Run.  Wind instruments are an aerobic activity.  The lead trumpeters who play high and loud all night long do it with air.  The diaphragm is much larger and stronger than the lip muscles and therefore should shoulder more of the effort.  My teacher said some pros run a lot–”Ten miles a day, my friend.  Get serious.”

Every day you don’t practice, someone else does.  My middle school band director told me that one.  In the cutthroat world of high school Allstate auditions, this was very much true.  People improved quickly, and nobody led by more than a length.

For every day you don’t practice, it takes two days to get back to where you were.  My first band director told me this one.  When you’re ten years old and have been playing for a week, it’s reasonably accurate, though there was no attempt to quantify “where you were”.  Half a decade later my private teacher said it was more like riding a bike; you’ll start off wobbly and get tired soon, but you still know what you’re doing.  On the other hand, Håkan Hardenberger said in an interview that each day we must learn to play the instrument from the beginning.  We’re mortal, so another way to look at it is that you only get to play for some fifteen, maybe eighteen thousand days; you don’t want to miss too many.

Pay attention to dental health.  True, a brass player should rely on wind and lips more than pressure, but I’ll be past my peak the day I start losing my teeth.  In the long run, dental health also is important for heart health, which you need for running.

Listen to recordings, but play with other people more.  You need to be steeped in the literature and hear how professionals play.  You need to listen to recordings of yourself; it’s very motivating.  However, you get much more information, a firehose of it, from playing with other people: you watch as they do it in the moment, and you get immediate feedback on everything you do.

All of that is rendered more interesting by chord substitutions and turnarounds, but the melody on its own stays pretty tightly in the key.

The bridge, on the other hand, creates tension and keeps it building on a single chord for two bars, resolves for two, builds tension on a single chord for two, and spends two bars in a normal turnaround.  I do a lot of substitutions, but they don’t change the tonality: instead of Bbm – Eb7b9, I do an edim-Bbm, and for the amin7sus I do some diminished chords that all spell out the same.  The A section comes back in predictably.

Overall, it’s probably the use of arpeggios with mid-stream octave changes that obscure the simplicity of the melodic idea without losing its comfortable familiar consonance.  It wouldn’t work without the tension, and cramming all of that into a few bars in the B section is perhaps overcompensating.  I don’t really see a lyrical reason for the contrast, but it makes a nice overall arc to the song.

Also, the thing is lightweight and sturdy and scratch-resistant.  It’s clearly designed by someone who has done gigs and dealt with these problems.  (A string bass player, it turns out.)

The polarized light hasn’t been important to me, and it’s a bit awkward to carry around in the original box.  You need to get a carry bag for it.  Overall, it’s a bit pricey, but since it’ll last a long time and you don’t have to buy bulbs, that offsets some of the cost.  But really, it’ so much better than an incandescent light that I’m glad I paid the money for it.  I deserve it, and it’s one more thing that helps a gig go smoothly.

When you decide to cover a song, your first decision is whether to make a faithful reproduction or make it your own.  Reproducing the recording has several benefits.  The audience will respond to the familiar.  With a transcription you can hand out the sheet music, play the recording, play along with the recording as a group, play it without the recording, and have the song ready very quickly.

On the other hand, if you learn the original improv solo you will be assured of capturing the style but not necessarily the soul; and you might be as good as the original, but you will not be better.  Personally, I’d rather have my bandmates’ minds in the moment rather than trying to pull from some distant recording.  If you create your own version, everyone’s had a chance to put their stamp on it, to get invested, to be eager to share with the audience.  Also, if you do it straight off the recording, the audience may not care because they could just listen to the recording.  You will never sound as much like the original band as the original band does–you may be better, but you won’t be more like them than they are.

You may not have a choice.  If your band doesn’t have the same instruments or voices, you might not be able to pull it off.  I prefer to take it consciously in a different direction, put a different beat to it, play it like you play some other song–especially if not all the players are familiar with the recording.  Sometimes it’s best to hand out lead sheets at a rehearsal, have someone play it solo, then have people join in and make an arrangement out of a jam.  Still, you’ll have to preserve the characteristic recognizable parts somehow, if only in the introduction or chorus.

Finally, you don’t have to use everyone all the time.  There’s a lot to be said for playing your strengths and not getting in your own way.  Bottom line, you need to know your players, their instruments, their capabilities, and how they blend.  That’s going to come from trial and error, and that’s a worthy way to spend rehearsal time.

http://www.playitwithmoxie.com/2011/10/19/live-cd-release/

Samples at http://www.myspace.com/playitwithmoxie and http://www.reverbnation.com/playitwithmoxie — check out “Angel Eyes”.

We recorded seven tunes, one of them a second take.  There were three camera operators, a sound engineer, and a director/producer, plus a stage manager and a person who operated the fog machine.  Yeah, that last one was important: when we did this a few years ago, the dry ice completely engulfed our drummer and made things difficult for a few others.

They provided a DVD of the finished product, with titles and camera cuts as they’ll be broadcast.  Also they gave us raw video to edit as we wish for our own use.

It was a good experience.  It made a difference having so many people involved: if one person has to jump between dry ice and sound board, plus preset cameras instead of operating them live, the results just aren’t as good.

The rumbling noises were either the drummer’s son barnstorming us in his Air Force jets or a thunderstorm.  We determined which when the lights went out in the middle of my solo on “Now’s the Time”.

The bass dropped to half volume and the piano went silent.  Immediately the drummer shifted to hi-hat and I started outlining chords while the bass kept walkin’.  After a few moments the power came back on and we picked it back up.

These things happen.

http://deutsch.ucsd.edu/psychology/deutsch_research6.php

It helps me understand the larger structure of a song (in terms of chord changes) by thinking of the melody/solo and the rhythm section as two threads.  They can be braided, they can be parallel, they can be knotted, they can be perpendicular on a loom, they can be unrelated.  Most interestingly, they can be in motion or not.

Put more bluntly, if the piano and bass want to move to an A chord, I don’t have to–I’m the trumpet, dammit.  I mean, y’know, maybe I *want* to… but I don’t *have* to.

Cape Verdean–Horace Silver: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gt7QXwYpZo&feature=related

Try Miles for When Lights Are Low.