Instrumental Band Quotes

You and your name-dropping. 'I knew Michael'. 'I knew Sammael'. 'The angel Gabriel did my hair'. It's like I'm with the Band with biblical figures.

Everyone knows that quote because of the Doors." Jace looked at her blankly. "The Doors. They were a band." "If you say so," he said. "I suppose you don't have much time for enjoying music," Clary said, thinking of Simon, for whom music was his entire life, "in your line of work." He shrugged. "Maybe the occasional wailing chorus of the damned.

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Who cares if you have a girlfriend, anyway?" "I care," Simon said gloomily. "Pretty soon the only people left without a girlfriend will be me and Wendell the school janitor. And he smells like Windex." "At least you know he's still available." Simon glared. "Not funny, Fray." "There's always Sheila 'The Thong' Bararino," Clary suggested. "That is who Eric's been dating for the past three months," Simon said. "His advice, meanwhile, was that I ought to just decide which girl in school has the most rockin' bod and ask her out." "Eric is a sexist pig," Clary said. "Maybe you should call your band The Sexist Pigs." "It has a ring to it.

Simon's band never actually produced any music. Mostly they sat around in Simon's living room, fighting about potential names and band logos. She sometimes wondered if any of them could actually play an instrument. 'What's on the table?' 'We're choosing between Sea Vegetable Conspiracy and Rock Solid Panda.' Clary shook her head. 'Those are both terrible.' 'Eric suggested Lawn Chair Crisis.' 'Maybe Eric should stick to gaming.' 'But then we'd have to find a new drummer.' 'Oh, is that what Eric does?...

No one told you to call your band Salacious Mold, my friend." "We're Millennium Lint now," Simon protested

Simon had never noticed before, but she wore a silver ring on her right hand, with a partner of flames around the band of it, and a carved L in the center. It reminded him of the ring Clary wore around her neck, with its design of stars. "It's the Lightwood family ring," she said, noticing where his gaze was fixed. "Every family has an emblem. Ours is fire.

Music shouldn't be just a tune, it should be a touch.

The Violins waltzed. The Cellos and Basses provided accompaniment. The Violas mourned their fate, while the Concertmaster showed off. The Flutes did bird imitations…repeatedly, and the reed instruments had the good taste to admire my jacket. The Trumpets held a parade in honor of our great nation, while the French Horns waxed nostalgic about something or other. The Trombones had too much to drink. The Percussion beat the band, and the Tuba stayed home playing cards with his landlady, the Harp, taking sips of warm milk a blue little cup. “But the Composer is still dead.

No body told you to call your band Salacious Mold, my friend.

Music is the fastest motivator in the world.

Music is the Universal Language that allows all people to communicate with each other.

