Best posts made by Newell Post

It is sobering that in this high-tech world where even your washing machine is computerized, an unknown event for one person can take down an entire community that evolved over a lengthy period of time.

It's not vintage, or rare, or custom built, or any of those things. But it just plays great and is the ideal horn for a small room. Schilke XA1. And it has the best valves of any of my horns.
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One of my two community bands is a sight reading band. Everybody loves sight reading so much that this band has been in existence for over 100 years. (No kidding.) That's no big deal to our colleagues in the UK and similar places in "the old country". But for California, it's quite unusual.

The band actually got started by the musicians union in San Francisco to give unemployed and underemployed professional musicians a place to go on Friday nights, hang out, and practice sight reading if they had no gig. It still meets on Friday nights.

The band has no connection to the union today, and is a city park & rec group. But it has accumulated a large music library partly by inheriting the music libraries from other bands that were disbanding. (Can a band actually disband? Need to think about that one.)

Although we are a sight reading band, we do occasionally perform at city events and just for fun. A couple of weeks ago was one of the fun performances. The conceit of this performance was that the director decided we should perform pieces that relate to places that either never really existed or used to exist but are now gone. The title was "Evanescence". The order of battle was:

• Fiume March (The national march of a country that existed between 1920 and 1924. Now a part of Croatia.)
• Camelot excerpts
• Le Lac des Fées ("The Fairly Lake" opera excerpts)
• Atlantis the Lost Continent (more opera excerpts)
• San Francisco (Open Your Golden Gate)
• Brigadoon excerpts
• Man of La Mancha excerpts
• Alhambra Grotto (circus march)
• The Mystic Land of Egypt march
• Beyond the Blue Horizon arrangement

As a sight reading band, we only run these maybe twice before performing, so the quality wasn't great, but nobody threw fruit. I always consider that a triumph deluxe.

Can anyone contact sethoflagos? I always thought his TM posts were interesting and insightful; and it would be great to have him here. Also, any of the British, Dutch, etc. members of TM would be great. Even if the trumpeting things are somewhat similar from country to country, the points of view about world affairs were really diverse and very interesting from the non-yanks. We might already have an Australian or two here from TM, but more of them would be great as well.

You guys realize that 98% of the Yogi Berra quotes were actually made up by his childhood buddy, Joe Garagiola, and attributed to Yogi, don't you? It was a shtick they started perpetrating in little league, and kept working the rest of their lives. Joe was a chatterbox and Yogi was almost non-verbal.

@administrator I belong to the Unitarian church, which uses the "flaming chalice" as one of its symbols. (One wag once said the flaming chalice looks kind of like a candle in a martini glass.) So, I make these chalices out of different woods and give them away to other churches or individuals. They are basically big candle holders. The photo of me at the lathe is a purpleheart chalice in the early stages. The red colored chalice is made from a tropical wood called "bloodwood." (But tropical woods are marketed under many different trade names. There's no telling what species of wood it really is.)

Where, oh where, is Tom Lehrer when we really need him....

LOL. OK, so here's the rest of the story..... I show up at the one and only rehearsal and after the first two pieces, the conductor says: "These next few pieces have some of the melody in the flugelhorn part. We really need that. Third cornets, can you find the flugel part and cover it?"

So I (the substitute Eb player) stick up my hand and say: "I brought my flugel, if you want me to try it." "Great. Do it.", he says.

So, for the next few days, I'm running about half of the pieces on Eb and half on flugel. We get to the gig this morning and he says: "Oh, the regular flugel guy is here today. I need you to do everything on Eb." So, I wind up sight reading about 4 pieces on Eb, an instrument where I'm not really fluent. (Well, I guess it wasn't pure sight reading, since I had played the pieces, just not the Eb part.) But we survived.

The thing I did find helpful was to use a lot of abdominal support, but not over blow.