Live from Twinwood

Our friend from the U.K., Lee Agnew, sent this announcement today about a Glenn Miller Tribute live from Twinwood Airfield in the U.K. on Monday, August 30th. Lee wants everyone to know that they can enjoy this Glenn Miller Tribute because it will be streamed live on the Internet.

Here is Lee's announcement:

BBC Three Counties Radio will broadcast a three-hour show from the International Glenn Miller Festival 2004, LIVE from Twinwood Airfield in Bedfordshire, England on Monday, August 30th.

The show will be streamed live on the internet between 1100 and 1400 Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) at http://www.bbc.co.uk/threecounties.

In the Three Counties Area, it will be aired on 95.5, 103.8, 104.5 and 98 FM and on 630/1161 MW.

Lee Agnew
Senior Broadcast Journalist
BBC Three Counties Radio
email: lee.agnew@bbc.co.uk
http://www.bbc.co.uk/threecounties
http://www.bbc.co.uk/ - World Wide Wonderland

To find out what time 1100 and 1400 GMT is in you time zone, visit our web page:

http://www.tuxjunction.net/worldclock.html

This sound like an exciting broadcast, so be sure to tune in!

See You In September

Isn't it curious how undergraduates look younger and younger every September?

After I had worked as a staff member at the University of Chicago for awhile, I mentioned this one September afternoon to a few of the faculty members with whom I was having lunch in the lounge at the Quadrangle Club. Their ages ranged from the mid-30s to the mid-50s. My remark made them all laugh!

Each year, the college generation remains the same age, but we move a notch farther away in time. In 1977, when I made the above observation, alumni I met from the Classes of 1939 or 1949 were old-timers. Now my class, the Class of 1976, has joined the old-timers!

But I remember my teachers and my classmates as if it were yesterday. We were working hard on our MBA's. I was in my mid-30s. We were the GSB Class of 1976.

And I was in the Class of 1963 when I graduated from Northwestern. Both Chicago and Northwestern have beautiful campuses. I miss seeing them everyday. I miss seeing my teachers and my classmates and the staff members I knew at both schools. But I still see their faces and remember their personalities, their smiles, their frowns, their laughter, their brilliance.

The same is true for my high school and grammar school teachers and classmates. I remember you.

In June, I attended the 50th Reunion of my eighth grade class at St. Leonard's in Berwyn, Illinois. There were 39 kids in our class. Today, 35 are still alive. Of those, 24 attended our 50th Reunion. We even saw our seventh and eighth grade nuns!

What a great time! What a wonderful feeling to see everyone after so many years! I hadn't seen some classmates since our graduation on June 10, 1954. I hadn't seen the rest since high school!

Old friendships, young love.

We all looked the same age. As I talked with each one, I saw a friend from childhood. My perception blended into my memory of them, as images of people sometimes do on the current CBS-TV series, Cold Case, starring Kathryn Morris.

I look forward to my alumni magazines and visiting the Northwestern and University of Chicago web sites. A few of the faculty I knew are still at both places. I am always saddened when I read that one of them has passed away.

It seems like yesterday....

Only yesterday.

Crescendo Returns

Suppose you could hear music play as soon as you began downloading a song from a website? No more waiting for the entire song to download! Wouldn't that be great?

That was the beauty of the Crescendo Internet Music Player, introduced by LiveUpdate.com in the mid-1990s. It was designed to work best with high-speed connections: DSL, Cable, and T1. Users with slower connections (56K or less) could use Crescendo, too, but they had to wait for songs to download fully before playing them. Crescendo plays both .mp3 and .midi files--but not .wav files.

In late 2000, when I launched Tuxedo Junction, improvements to Windows Media Player (WMP) were still on the drawing board. Microsoft Technical Support suggested I embed Crescendo into my web pages. It worked beautifully! A year later, after Microsoft introduced an improved WMP , I built parallel Jukebox pages, one set featuring Crescendo, one set WMP. This gave visitors a choice.

Unfortunately, LiveUpdate.com mysteriously disappeared from the Internet in August 2003. LiveUpdate.com never offered any explanation to the more than 11,000 webmasters using Crescendo on their sites. Those who already had installed the Crescendo player could still enjoy web sites that used it, but new users were unable to download Crescendo anywhere.

Last week I found Armadillo Web Design, which now offers Crescendo. It is managed by Michael Gordon, who was kind enough to send me his Crescendo web pages so I could customize and add them to my site. You may click Crescendo to view the main page, which links to the download and test pages.