The Frays had never been a religiously observant family, but Clary loved Fifth Avenue at Christmas time. The air smelled like sweet roasted chestnuts, and the window displays sparkled with silver and blue, green and red. This year there were fat round crystal snowflakes attached to each lamppost, sending back the winter sunlight in shafts of gold. Not to mention the huge tree at Rockefeller Center. It threw its shadow across them as she and Simon draped themselves over the gate at the side of the skating rink, watching tourists fall down as they tried to navigate the ice. Clary had a hot chocolate wrapped in her hands, the warmth spreading through her body. She felt almost normal—this, coming to Fifth to see the window displays and the tree, had been a winter tradition for her and Simon for as long as she could remember. “Feels like old times, doesn’t it?” he said, echoing her thoughts as he propped his chin on his folded arms. She chanced a sideways look at him. He was wearing a black topcoat and scarf that emphasized the winter pallor of his skin. His eyes were shadowed, indicating that he hadn’t fed on blood recently. He looked like what he was—a hungry, tired vampire. Well, she thought. Almost like old times. “More people to buy presents for,” she said. “Plus, the always traumatic what-to-buy-someone-for-the-first-Christmas-after-you’ve-started-dating question.” “What to get the Shadowhunter who has everything,” Simon said with a grin. “Jace mostly likes weapons,” Clary sighed. “He likes books, but they have a huge library at the Institute. He likes classical music …” She brightened. Simon was a musician; even though his band was terrible, and was always changing their name—currently they were Lethal Soufflé—he did have training. “What would you give someone who likes to play the piano?” “A piano.” “Simon.” “A really huge metronome that could also double as a weapon?” Clary sighed, exasperated. “Sheet music. Rachmaninoff is tough stuff, but he likes a challenge.” “Now you’re talking. I’m going to see if there’s a music store around here.” Clary, done with her hot chocolate, tossed the cup into a nearby trash can and pulled her phone out. “What about you? What are you giving Isabelle?” “I have absolutely no idea,” Simon said. They had started heading toward the avenue, where a steady stream of pedestrians gawking at the windows clogged the streets. “Oh, come on. Isabelle’s easy.” “That’s my girlfriend you’re talking about.” Simon’s brows drew together. “I think. I’m not sure. We haven’t discussed it. The relationship, I mean.” “You really have to DTR, Simon.” “What?” “Define the relationship. What it is, where it’s going. Are you boyfriend and girlfriend, just having fun, ‘it’s complicated,’ or what? When’s she going to tell her parents? Are you allowed to see other people?” Simon blanched. “What? Seriously?” “Seriously. In the meantime—perfume!” Clary grabbed Simon by the back of his coat and hauled him into a cosmetics store that had once been a bank. It was massive on the inside, with rows of gleaming bottles everywhere. “And something unusual,” she said, heading for the fragrance area. “Isabelle isn’t going to want to smell like everyone else. She’s going to want to smell like figs, or vetiver, or—” “Figs? Figs have a smell?” Simon looked horrified; Clary was about to laugh at him when her phone buzzed. It was her mother. where are you? It’s an emergency.

You and your name dropping he said, I knew Michael, I knew Sammael. The angel Gabriel did my hair. Its like I'm with the band with biblical figures.

Isabelle looked dubious. "Mom and Dad won't be pleased if they find out." "That you freed a possible criminal by trading away your brother to a warlock who looks like a gay Sonic the Hedgehog and dresses like the Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Band? Simon inquired. "No, probably not.

You know what punk is? a bunch of no-talent guys who really, really want to be in a band. Nobody reads music, nobody plays the mandolin, and you're too dumb to write songs about mythology or Middle-earth. So what's your style? Three chords, cranked out fast and loud and distorted because your instruments are crap and you can't play them worth a damn. And you scream your lungs out to cover up the fact that you can't sing. It should suck, but here's the thing - it doesn't. Rock and roll can be so full of itself, but not this. It's simple and angry and raw.

The lights flickered. The bands laid down their instruments and the crowds made quiety for the door.

I sometimes wonder how many hours of my life I have wasted bitching about keyboards. The use of keyboards and synthesizers is the Roe v. Wade of '80s metal. It was-without question-the lamest instrument a band could use.

My advice to women who habitually gravitate toward musicians is that they learn how to play an instrument and start making music themselves. Not only will they see that it's not that hard, but sometimes I think women just want to be the very thing they think they want to sleep with. Because if you're bright enough--no offense, Tawny Kitaen--sleeping with a musician probably won't be enough for you to feel good about yourself. Even if he writes you a song for your birthday. Don't you know that a musician who writes a song for you is like a baker you're dating making you a cake? Aim higher.

Either as a detective I was a good sofa-pillow crocheter, or else I was playing in the identical luck of the piccolo player when the eccentric millionaire filled up the instruments of each member of the German band with $5 gold pieces.

When you’re in a band, you spend the first four hundred thousand years of your career dragging around your own crap. Your speakers, speaker stands, mixing head, mics, pickups, power cables, mic cables, speaker cables, instruments, the everything. You forget something, you’re screwed. You break something, you’re screwed. You don’t have a long enough extension cord? Screwed. Once you hit it big, though — You’re packing your shit into a late-model Mustang and a pickup truck and hoping you didn’t forget anything.

