Confession Time!

I can't believe I'm going to admit this but I grabbed a Christmas CD on my way to the car this morning - Diana Krall's Christmas Songs. I bought this last year and its actually a great CD. A fantastic band playing some really great arrangements of Christmas tunes. It is a very controlled sounding band throughout and really swings. Some of the arrangements remind me of the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis band, others remind me of Ellington - terrific stuff! I do miss regularly playing in a big band for many many reasons... maybe I'll find myself back in that situation at some stage. I hope so - its a wonderful thing.

Today I spent 30 minutes of drum practice time just improvising with no set structure or tempo. Some interesting stuff came out and made me wish I had a set at home so I could just sit down and do this more often. I played a couple of things that made me think of Dave DiCenso's Modern Drummer Festival performance... (except I didn't sound anywhere near as good as Dave) I really need to check out that DVD/Dave's MD interview/my notes from my lesson with DiCenso again!

This evening I hit the piano:

20 minutes playing the second half of Study in F without a metronome. This was much more successful than my attempt the other day.

I then spent another 40 minutes on the Study in F, eventually trying the whole thing through at crotchet=40. I need to spend a little more time working on bars 9-12 before I can realistically start working the piece up to speed.

I also had a couple of quick runs through Top Cat and the Bach piece to keep them fresh in my mind.

I've been leafing through some more of John Novello's book The Contemporary Keyboardist today. It has a LOT of good information and ideas in it (probably too much for a bone head like me.)

Tonight is my first Friday night in for a while so I'm off to cook Kung Pao Chicken, drink beer, watch a movie and then probably have some cheeky red wine and mexican cheese :)

Tomorrow I go to my Dad's in Wylam. It'll be good to hang out with Adie, Dipsy and the folks again - its been a while since the gang was all back together!