Best posts made by barliman2001

@kehaulani That's why I take pictures!!

@tjcombo A blonde clarinet player friend of mine has been badgering me for days to get instructions as to how to properly fold a cardboard box for her imminent relocation... She sent photographs of the unfolded boxes... I sent descriptions, I drew diagrams into her pics, it went back and forth about fifteen times for three days... then, silence. Oh, she's finally grasped it. Yesterday, she sent me a message - "I've now managed to fold and fill the first box. Should I tape it shut?"
When I posted this story on FB, in the "Trumpets, Trumpeters, Trumpeting" group, it was deleted as "not according to the gravity of trumpet playing..."
I left that group because a group that does not understand a joke (especially one that has been happening in the real world) is not for me.

I have just learnt that Dusko Gojkovich has passed away after seven decades of a very full career that included playing with all the greats of the International Jazz world.

It's a personal thing for me as I once had a very impromptu chance of playing with him - I was attending a concert of his big band in renowned Munich jazz club "Unterfahrt", with a friend of mine playing 4th trumpet. Shortly before the interval, my friend collapsed on stage and had to be taken to hospital by ambulance for a ruptured gall bladder (he recovered and is well). While being carried out, he told me to take his place and carry on, and Dusko okayed that I jump in. I always carry my mouthpiece, or I would not have been able to do so. And so I played the second half of the concert, on an unfamiliar instrument, sight-reading (or attempting to) a programme I had never rehearsed, and managed at least not to blunder too audibly. Afterwards, Dusko told me that whenever he played in Munich, I was to have a free ticket, and invited me to a civic ceremony where he was given the Munich Medal of Honour (only twelve living incumbents at any one time!) and the Freedom of the City...
A good friend, a wonderful musician... may he now see all his friends again.

Checking whether trumpet valves are tight is pure, unbridled pop-ulism.

Just wanted to tell you that from 3 May until 16 May, I'll be in the lovely coast town of Cefalù in Sicily, as 1st trumpet of the Filarmonici di Cefalù orchestra. We are rehearsing and performing two programmes, one containing Brahms' Second Symphony and Elgar's Enigma Variations, the second a mixed chamber music programme involving trumpets only in Elgar's Salut d'Amour and a wind ensemble arrangement of his Elegy.
The whole thing is organized by a cello player under the brand name of Symphonic Holidays, www.dacapo-travel.eu.
I presume - from my previous experience with Symphonic Holidays - that it will be a gorgeous event, with lots of glorious Italian food, sea and sun and sand, with little to no time to be spent at a computer. Expect me when you see me back. Ciao!

P.S.: For those who mght be interested in gear, I am carrying a one-brand-only gig bag containing my Courtois Balanced Bb for Enigma, my Courtois Roger Delmotte D for Brahms and my Courtois Bb/A cornet for the rest.

@adc Giving away instruments to deserving talents is a good idea. I recently donated a Besson Stratford trumpet, a King Tempo cornet and a Conn Director to a school orchestra in Bulgaria, together with a heap of mouthpieces. Since then, I am swamped with videos of the kids practising enthusiastically; and the orchestra is now much in demand by the civic authorities to give athmosphere to official functions...

Heavens, that's three instruments I forgot to list!!

Almost the whole of Austria is a disaster zone just now, with continuous torrential rain over the last week... many communities are flooded, and the first deaths have occurred. Luckily, our house is built on stilts so that we can still hope to escape relatively unscathed; but at this moment, our garden is almost three feet under water.
Luckily, we were able to save about three weeks' worth of firewood - our only heating source! - all the garden appliances are now in the house, and we have filled every container with water, and the larder is full of dry and canned foods, and over the last weeks, we preserved many hundreds of jars of our home-grown fruit (cherries, apples, pears, peaches, apricot, grapes, plums and quince) which is good because our community is now isolated from outside. Fire service and army are helping or evacuating those that are not so fortunate... so if any appeals for help reaches you, be so good as to donate. Many people have already lost everything; and in many areas of Austria, you can't get flood insurance.

Our street

Our and the neighbour's garden

"Dad, where can I do my number twos now?"