I'm pretty sure that when babies are born in Oregon, they leave the hospital with birth certificates - and teeny-tiny sleeping bags. Everyone in the state camps. The hippies and the rednecks. The hunters and the tree huggers. Rich people. Poor people. Even rock musicians. Especially rock musicians. Our band had perfected the art of punk-rock camping, throwing a bunch of crap into the van with, like, an hour's notice and just driving out into the mountains, where we'd drink beer, burn food, jam on our instruments around the campfire, and sack out under the open sky. Sometimes, on tour, back in the early hardscrabble days, we'd even camp as an alternative to crashing in another crowded, roach-infested rock 'n' roll house. I don't know if it's because no matter where you live, the wilderness is never that far off, but it just seemed like everyone in Oregon camped.

He was supposed to be reading, but all he could do was watch her and love her bare arms, her Alice band, her straight back, the sweet tilt of her chin as she tucked the instrument under it...

Mac Rebennack, better known as Dr. John, once told me that when a brass band plays at a small club back up in one of the neighborhoods, it's as if the audience--dancing, singing to the refrains, laughing--is part of the band. They are two parts of the same thing. The dancers interpret, or it might be better to say literally embody, the sounds of the band, answering the instruments. Since everyone is listening to different parts of the music--she to the trumpet melody, he to the bass drum, she to the trombone--the audience is a working model in three dimensions of the music, a synesthesic transformation of materials. And of course the band is also watching the dancers, and getting ideas from the dancers' gestures. The relationship between band and audience is in that sense like the relationship between two lovers making love, where cause and effect becomes very hard to see, even impossible to call by its right name; one is literally getting down, as in particle physics, to some root stratum where one is freed from the lockstop of time itself, where time might even run backward, or sideways, and something eternal and transcendent is accessed.

My life was awful. When I was a kid, I was fat, pretty ugly and had awful hair. I used to get teased every fucking day, slammed up against lockers, punched in the face - you name it. Hell, I had to go to prom with one of my female friends because I couldn’t even get a proper date. I can’t even look back at those photos because I look so bad. I transferred schools, but the teasing just got worse. After an, let’s say, ‘incident’ I had with the school play the bullying just got worse. But I made it through high school, only to find out that real life was pretty much the same. I just stayed in my dark room all day and didn’t talk to anyone. I didn’t go outside. I just stayed inside and drew. I’d draw vampires, mummies, heroes, villains. Anything to help me escape all the bad in the world. I went to art school and didn’t really belong. All I could draw was comic book characters. I tried to put my only good talent to use by drawing a cartoon and pitching it - only to have it turned down. Life to me was just pointless. I started drinking, doing drugs and just generally wasting my life drawing.
Then one day, I saw bodies falling from the sky. I witnessed people dying. And that’s when I decided to turn my life around. I called up anyone I knew who had an instrument and we formed a band. Being on tour for the first few years was bad. All we’d do is get drunk and do drugs, but I loved it. Because I was doing something I loved with people I loved. And a few years ago I met the most perfect woman ever. It’s like we share a wave-link or something. She just knows me without even knowing me, if you understand. And now, 2011, I have a beautiful baby girl, a caring wife and I get to perform for my adoring fans everyday. I am living proof that no matter how bad it gets, it gets better. I am Gerard Way, and I survived.

The snores alone were quite a study, varying from the mild sniff to the stentorian snort, which startled the echoes and hoisted the performer erect to accuse his neighbor of the deed, magnanimously forgive him, and wrapping the drapery of his couch about him, lie down to vocal slumber. After listening for a week to this band of wind instruments, I indulged in the belief that I could recognize each by the snore alone, and was tempted to join the chorus by breaking out with John Brown's favorite hymn: "Blow ye the trumpet, blow!

Our band had perfected the art of punk-rock camping, throwing a bunch of crap into the van with, like, an hour's notice and just driving out into the mountains, where we'd drink beer, burn food, jam on our instruments around the campfire, and sack out under the open sky.

So this book is like a thank you. We want everyone to know the story of how four Western Sydney teenagers picked up their instruments and dreamt of being one of the biggest bands in the world.

