. I settled on an octet consisting of trumpet, trombone, two saxophones (who double on other woodwinds), guitar, piano, bass, and drums. By using the guitar as one of the “front line” instruments, I am able to write five-part textures similar to those used in big band writing, and by including the guitar in the rhythm section, I can be freed from the piano when necessary to conduct – plus it gives me the possibility for different textures in the rhythm section. I also wished to feature vocals on some arrangements, since I had written more several songs for which I or my wife, jazz singer Wendy Fopeano, had written lyrics.

Very few of my existing arrangements from my days at DU exactly matched the instrumentation I chose for my new octet, so I had to spend some time reworking those charts. Big band arrangements in particular provided a real challenge, as I wished to preserve both the saxophone “soli” sections and the brass-dominated “shout” choruses, as well as the contrapuntal sections. This is difficult to achieve with only two saxophones and two brass instead of five and eight. Some of this music ends up being unusually demanding to play as result. The charts originally written for seven to nine pieces were more straightforward to arrange for the new octet, but I managed to work in a number of new passages and improvements suggested by my experiences with the original arrangements at DU.

In addition to the charts that began life as larger ensemble pieces at DU, some of the pieces originally written for the quartet at El Chapultepec have also been arranged for this octet, and a few pieces were newly conceived especially for this project.



So after a long journey, the music is finally ready for its debut at Dazzle. Of course, any composition is only as good as the musicians playing it, but the band I have assembled comprises some of the top players on each instrument. Trumpeter Brad Goode serves in multiples roles. During the big-band-style passages, his part alternates between what might be a typical lead trumpet role and a typical lead alto role, and of course he is the trumpet soloist as well. Luckily, Brad is one of the best in business at all of these. Josh Quinlan has the been the alto saxophonist of choice for several of the more creative big bands and other large ensembles in the area, and he has played regularly in smaller groups at El Chapultepec as well. Tenor saxophonist Peter Sommer was featured on my first two CD's – the first recorded when Sommer was only months out of high school – but we have not had the opportunity to work together much in the last decade I am especially pleased to be reunited with Pete for this project. Tom Ball is one of the few improvising trombone players in the area capable of navigating the sort of demanding parts I wrote. On some pieces, Tom also plays euphonium. Guitarist Bill Kopper worked with me on Wendy Fopeano's most recent recording, and as with Tom, Bill has the unenviable task of reading parts of a technical nature that players of his instrument seldom encounter in this type of music. Accompanying me in the rhythm section, Drew Morell has been one of my favorite bassists to work with for many years, and Mike Marlier is one of the tightest but hardest driving drummers around – exactly what is needed to hold an ensemble like this together. Featured vocalist Wendy Fopeano is one of Denver's most expressive singers and is well-known as the host of a regular jazz show on KUVO for the last several years.



Some of the highlights of the concert will include:

Zone Row G – this was adapted from a big band arrangement written in tribute to several different musicians. The central theme of the piece is a “zone row” - a melody made out of a series of pitches arranged to form triads, based on an idea espoused by George Garzone – that is then cast into different harmonic and rhythmic contexts. Over the course of the piece, the “zone row” visits territory inspired by the textures of Maria Schneider, the contrapuntal writing of Fred Sturm, and the serialism of Fred Hess.

Fanfare and Fugue – this piece takes a fanfare by Charles Carter that I learned and grew to love as a clarinetist in the Florida State University Marching Chiefs, pairs it with a honest-to-goodness baroque-style fugue based on two themes found in Thelonious Monk's “Brilliant Corners”, and opens it up for both fast-paced improvisation and a musical “conversation” reminiscent of duets between Charles Mingus and Eric Dolphy.

Obsession – this Dori Caymmi song popularized by Sarah Vaughan has long been of my favorites, but I have always been interested to hear it in a slightly different arrangement. This version is adapted from a big band arrangement I wrote at DU. It is faithful to the original song while hopefully “kicking it up a notch” in intensity. My arrangement is a feature for soprano saxophone and vocal.

As I Do – I composed this after graduating from DU but while teaching there (which I continue to do). I wrote it as a demonstration of the process of writing a larger scale piece, since I was giving my class an assignment to do the same. It is an essentially “positive” sounding composition that balances melodicism and intensity. It contains a number of inter-related themes and different harmonic contexts for improvisation.