There is a guy out there who reworks stupid party sounds into music of gone eras... compare the original

@barliman2001
Pistoia, 2022

With the Vienna Klezmer Orchestra in Lviv/Ukraine

Playing Repiano Cornet with the Vienna Boy Scouts' Band

Playing a large-scale ball in Munich, with my main big band (www.bbmf.de)

@administrator Hammonds... I once played in a big band whose keyboarder was an instrument collector... for each gig, he brought an electric piano and at least three different Hammonds... and of course every one in the band had to help manhandling them out of the truck and onto the stage. Once, we played the afternoon dance at an Austrian wedding... the usual restaurant function room, as usual a late addition to the building with it's only access being a large double door near the kitchen. Stage nice and roomy, but at the other end of the room which could hold 100 people comfortably but (not uncommon at Austrian weddings) now was crammed with at least 200 packed tightly without proper aisles or anything. And we had to somehow squeeze all our equipment through; electric baby grand, three Hammonds, large drumset, all the amps and monitors and speakers... we ended up carrying the stuff at arm's length above the heads of the audience!

Apart from regular products, it might be interesting to research into what people use in emergencies if they don't have the right product available... I once saw an oompah band player whose valves began sticking unscrew all the valves, pour about half a pint of beer into the valve casings, reassemble and continue...

OK, I get the message... I'll solve.

• Top row, left to right:
  Gene Watts (Trombone, Canadian Brass 1990s)
  David Ohanian (French Horn, CB)
  Ron Romm
  Pour Elmar, Avec toute mon amitié, Guy Touvron

• Second row:
  Amicalement, Maurice André
  Fred Mills
  With best wishes, Sergej Nakariakov (signed his name in Cyrillic)
  Jens Lindemann
  Dusko Gojkovich
  Chuck Daellenbach (Tuba, CB)

Wynton Marsalis signed another case of mine because we happened to meet unplanned (in fact, in a full hotel breakfast room, he had to ask to sit at my table, ending up in a three-hour warm-up session in his room and a free ticket for that evening's concert. I had not even known he would be there (Leipzig) and was there for a historians' conference and getting myself a Friedbert Syhre Corno da Caccia - which was a fun instrument to play, but I never came to use it in a gig, so I sold it).

@Kehaulani Good for you. But now keep up the good work, or she'll fall back into it worse than before.

Morbus N+1... (N being the number of trumpets you already have). There is one sure sign of having contracted this disease and being in the incurable stage: When you consider skipping meals to finance another trumpet, that is certainly one too many.

@Vulgano-Brother When I was still playing in a brass quintet - can't seem to get one together these days - we had an external musical director who not only supervised our rehearsing, but wrote original music for us as well. Worked perfectly and brought a bunch of rank amateurs (as we then were) into all the big local concert halls... even though some of the original music was distinctly weird: "Variations on Greensleeves", with every variation representing a different period of music history: va. 1 a Bach fugue, var. 2 a Mozart minuet, var. 3 Beethovenesque, var. 4 Bruckner, var. 5 a military march, var. 6 Wagnerian, var. 7 being dodecaphonic...

@administrator You forgot one straight cornet for jazz and big band work, one pocket trumpet for travelling, one multi-pitch trumpet by Jaeger trumpets, one old banger for the football pitch, one to scare the wife with...

Michael Praetorius was a 16th century composer, one of the first to really incorporate brass music into the Church, and one of the most important not to take up old melodies, but provide new melodies for later composers and arrangers...

I once met HM, many, many years ago (around 1990), at the official opening of an exhibition about the Domesday Book in the Public Record Office (now National Archives) in London... I was there for the exhibition which enabled me to view many documents that I needed for my PhD thesis in one place instead of spread out all over the country... so I had planned to be there on Day One and stay as long as needed. I was in the exhibition hall when suddenly a group of obvious security officials appeared, a red carpet was unrolled and a tape was slung across the entrance - mind you, there were about fifteen visitors already inside because the exhibition had opened at 9 am and by this time, it was 11 - then the Keeper of the Records arrived, in full robes and panoply, a couple of other officials lined up, and then HM arrived, in a pigeon-blue costume with matching hat. Someone dropped on one knee to present HM with a cushion with the scissors on it, and she cut the tape and declared the exhibition opened, and proceeded down the hall to see the exhibits, most importantly the first volume of the Domesday Book dating back to 1068... and had to pass me. She addressed me with " So why are you so keen on the exhibition that he could not wait for me to open it?" and I stammered something about not knowing that there would be an official opening. "Why shouldn't there be?" was her reply, " Anyway, success to your research." and was gone.