Michael and I now offer Crescendo for free to anyone who wants to use it. It is a very small file that downloads and installs quickly.

Fortunately, many of the 11,000 Crescendo-embedded websites are still around. Search Google for "Crescendo websites" to find links to them.

I plan to keep all of my WMP pages in tact. This time around, I'll only be adding Crescendo Jukebox pages. My Count Basie page already is online. I'll be adding more in the coming days, about two dozen in all.

Why not try Crescendo today? Let me know how you like it!

Adding Music To Videos

I would like to add music to some of my videos of aeromodelling. If you can help me, please email me. I look forward to your suggestions.

Today, it is raining here in the north of Spain, but the temperature is very mild.

Cordially,

Raitan

Billie, Rain, A French Vineyard

It is raining softly here in Bordeax, France. You can hardly tell if it is raining or just a trick of your imagination. All of the workers are inside now and playing cards. Someone pulled out a Billie Holiday Cd and put it on quietly as background music. Her rich voice fills the front room. I can hear the whispers of the workers as they play gin. They are being quiet partly because they think I am sleeping in the back bedroom here, but it is also partly because they respect Billie so much, they don't want to disturb her singing.

Billie to me conveys the meaning of a soul. You can feel pain in every single note she sings. Her voice is liquid dripping off of every word and running lazily into your ear. She warms and chills you at the same time. You want to bask in her sun and pull a sweater around your shoulders to keep out her chill. The bass plucks your heart strings with its ecentric simplicity. An alto picks up on her loneliness and lets out a long loud wail as if crying with her.

You feel as if you are walking in to the nightclub where they are playing a small stage. The trumpet player stands stage right, the bass player always in the back, and the saxophone player is stage left. Billie is in front in all her crowning glory. She stands there swaying her hips slightly, rocking in time to the music, really feeling it. Her eyes are closed to the nightclub and her heart is open to the words. She doesn't hear her own voice as being her own, but rather the voice of the person who wrote the lyrics. In singing she becomes Juliet, Jane Eyre, Guinevere, or any other tragic heroine pining for her love throughout time. Truly, she feels she is telling their story. And also, a little bit of her own.

The Cd is almost finished now and the card game is winding down. It is dark outside, almost eleven at night. Outside the proped open window, you can hear the wind blowing through the vineyard beyond the house. A sweet smell of grapes and wine hits your nostrils and you feel very electric. As if anything you touched could start one fire like being hit by lightning. Billie is reminding us that it is summertime and the living should be easy.

And tonight my friends, it really is. If only for tonight.

Keep the jazz alive,
Mischalina.

Click here to listen to Billie Holiday sing Mandy Is Two

Oo Bop Sh'Bam

I received an email today from Ronaldo Guilherme Benvenga from Santo André, São Paulo, Brazil. Ronaldo came right to the point: "I want to know all about the Billy Eckstine discography."

I wasn't sure what he meant by the "Billy Eckstine discography," so I sent Ronaldo the link to my Mr. B Jukebox Page: Billy Eckstine.

There are about two dozen songs on that page. You can hear BIlly with his great band from the mid-1940s, one of the best from that era, as they break new ground, showing the world what bebop was all about. Other songs feature Billy on ballads, sometimes with Count Basie and his Orchestra. No one sang like Mr. B.

Billy's big band included (not necessarily at the same time) Charlie Parker, Sonny Stitt, John Jackson, Dexter Gordon, Wardell Gray, Gene Ammons, Lucky Thompson, Budd Johnson, Leo Parker (saxes); Dizzy Gillespie, Fats Navarro, Kenny Dorham, Miles Davis (trumpets); Gerry Valentine, Howard Scott, Taswell Baird, Walter Knox (trombones); John Malachi, Richard Ellington (piano); Connie Wainwright (guitar); Tommy Potter (bass); and Art Blakey (drums). Eckstine handled most of the vocals, while Sarah Vaughn took care of the rest.

How is that for a remarkable lineup?

Now, why was Billy known affectionately as "Mr. B"?

For many years during the 1940s and 1950s, Billy's dress shirts had a large, roll collar that formed a "B" over his tie. It soon became hip to wear Mr. B collars. I did when I was a teenager in Chicago in the mid-1950s. Only a few places carried them. No problem. I bought mine at Smokey Joe's on Maxwell Street, "where the elite meet!" At least, that's what Daddy O'Daylie always said about Maxwell Street!

Like to hear Billy sing now? That's easy! Just click the title to this entry! You'll even hear quite a few flatted fifths....