Serving Notice – the bartender at El Chapultepec while I was playing there made no secret of the fact that he hated jazz and would rather be working almost anywhere else. We all loved him anyhow. When he announced he would be leaving (after something like ten years there), I wrote him a song with a hip-hop beat - which is what he preferred to jazz - and had Wendy Fopeano write lyrics on the subject of finally leaving a situation you have been wanting to leave for some time. The groove, melody, and lyrics really resonate with people when we perform this in small group settings, and I'm excited to now be able to present this tune with a “Chicago”-style horn arrangement. Oh, yeah - the bartender ended up changing his mind about leaving; he's still working there today as far as I know.

Hymn For Peter – originally conceived as a simple 4-part chorale in honor of my brother-in-law who died tragically in 2008, the octet version combines a reverentially reflective solo piano rendition of the theme with a gospel-flavored tenor saxophone re-statement, adds room for improvisation, and concludes with a triumphant orchestration of the original chorale harmonization.

Down – while vacationing up in the mountains, I happened to share a lodge with folks attending a writing workshop, and on a whim I tossed out the suggestion that I might set some of their poetry to music while we were all there. One of the writers, Jennifer Phelps, took me up on this and submitted her poem “down (anything but red)”. By the evening I had turned it into a song. The octet version is based on an arrangement I did for my recital at DU.

Venable – this piece tells the musical story of a (real) backpacking trip through the mountains and an (imagined) midnight encounter with a bear. It is alternately majestic and heart-poundingly thrilling.

Mystic Reverie – the one that begat this whole project has always been a crowd favorite on the occasions when it has been performed in small-scale arrangements. The piece covers several different moods over its course, and the climax in which everyone in the audience is invited to sing along “like a drunken sailor” sends them home smiling.

My intent is to keep this octet together as a regular working ensemble – recording, writing new music, and adapting more existing pieces from my catalog. I hope to eventually expand into touring, bringing in guest artists, and more. But it all begins at Dazzle on Saturday, May 15, so mark your calendars!

Creative Improvised Music - A Wakeup Call From Ken Vandermark

I attended a show recently that featured saxophonist Ken Vandermark, and it got me thinking.



I first became aware of Ken almost 20 years ago. At the time, I was mostly into very mainstream jazz - Charlie Parker, Bill Evans, etc. I was knew of, had respect for, but didn't really listen much to, certain "free jazz" musicians that had strong ties to the tradition - Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman in particular. And at some point after moving to Colorado in 1988, I began subscribing to Cadence magazine. Cadence covers jazz, but also more generally "creative improvised music" - much of which exists outside the radar of the mainstream jazz media. And it seemed that every other CD they reviewed at that time featured Ken Vandermark.

I don't know that it is possible to describe this music succinctly, because by its very nature, much of it defies convention of genre or idiom. It often involves improvisation that is free of typical chord structures and hence is often atonal. Some people find it hard to identify any sort of structure, but then, many find it hard to recognize structure in bebop.

I started listening to some of this music, including Ken's, and was intrigued. For quite some time I worked incorporating some of these sounds and ideas into my own composition and playing, and I found it very musically rewarding. I even ended up recording a CD with trumpeter Hugh Ragin for the Creative Improvised Music Projects label, which is run by the same folks (Bob Rusch & company) that publish Cadence Magazine.

That was all while having a day job as a software engineer, treating music as a hobby. At some point I realized that playing music "as a hobby" was about as fulfilling as when someone you really like tells you that they like you too - "as a friend". So I quit the day job and went into music full time. At some point after that, however, I had to accept that as personally fulfilling as this "creative improvised music" was, my career pretty much demanded I focus primarily on traditional forms. Between playing a steady gig for many years at El Chapultepec (where it was all about playing "standards"), going back to school to study composition, teaching jazz theory, and any number of other factors, my musical thinking has been much more focused on mainstream jazz again for the last decade or so. It's not that I deliberately turned my back on "creative improvised music", but I did not go out of my way to make room for it, either, and not surprisingly, it didn't make room for me.