I was fascinated by the machinations of performance back then and I still am now. A stage full of instruments awaiting a band is exciting to me. The sight of a guitar still turns me on. There is an unstated wonder in both of them: they hold the ability to transcend reality given the right set of players.

Welsh Incident 'But that was nothing to what things came out From the sea-caves of Criccieth yonder.' What were they? Mermaids? dragons? ghosts?' Nothing at all of any things like that.' What were they, then?' 'All sorts of queer things, Things never seen or heard or written about, Very strange, un-Welsh, utterly peculiar Things. Oh, solid enough they seemed to touch, Had anyone dared it. Marvellous creation, All various shapes and sizes, and no sizes, All new, each perfectly unlike his neighbour, Though all came moving slowly out together.' Describe just one of them.' 'I am unable.' What were their colours?' 'Mostly nameless colours, Colours you'd like to see; but one was puce Or perhaps more like crimson, but not purplish. Some had no colour.' 'Tell me, had they legs?' Not a leg or foot among them that I saw.' But did these things come out in any order?' What o'clock was it? What was the day of the week? Who else was present? How was the weather?' I was coming to that. It was half-past three On Easter Tuesday last. The sun was shining. The Harlech Silver Band played Marchog Jesu On thrity-seven shimmering instruments Collecting for Caernarvon's (Fever) Hospital Fund. The populations of Pwllheli, Criccieth, Portmadoc, Borth, Tremadoc, Penrhyndeudraeth, Were all assembled. Criccieth's mayor addressed them First in good Welsh and then in fluent English, Twisting his fingers in his chain of office, Welcoming the things. They came out on the sand, Not keeping time to the band, moving seaward Silently at a snail's pace. But at last The most odd, indescribable thing of all Which hardly one man there could see for wonder Did something recognizably a something.' Well, what?' 'It made a noise.' 'A frightening noise?' No, no.' 'A musical noise? A noise of scuffling?' No, but a very loud, respectable noise --- Like groaning to oneself on Sunday morning In Chapel, close before the second psalm.' What did the mayor do?' 'I was coming to that.

It's a complex song, and it's fascinating to watch the creative process as they went back and forth and finally created it over a few months. Lennon was always my favorite Beatle. [ He laughs as Lennon stops during the first take and makes the band go back and revise a chord.] Did you hear that little detour they took? It didn't work, so they went back and started from where they were. It's so raw in this version. It actually makes the sound like mere mortals. You could actually imagine other people doing this, up to this version. Maybe not writing and conceiving it, but certainly playing it. Yet they just didn't stop. They were such perfectionists they kept it going This made a big impression on me when I was in my thirties. You could just tell how much they worked at this. They did a bundle of work between each of these recording. They kept sending it back to make it closer to perfect.[ As he listens to the third take, he points out how instrumentation has gotten more complex.] The way we build stuff at Apple is often this way. Even the number of models we'd make of a new notebook or iPod. We would start off with a version and then begin refining and refining, doing detailed models of the design, or the buttons, or how a function operates. It's a lot of work, but in the end it just gets better, and soon it's like, " Wow, how did they do that?!? Where are the screws?

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy notes that Disaster Area, a plutonium rock band from the Gagrakacka Mind Zones, are generally held to be not only the loudest rock band in the Galaxy, but in fact the loudest noise of any kind at all. Regular concert goers judge that the best sound balance is usually to be heard from within large concrete bunkers some thirty-seven miles from the stage, while the musicians themselves play their instruments by remote control from within a heavily insulated spaceship which stays in orbit around the planet—or more frequently around a completely different planet.