Our 200,000th Visitor

Since Aug. 1, 2001, more than 200,000 people have visited Tuxedo Junction, our main jazz and big band web site, according to the counter on our Homepage: http://www.tuxjunction.net.

The 200,000th visitor stopped by around 9:30 p.m. (Pacific Daylight Time) on Saturday, Aug. 7, 2004.

Moreover, 100,000 of these visitors have stopped by during the past six months. Our 100,000th visitor came by on Feb. 2, 2004, Ground Hog Day in the United States. More and more visitors stop by every day, ranging between about 500 and 700 per day.

When I launched Tuxedo Junction in October 2000, I never dreamed so many people would one day find this site. To me, Tuxedo Junction was another way of sharing my love of jazz and big band music, as I had done 20 years earlier in Chicago when I hosted "The Saturday Swing Shift" on WBEZ-FM (National Public Radio) and wrote about this great music for the former Chicago Daily News, the Chicago Sun-Times, and Chicago Magazine. I have modified and updated some of those articles for Tuxedo Junction.

I didn't have a clue as to how many people on the Internet would stop by. Ten a day? 20? Maybe even 50?

In late January 2002, National Public Radio's Morning Edition ran a story about the upcoming 25th anniversary of the Martin Scorcese movie New York, New York starring Robert DeNiro and Liza Minnelli. Tuxedo Junction includes a review of the film that I wrote when New York, New York came out in 1977. The big band music in the film is first-rate, thanks to Ralph Burns' great score and the top-notch musicians, including tenor giant Georgie Auld, on the soundtrack. Auld also has a small role in the film. Morning Edition published a link to my article on their web site.

As soon as the NPR story aired and the link appeared on their site, the number of daily visitors shot up from about 300 to 10,000! The number stayed that high for a few weeks, then returned to the 300-400 range. It has been growing slowly but steadily since then. Now it hovers between 500 and 700 per day, sometimes more, sometimes less.

Our other jazz and big band site, The Swing Era, will celebrate its first anniversary at the end of August. It has developed its own circle of visitors. The Swing Era is a compact version of Tuxedo Junction designed for everyone but especially for those with slower Internet connections. Visit The Swing Era: http://swingera.net.

The real joy of developing and managing Tuxedo Junction, as well as my other web sites and web logs, is that I have met so many people from around the world who share my enthusiasm through emails, feedback forms, and GuestBook entries on my sites.

To get an idea of where everyone lives, look at our Visitor Flags page: http://www.tuxjunction.net/flags.htm. The flags of 52 nations are displayed on this page. Music brings us together.

Our GuestMap on Tuxedo Junction shows where many of us live, but it only allows 50 "pins" at a time. It changes whenever someone new "pins" his or her location.

Thanks to all of you for visiting Tuxedo Junction! Please tell your friends and relatives about us.

Keep coming back!

Cordially,

Klookamop

A Fascinating Interval

The early church demonized it. It is also called the tritone or the "blue" note. Exactly halfway through an octave, the flatted fifth has a primal and irrational (square root of 2) frequency relationship with the tonic. It is also an enharmonic sharped fourth.

KFFR Los Angeles

We have launced KFFR Los Angeles, which you can hear wherever you live, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year (with an extra day thrown in for free this year!).

How do you tune in? Scroll down the sidebar on the right, looking for the "KFFR Los Angeles" heading. Click the "On Air" button below it--or this On Air link! Another window will open, allowing you to continue reading our blog while you listen to the music. If you like, minimize the KFFR Los Angeles window as you read on.

You'll need the free Windows Media Player (WMP) to enjoy KFFR. Click the WMP logo on the KFFR Los Angeles web page to download and install WMP from Microsoft.

The playlists will change every day. Enjoy the music!

Our Second Month

Oh, to be in Chicago now that it is August! The temperature and humidity will both be in the upper 90s! But I guess I'll have to settle for living by Santa Monica Bay, cool ocean breezes, temps in the 70s and low 80s, hardly any humidity, and bikini-clad vixens roller-blading along the bike path on the beach.

Hey, someone has to live here!

The Flatted Fifth enters its second month. I began building this blog a few weeks ago. It's been fun, and it's coming along. I'm delighted to see some of our members are posting entries. A couple of members haven't done so, but perhaps they will this month. Every member is expected to post one entry per month.

If you would like to contribute to The Flatted Fifth, look at the sidebar on the right, scroll down to the "Push Our Buttons" heading, then click the "Register" button. We'll have Blogger.com send you an invitation to join The Flatted Fifth. We encourage our visitors to join us. Please do!