When Ken Vandermark came to town last week with Dutch musician Ab Baars, I of course attended, and really enjoyed the performance. It also served as a wakeup call - a reminder of something that had been missing from my musical expression for too long. I'm not sure how I'll respond to that realization, but it was an eye-opener. I still have a lot of straightahead compositions I hope to record soon, and I still expect to be making my living playing mainstream jazz. But I need to keep in mind what it was I loved so much that it set me on this path in the first place.

Here are some shots from the concert featuring Ken along with saxophonist Ab Baars, bassist Wilbert De Joode, and drummer Martin van Duynhoven:









By the way, I was also surprised to see that Ken was about the same age as me, and had actually only just hit the scene when I became aware of him. For some reason, as much as I was seeing his name back then, I assumed he had been around a long time already.

A couple more shots:

Returning To The Scene

As some of you know, I played the piano at a jazz club in Denver called El Chapultepec (aka "the Pec") for a number of years, ending back in July. I hadn't been back since - not because there were any hard feelings, but simply because there hadn't been any particular reason to visit. A few days ago, the saxophonist I had worked with most of those years - Keith Oxman - suggested we meet there and visit. OK, and also to see about maybe playing there again. When they ended our run last summer, they decided not to have anyone there on a steady basis any more on weekend nights but instead to bring in different bands each night, as most clubs do. No particular reason we couldn't be one of them!

So we dropped by last night. It was great to see the owner Angela, the bartender James, and the rest of the crew again. The band du jour was led by trumpeter Hugh Ragin, who was the first musician I worked with regularly in Colorado, going back almost 20 years. This from last night:



BTW, that was shot at 1/6". I was able to rest my elbows on a countertop, so you can't credit me or Pentax shake reduction too much for the lack of camera shake. But for the lack of subject motion blur, you've got to credit Hugh, who has one of the most relaxed trumpet techniques you're ever likely to see.

They've made some cosmetic changes at the Pec over the last few months. Nothing really major - some faux brickwork behind the stage, new carpet in the dining area, etc. But one of the most immediately noteworthy changes was the lighting. At least the way they had it set last night, it was still as bad as ever toward the front of the stage where Hugh was. But the light on the piano was a *lot* brighter and cooler than in the past. Actually, I think it mostly came from a neon beer sign, but light is light. In this shot of pianist Ron Jolly, it's hard to recognize it as the same place, as anyone who has tried to shoot there will attest:



Keith and I sat in and played a tune or two. No pictures of me, of course, but here's Keith, pretty much back to 100% after his bout with cancer:



On those last two, I'll take some credit for good timing in getting reasonably sharp pictures at shutter speeds of 1/20" and 1/15" respectively :-)

Oh yeah - we did talk to Angela, and she's more than happy to have us back from time to time. I think playing there on an occasional basis will be great - it will be more likely that we'll be able to get people to show up to hear us as opposed to just depending on the people who happen to drop in as we always had (it's the busiest neighborhood in the city). So hopefully I'll be seeing some of you there at some point!

Hymn For Peter

Dedicated to Peter Fopeano (1965-2008)

Listen to a (simulated) orchestra playing my composition, "Hymn for Peter"

My wife Wendy's family has a large Thanksgiving gathering every few years, with relatives coming in from all over the world. Although he would sometimes make the trip for part of the time, her youngest brother Peter was never able to be with us on Thanksgiving day itself, because he worked at a casino and Thanksgiving was one of their busiest days of the year.





Peter lost his job earlier a few months ago, and while that is seldom a good thing, one silver lining was that he was going to be on Thanksgiving for the first time in many years. Although this year was not going to be one of the large worldwide gatherings, my wife and I made plans to fly out to Kansas City to celebrate with her immediate family, and Peter in particular.

The morning before we were to fly out, we received news that Peter had been shot and killed while sitting in his car - an unintended victim of crossfire between rivals standing on either side.

Needless to say, our trip to Kansas City took on an entirely different meaning, as our celebration was tempered by mourning. I do not think I can express my feelings about all this in words here in this blog. However, on Friday - the day after Thanksgiving - I had time to sit alone with my thoughts for some time, and not surprisingly, I turned to music for release. I decided to write a composition to perform at Peter's memorial service.

