Micro-Blog 4

Hey, you guys, look what I found.

Holy shit! The nostalgia is overwhelming.

Beechwood Band 2004

This is our show from back when. The show was "Things that go bump in the night." It was recorded at Boone County. Those steel drums you hear at the beginning of the closer are me, baby, me.

Wow. Good times, good memories. If I find any others you can bet I'll post them here. What I really want is two years before this when I was in eighth grade. We played "The Life and Times of Marc Antony." I think I can still play the ballad from that. Next time you, me, and a vibraphone share a room...

My shows with that band:
The Natural - aka the baseball year. We played songs from the eponymous film. That ballad is the only song to ever bring tears to my eyes.
The Life and Times of Marc Antony - aka the Roman year. I found the script in the band room once. I really wish I had kept it.
The Divine Comedy - aka the divine year. Music based on the famous epic poem. We were literally half the size the band is now and won MSBA for the first time that year. It was also my first year as pit section leader. I also had the most deliciously fast solo, where I played the xylo at tempos that would make you shit yourself and all at ff.
Things that Go Bump In the Night - Batman, The Night Before Christmas, and Beetlejuice. All music by Danny Elfman from Tim Burton films. I had the only steel drum part I've seen in a pit, ever.
Breakout - A mix of strange music by Karl Jenkins. Weird stuff. It was our first trip to KMEA semifinals in six years. Also my last year at Midway for band camp. I really miss that place. The middle of nowhere setting was really serene and provided a good backdrop for dedicated practice. Morehead doesn't have that setting and I found working there to be much harder.
A Study in Form, Sound, and Light - Richard Saucedo provided the score that year. It was my senior year and our first trip to Finals in ten years.

The music that had the greatest impact on me, though, was the first three years. I'll discuss marching band in much, much greater detail in a future blog post. It'll probably be the one of the longest I write but it'll also give you a chance to see one of the things that made me who I am today and provided a few of the best friends I have.

A brief update: After more than two years out of practice I can still play all the old warm-ups without thinking. I'm pretty rusty on that Roman year ballad but the notes to the xylo solo mentioned above are still ingrained in muscle memory. That solo, by the way, was solid sixteenth notes at well above 200 bpm. It's the coolest thing I've played. At that speed your brain has trouble processing notes independently and you get a weird sensation of bizarre chord structures overlaying the piece as all the bars ring at the same time.