http://acidjazz.tribe.net/thread/069887c7-def0-47f2-ac11-96fa6163bbab?format=rss Tribe.net. Local Connections http://AcidJazz.tribe.net/thread/069887c7-def0-47f2-ac11-96fa6163bbab#7f251355-5345-4b32-b142-85cb9ff776c4 I've been moderator of ORNITHOLOGY tribe,(which has about 32 members also) since about 2003 when the previous moderator Justin suddenly turned the tribe over to me due to some issues of his personally. I'd found tribe.net from doing a web search for "Charlie Parker" which had impressed Justin; who is a musician in the bay area playing guitar in the styles he learned living in France about fifteen years or more ago with the Manouche' Gypsies who are the tribe Django Reinhardt is from. As moderator of ORNITHOLOGY tribe I've made a few posts; but have deleted them as not too appropriate or interesting. The tribe has grown from seventeen to the current thirty two since I joined, but though an interesting looking group never a lot of interaction. I hadn't checked out what was going on there for some time; when I looked to see most recently that we'd picked up a couple more members. I guess the slow constant growth is a sign people are interested, and the various members do have some times intriguing profiles to look at. Justin is about the only person at tribe.net I've had much to do with other than the Voice of Roma representative who is one of my three friends too at tribe.net.(I'm involved with Voice of Roma as a volunteer at their annual HERDELJEZI festivals to raise money to help Kosovoan Rromani impacted by the war; which is horrific often <www.voiceofroma.com> ) I once had four tickets to a Yuri Yunakov performance at U. C. Berkeley and had them left for Justin with a friend working in a music store in Berkeley, but they were never used.(I didn't know I couldn't get a refund...opps!) I've been in a master class with Yuri and have heard him play a few times now, who is a very nice man and endures my bad musicianship affably which is a rare and appreciated encouragement.(I think I've had twenty saxophones total; and now have three altos, a Yamaha YAS-23 that is exactly like one Yuri is photographed playing on a CD cover I've seen, a '51 Buescher Aristocrat made the year I was born that has rarely been played, and a '29 Buescher which needs an overhaul badly I got in '97 I'd played until unplayable held together with elastic hair ties, nylon thread and rubber bands, when I'd got the Yamaha in 2003) By the way, I'm probably the only person who has proven scientifically that the saxophone is the center of the universe. The universe really has no center of course, but in a relative sense were this possible the saxophone would be it. My contention is that the past five millennia of human social evolution, as macrobiotic theorist Georges Ohsawa points out, has been devoted to technological development at the expense of the advancement of most other facets of the human potential.(Ohsawa says "mastery of fire and salt" or in other words metallurgy and chemistry) He credits the ice ages and the much more difficult to survive in environment of Europe for the phenomena, which also led to the dominance of global society by Europeans and such odious institutions as the African slave trade with the western hemisphere. The saxophone was invented and developed by Adolph Sax in the nineteenth century, an era in Europe especially when the greatest minds then, of which Sax was surely one, were communicating much more directly with the lay person of society; unlike now and which developed so rapidly during the twentieth century, where specialization is the rule and intelligence is made into an esoteric pursuit almost alien to the masses of humanity. I've been greatly moved as no doubt many of you have; by the music and musicianship of the late great baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan whose albums from a live Paris concert with Carson Smith, Shadow Wilson and Bob Brookmeyer and one with Thelonious Monk were two I'd been given with several others as a youth by my uncle who'd been a jazz pianist. From those albums I'd especially liked, particularly the Paris concert and "Bernies Tune" I'd had a love of Mulligan's playing and as a music student I'd followed his career until I'd ended up with an unusual album of his AGE OF STEAM(which should be reissued!) that is mostly an effort of his at composing and arranging for a group of about ten or twelve musicians; and which has a great composition called "Maytag" dedicated to his mother's washing machine and a wonderful sound very much like one of those I remember from my own childhood very vividly; sloshing along merrily always, but which once had so terrified me once when changing cycles my father had picked me up from the floor next to it in our utility room so suddenly he'd thrown his back out and made a painful scream so that when I'd looked up at his face he'd changed momentarily into a werewolf before my eyes just as actor Carl Bentz had on the DONNA REED SHOW on television which evidently made an impression on me then as a small child. I guess from this great and unusual for him Gerry Mulligan album; I'd thought of how much saxophones look like steam engines...there used to be