A Steinway in every driveway...

I had a solid night's sleep. Ken had a gig out of town so I had the room to myself for the night. It's dead quiet at nighttime up here save for the odd rutting elk, so I awoke refreshed, but with a mouth as dry as a popcorn fart. (Just how did someone come up with that saying?) You have to rehydrate constantly in Banff due to the elevation and the dryness. I found it good to have industrial strength lip balm on hand at all times. A cracked lip could be deadly up here with so much playing going on.

I had an orange left over from dinner and so all I had to do is get a my caffeine hit and a bottle of water before the first session started. The morning was an introduction session and the 10 composers in the program (less Marianne who needed the day to recuperate) all introduced themselves. It was quickly apparent that we are all very diverse in style, and some are extemely talented. This is going to be a fun program.

We all had to play some excerpts of our compositions to give everyone a taste of our personal styles. I rifled through my cds and much to my dismay, had not a single example of my writing. I had lots of varied performances, but it was all either improv or my playing standards. So I just talked about where I am coming from, and my approaches to the creation of my graphic scores.

After the morning session broke for lunch, one of the people in the room, acutally Banff staffer and an artist in her own right, asked me to play at least a sample of my music. I put on a bit of our February recording of the ion Zoo gig at the Cellar. She asked who's singing and I said it was Carol Sawyer. "CAROL SAWYER - I know her!" She asked which group and when I told her it was ion Zoo, she said she's come out to see us at 1067 and absolutely loves the group. Again, there are no coincidences at Banff.

Lunch was less than fun. I still hadn't found my room key package, which also contained the slip used to get my artist's ID card, which is also the meal pass. The previous evening the front desk just called down to the dining room and the manager was happy just to accept a photo id, since I was already in the computer system. In fact he remembered me from previous years there. Not so at lunchtime. The person at the dining room computer basically said no card, no food, unless you pay for it. She was quite unpleasant about it and would not even bother to look me up on the computer. She had no time for me and didn't care to hear how they accomodated me the previous evening. She charged me full price for lunch, $18.75, and believe me, it wasn't worth it. I lodged a complaint with our Community Services liasion person about her conduct.

In the afternoon, we had a lecture from Hugh about one of his favourite topics - some of the universal mathematical concepts behind music. It went from what note the Sun resonates at, through the Fibonacci series and into geometric shapes superimposed over the circle of fifths. It was very esoteric and even though it's the fourth time I've heard it, I am making slow progress in understanding it. I was interested in noting the places where I felt like I has a sudden IQ drop, all places where I hadn't wrapped my head around what he was talking about. The fascinating thing was that he backed it all up by playing samples of famous pieces on the piano, often rearranging them on the fly as he thought of a new way to apply the concepts.

He put many of these theories into the composition of his Concerto for Jazz Orchestra, which I had played here in 2002. In particular, one section was done absolutely strictly by the numbers and diagrams, but it sounded like Ellington, had he been writing in the late 20th century. I have been intrigued by that direct connection between Duke's music and some of the more avante garde music. It's like it's a straight line progression, and here it was showing up again in the example Hugh was using.

We were given a short writing assignment to be presented Tuesday evening. I was thinking that I could spend my time here developing within the stylistic guidelines of my two previous graphic scores, but this was the perfect opportunity to challenge myself. I joked that it would be most radical for me to write In the Mood. That's not far from my intention, as I want to write something more arranged and voiced than I normally do, at least for this assigment.

I met some other Vancouver musicians that I know, who are up here with high school concert bands and choral programs that are going on until Tuesday. Dominique Brunchmann and I are going to try to meet tomorrow morning to work on the song room project - it's so great she's up here.

I went back to my room and much to my surprise found the missing key and registration package in my percussion bag. I had absolutely no recollection of putting it in the one pocket that I hadn't checked in the previous 24 hours. So I got my artist's id.

I didn't even have to pull it out at dinner time - last evening's host said "Hi Steve" as I was walking down the stairs into the dining room and checked me into the computer. That just made me even more displeased with my lunchtime experience.

After dinner, the music building was packed with high school kids waiting to go into a performance. As I waded through them, I had the sense that I was being stared at. It was only at the end of the gauntlet that one of them said "Tell us a joke." This was a school that attended our Kiwanis Music Festival and one of my things I do as MC is to tell a lot of stupid music jokes. Q: What's the definition of counterpoint? A: Two guitarists reading the same line.

I had a couple of good scheduled one-on-one sessions with Mike Herriott and Hugh, discussing compositional concepts and my idea for doing a more arranged piece. Particularly with Mike, I picked his brains about how to approach voicings for brass instruments.

Then I got to work in the practice room. There is a wealth of great grand pianos in the practice rooms here, many of them Steinways, sometimes 2 in a room. I like having a Steinway in a practice room. They are such great instruments that they resonate when I'm playing a horn in the room and I always sound better. We all should be so lucky in the outside world.

I got to work on my piece and something wierd happened. I just want to write a fairly short and manageable piece for the assignment, but the damn thing kept growing bigger. I had to stop after a couple of hours because it was getting to be too long, and I didn't feel that it was complete yet. And the wierder thing is that it sounds like something Marianne would write (probably on an off off day). She is a bigger influence on me than I knew. And stranger still because I am not much of a pianist, but these pianos just sound so damn good that the music flows out of them.

I decided to write this while taking a break from the piano, but what I really want to do now is play some saxophone. I'll do that and call it a night.