The idea started as a simple tune that I would play on the piano and embellish with improvisation in my usual manner. My model was Don Pullen's Ode to Life, which is a jazz piece that incorporates improvisation but has a classical feel to the composed sections. Because I wished to be alone, I did not compose at the piano (which was in the dining room), but rather in silence with pencil and paper only, in the bedroom where Wendy and I were staying. While this is not my norm, it is not something I have no experience with, either - I composed away from the piano often when I was writing in a classical idiom as part of my degree.

Perhaps for these reasons, when the first few phrases came out of my pencil, I realized I was writing not a jazz tune at all, but a hymn. After writing the basics of the melody and harmony for the first section of the piece, I turned my attention to arranging it in traditional four-part chorale harmony. I think wrote a second section for the piece and arranged it similarly. At that point, I had a completed hymn, but not a clear idea of what I would do with it.

Since I was not at the piano, and I had my computer with me, I entered my hymn into Finale, the scoring software I have used for years, so I could hear it, edit it, and then print it out. At first, when I hit the playback button to listen to the results, it played using the default piano sound. But at some point I started thinking about what it would sound like if it were sung - even though I had not (and still have not) written any lyrics for this. So I changed the sound to a sample of a choir singing "oooh" and "aaah". Although I can't say the results were impressive in themselves, it immediately struck me that the piece really needed to be scored for some sort of instrumental ensemble. The most obvious choice seemed to be a straight rendering of the four-part SATB harmony into the instruments of the quartet: two violins, viola, and cello. I set this up in Finale, and then started considering how I might put together a quartet or even a small string section (with multiple players per part) to record this during the week between then and the memorial.

By the next day, however, it occurred to me that I really wanted to hear how it would sound with a full orchestra. I knew there was no way I could get an actual orchestra lined up to play it such short notice (and indeed, it would be difficult even with no time constraints). But I also know that Finale comes with some fairly high-quality orchestral samples - ones that are often used in film scoring. So I spent most of Saturday and Sunday working on an orchestral arrangement of my hymn.

What I ended up with is a pretty faithful rendering of the original SATB chorale harmonization, using the different colors of the orchestra to add variety, as opposed to actually creating new harmonies and so forth. Over the last few days since returning to Denver, I have continued to tweak this, and while I suspect I'll continue to do in the future, I think this at a place where I would like to share it. So if you have not already clicked the link at the top of this entry, you can do so now.

The memorial service is Monday in Kansas City. I still have not decided if I am going to simply play this on the piano as per my initial plan, or use this recording, or use a recording of a real string quartet that I still plan to try to make between now and then. I may well decided to play it myself, since that in some ways is the most personal expression I can put forward at the service. As a composer, my orchestral arrangement is at least as personal to me as my own playing. But of course, this is not about my relationship to the music - it's about expressing my feelings about Peter.

Peter, this is for you.

Inspiration

As a person involved in so many creative endeavors - music and art most obviously, but also photography, writing, and even my approach to cooking and other activities - the subject of "inspiration" comes up fairly often. As in, where does my inspiration come from. That is a difficult question to answer, but I would like to share a few thoughts on the matter.



My main occupation is music - specifically, jazz. One of the unique things about jazz is that, compared to other forms of music, one is almost constantly creating. Improvisation is the heart and soul of jazz. In a typical performance, probably 95% of what I play is improvised. This means that each time I play a gig - as I do usually a couple of nights a week on average - I am coming up with several hours' worth of music I have basically never played before. Sure, I am building on foundations that have been laid down already, but most of the specific melodies I play really are created on the spur of the moment. I am accustomed to not waiting for "inspiration" to strike me as if this were an unusual event. I no more require "inspiration" in order to decide what note to play next than I do in order to decide when to take my next breath.



This is in fairly stark contrast to a classical musician practicing a piece over and over so he can perform it pretty much exactly the same way every time. But more importantly, it is also quite different from the image of, say, a writer staring at his typewriter for days on end waiting for a word or two to come out. I come closer to this situation when I am composing, as opposed to improvising, music. Although I know from experience that I can generally compose a tune any time I sit down and put my mind to it. I have not tended to do this very often, but for a while, when I had a regular weekly gig with my quartet, I was writing a tune a week.