often in Puget Sound in Washington state Jazz Cruises on Seattle's Virginia V steam boat; and a person could go and look at the big steam engines in the vessel's bowels the crew liked to show off, which were always shiny and polished with much brass, so very saxophone like to look at if you'd been thinking along such lines as was easy if so inclined as several great horn players were always aboard holding forth in the jams just above. I also have been fooling around making primitive woodwind instruments, and one of which uses a plastic automotive automatic transmission fluid funnel with an alto saxophone mouthpiece which I put tone holes into the funnel so playable like a penny whistle or recorder. The tone holes were placed by tapping with my fingers as if playing, on the plastic of the funnel until I seemed to get a nice resonant sound where I'd then drill a hole and which I'd then expand to try and get an accurate pitch and good sound; but working in the very hard plastic using just old worn round chain saw files I found I didn't get a very good scale or intonation. As a consequence I'd tried to see if there were anyway I could figure out to mathematically locate the tone holes on another funnel; and somehow by trail and error came up with a formulae which hasn't yet helped me place the tone holes, but where by I'd found that the volume of a sphere the same height as a cylinder is two thirds that of the cylinder. This was a fairly simple thing to figure out or I'd of not been able to and which seems as if feasibly a way to locate the tone holes on a conical bore...there has to be some sort of a formulae Sax used I'd guess? What was unusual about that though, is that a couple years later watching PBS television I caught a very interesting show about the ancient Greek philosopher/scientist Archemedes who insisted on having the same formulae I discovered(which he'd also invented) inscribed on his tomb.(the show was mostly about a book of his thought lost a thousand years ago rediscovered recently that a Byzantine prayer book had been printed over the original text of; which they'd claimed if not lost for so long would've likely allowed travel to the moon about five hundred years ago!) One of the theories of mine I've thought of which may or may not be accurate, is that the star and crescent of the Muslim flag represents a celestial body like a comet or asteroid hurling towards a collision with the earth. Since about 800 A. D. the Moslems were very scientifically advanced compared with the rest of the global society perhaps then the idea of the dangers of such a thing happening were on some of the more intelligent thinker's minds of that time and amongst that faith. To me, and again there was a PBS television special on just such a thing, the ultimate purpose of five thousand years of technological evolution may be just such a venture, to develop the means whereby the earth can be protected from collision with other objects in space. The show on PBS about this says there is a comet which will pass within the orbits of artificial satellites going around the earth in 2012 which then will return in 2032 and depending on the earth's gravitational influence in 2012 this same comet could collide with the earth in 2032 which were that to happen would render evolution back to the level of cock roaches. I've long now been a student of such human potential interests as yoga and macrobiotics; and thus realize how little society currently devotes to the support of much of the possibility inherent in humanity. And the idea that the technological developments of the past five thousand years have often and sometimes exclusively been driven by war is an obvious truth, which has conditioned our species and the rest of the planet to a belligerent way of being that is wholly inefficient and otherwise unnecessary, but for the development of reasonable alternatives which evidently take a good deal of time to procure and institute. Given that we as a collective of humans can survive and transcend this current stage of our being; then I think a likely remnant of these thousands of years of technology, culminating in the golden era of the tendency during the nineteenth century, could be Adolph Sax's saxophone. If you are a serious student of the horn and the music playable by this amazing instrument, you can realize the potential of the saxophone is still greatly unexplored and fascinating to speculate about the future of. In society less driven by a combative mentality and diffidence to individual survival and enjoyment; the potential of music and musicianship as a whole would become much more central to our common experience, and greatly expanded in scope and influence socially too. With I think the saxophone representing a level of technology which best encompasses both primitive and complex idioms with a focus between the two as they say "cosmically" aligned in a phenomenological balance between nature and the specific ergonomic realities of our species. Thus, "the center of the universe." So to speak. Fri, 21 Nov 2008 03:36:22 GMT http://AcidJazz.tribe.net/thread/069887c7-def0-47f2-ac11-96fa6163bbab#7f251355-5345-4b32-b142-85cb9ff776c4 BOB 2008-11-21T03:36:22Z