Blog entries

Austria, Oct/Nov 2010

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I arrived back yesterday from a very enjoyable trip to Austria, where I was playing with Gansch & Roses on their CD Presentation Tour. The new CD, entitled ‘Resal’, was released just a day or two before the start of the tour, as I’ve written elsewhere. I now have a copy of the finished product and it sounds great! I had already been enjoying the pre-master mixes that Thomas Gansch gave me a copy of last December when he was visiting New York – the final CD sounds even better!!

We played 5 gigs in Austria, including the Salzburg JazzHerbst (Autumn Jazz) Festival and, of course, the fantastic Porgy & Bess Jazz Club in Vienna. We played to large and appreciative audiences wherever we went – the Austrians really enjoy their music!

There will be more to report about the trip once the fog of jetlag has cleared! For those outside of Europe, I have procured a few copies of the CD to sell through this site – I suspected the €18 + shipping price tag (about $30US in total) may be a little much for some. Details of a more competitive price to follow soon…

Ok… caffeine time…

A Mention on “The Systematic Approach”

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I recently became a member of the newly created Brass Musician forums and, following a post I made there about practising, I was delighted to be quoted by one of the other forum members, David Roberts, on his blog; The Systematic Approach. You may be interested in the original Brass Musician forum post, or David’s article.

David’s site is a most interesting one. He is a come-back player, who has returned to studying Trumpet after a break of 15 years or so. He is documenting his progress online, as he works his way through Claude Gordon’s excellent Systematic Approach to trumpet playing. His site is full of interesting articles about the challenges he is facing, along with videos of him performing the exercises he has been working on.

Many thanks to David for considering my comments worthy of quoting. I wish him the very best in his studies of this infernal machine!!!

Still alive!

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I’m still here, just in case you were wondering. Apologies for the radio silence but, between practicing and working for a living, I’ve been pretty busy!

Not a lot more than that to say right now. Back with more before long…

New Trumpet!

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My new trumpet was delivered this morning. It is the new Jupiter XO 1600i – the Roger Ingram Signature model. Nobody’s more surprised than me that I’ve chosen a Jupiter horn but this model plays so much better than I imagined!

I had a chance to try one a couple of weeks ago when Roger, himself, passed through NYC on his summer teaching tour. He was kind enough to hang out for a little over an hour and play test the Lacquer and Silverplate Jupiters he had with him, along with my Yamaha 8335LA. We both agreed that the Jupiter sounded just as good overall, and better in the extreme upper register, while being easier to play. I feared it was going to be tough to track one down, but I got lucky last week and was able to order one for immediate shipping.

I’ll post more observations about it in the coming weeks. Meantime, I should go play it some more!

A Spot of Spring-Cleaning

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Just a little forewarning that I’ll be doing a little reorganising of the site over the next couple of weeks. There’s a full-blown redesign in the works but first I need to straighten out how some of the site content is put together – partly to simply tidy up but also to take advantage of some of the new features of WordPress which are now available.

The first tweak has already been made; you’ll notice that the “Upcoming Shows” have been added back into the sidebar on the homepage, after a long absence.

Anyway, if anything is weird with the site when you look in, in the next little while, please just check back later. I’ll be tweaking as fast as I can to minimise disruption.