For a long time, painting was somewhat similar for me. Virtually all my paintings are landscapes, and virtually all done on location (en plein air). I would make a commitment to myself or a friend or a group (such as a class I might be taking) to show up at a particular time and a particular place and paint whatever happened to present itself that day. I might wander around for a few minutes to find something I liked, and think some about the vantage point that would produce the best composition, how to frame the scene, and how I would approach the painting. But overall, the feeling was almost as automatic as improvising music: just about any time and any place would do, and I would find something to paint as surely as I would find a phrase to play when improvising in jazz.





A couple of weeks ago, however, I hit a point of temporary crisis. I had met a friend to paint at a location we had been to several times before. Very nice scenery, with a river, trees, some interesting old buildings - everything that would normally get me going.





On this occasion, though, I simply could not get inspired. I wandered about with my camera as I always do, taking "test" pictures of various subjects and checking them out on the screen to see if I thought they would make good paintings. Many shots looked perfectly usable, but the overall sense I had was, "been there, done that."





The only two shots I took that excited me were shots that were almost totally unpaintable. Or at least, they could not easily be painted on location. The image at left depended on a quality of light that was not going to last but a minute. The image at right (below) depended on the length of my shadow, which was going to get shorter and shorter the longer I worked - plus the shadow of my easel would have become part of the picture. It would not have been impossible to work around these issues, but now that I had the photographs, I felt no need to go to that much trouble to recreate them as paintings.





I actually considered giving up for the day, as I had been walking in circles for over an hour. But instead, I decided to embrace the idea that inspiration is, or at least can be, important. I still clung to the belief that it should be possible to find something to be inspired by, but accepted that I might have to look harder to find it. In jazz, I always feel I am better off eschewing the obvious and instead going for the less common, but this was one of the first times that the same feeling came over me in painting. I finally got tired - if perhaps only for a moment - of doing essentially the same painting over and over.





In the end, I found something that inspired me - a patch of tall grass that appeared to me like bamboo. In order to really capture what fascinated me about the scene, I sat on the ground on squatted low to give me vantage point where I would be looking up at the top of the grass. This is the type of "unusual" viewpoint that I always admire in photography but seldom think about in painting.

I set up my easel on the ground, too, and painted from this same position. Here is what I ended up with:





The moral? I am not sure. Like I said, I just wanted to share some thoughts. I welcome any comments you may have!

Hazel Miller

On Saturday night, my wife and I did a gig at a fundraiser for Friendship Bridge, an organization that helps Guatemalan woman escape poverty. We were the opening act for Hazel Miller, a fixture on the Denver jazz/blues/R&B for many years.

I had actually only heard Hazel in person once before, and only briefly. She is a very dynamic performer, belting out a variety of familiar and not-so-familiar tunes by folks like Stevie Wonder and Aretha Franklin.

The bassist was Rich Lamb. I've known Rich for a while now - and my wife has known him since they were basically kids.



Hazel had two keyboardists with her. Pictured first here is Dana Marsh, who has been working with Rich (both with Hazel and in other contexts) for many years.



The rest of Hazel's band was unfamiliar to me, but it featured Harry Padilla on keyboards and Frank Selman on guitar. The drummer was too obstructed and too much in the dark for me to get a good shot of him.

Mark Sloniker with Joe Anderies at Dazzle

One of my major ongoing projects is to photograph as many Denver-area jazz musicians as I can. I am maintaining a gallery on Zenfolio to display my best pictures of each musician. There are already well over 100 musicians represented in the gallery. I plan to feature some of them individually here.

First up: jazz pianist Mark Sloniker, who lives in Fort Collins. He is my first choice both because he was one of the most recent additions to the gallery, but also because he was one of the first musicians I met upon moving to Colorado in 1988. I lived in Fort Collins for 10 years before moving to Denver, and I have been fortunate to work in Denver fairly regularly since moving here. Mark has been playing a steady gig in Fort Collins for decades, but had not had much opportunity to play at a major Denver jazz club. This was his Dazzle debut, and I was thrilled to be able to be there and see my old friend - who, I might add, is sounding better than ever!

Here are a few other pictures from that gig:

And here's a link to even more.