Because this painting has never been restored there is a heightened poignance to it somehow; it doesn’t have the feeling of unassailable permanence that paintings in museums do. There is a small crack in the lower left, and a little of the priming between the wooden panel and the oil emulsions of paint has been bared. A bit of abrasion shows, at the rim of a bowl of berries, evidence of time’s power even over this—which, paradoxically, only seems to increase its poetry, its deep resonance. If you could see the notes of a cello, when the bow draws slowly and deeply across its strings, and those resonant reverberations which of all instruments’ are nearest to the sound of the human voice emerge—no, the wrong verb, they seem to come into being all at once, to surround us, suddenly, with presence—if that were made visible, that would be the poetry of Osias Beert. But the still life resides in absolute silence. Portraits often seem pregnant with speech, or as if their subjects have just finished saying something, or will soon speak the thoughts that inform their faces, the thoughts we’re invited to read. Landscapes are full of presences, visible or unseen; soon nymphs or a stag or a band of hikers will make themselves heard. But no word will ever be spoken here, among the flowers and snails, the solid and dependable apples, this heap of rumpled books, this pewter plate on which a few opened oysters lie, giving up their silver. These are resolutely still, immutable, poised for a forward movement that will never occur. The brink upon which still life rests is the brink of time, the edge of something about to happen. Everything that we know crosses this lip, over and over, like water over the edge of a fall, as what might happen does, as any of the endless variations of what might come true does so, and things fall into being, tumble through the progression of existing in time. Painting creates silence. You could examine the objects themselves, the actors in a Dutch still life—this knobbed beaker, this pewter salver, this knife—and, lovely as all antique utilitarian objects are, they are not, would not be, poised on the edge these same things inhabit when they are represented. These things exist—if indeed they are still around at all—in time. It is the act of painting them that makes them perennially poised, an emergent truth about to be articulated, a word waiting to be spoken. Single word that has been forming all these years in the light on the knife’s pearl handle, in the drops of moisture on nearly translucent grapes: At the end of time, will that word be said?

Driving to pick up his son, Bennie alternated between the Sleepers and the Dead Kennedys, San Francisco bands he'd grown up with. He listened for muddiness, the sense of actual musicians playing actual instruments in an actual room. Nowadays the quality (if it existed at all) was usually an effect of analogue signaling rather than bona fide tape - everything was an effect in the bloodless constructions Bennie and his peers were churning out. He worked tirelessly, feverishly, to get things right, stay on top, make songs that people would love and buy and download as ring tones (and steal, of course) - above all, to satisfy the multinational crude-oil extractors he'd sold his label to five years ago. But Bennie knew that what he was bringing into the world was shit. Too clear, too clean. The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was digitization, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh. Film, photography, music: dead. An aesthetic holocaust!

The band responded by handing their instruments over to some fans during the encores, and leaving the stage. ‘That was the ultimate,’ Paul told Q. ‘People pay to come in and see us – and end up playing the bloody songs themselves.

It is understated and underappreciated, yet it plays the most important role. The bass is the link between harmony and rhythm. It is the foundation of a band. It is what all the other instruments stand upon, but it is rarely recognized as that.

The travelers emerged into a spacious square. In the middle of this square were several dozen people on a wooden bandstand like in a public park. They were the members of a band, each of them as different from one another as their instruments. Some of them looked round at the approaching column. Then a grey-haired man in a colorful cloak called out and they reached for their instruments. There was a burst of something like cheeky, timid bird-song and the air – air that had been torn apart by the barbed wire and the howl of sirens, that stank of oily fumes and garbage – was filled with music. It was like a warm summer cloud-burst ignited by the sun, flashing as it crashed down to earth. People in camps, people in prisons, people who have escaped from prison, people going to their death, know the extraordinary power of music. No one else can experience music in quite the same way. What music resurrects in the soul of a man about to die is neither hope nor thought, but simply the blind, heart-breaking miracle of life itself. A sob passed down the column. Everything seemed transformed, everything had come together; everything scattered and fragmented -home, peace, the journey, the rumble of wheels, thirst, terror, the city rising out of the mist, the wan red dawn – fused together, not into a memory or a picture but into the blind, fierce ache of life itself. Here, in the glow of the gas ovens, people knew that life was more than happiness – it was also grief. And freedom was both painful and difficult; it was life itself. Music had the power to express the last turmoil of a soul in whose blind depths every experience, every moment of joy and grief, had fused with this misty morning, this glow hanging over their heads. Or perhaps it wasn't like that at all. Perhaps music was just the key to a man's feelings, not what filled him at this terrible moment, but the key that unlocked his innermost core. In the same way, a child's song can appear to make an old man cry. But it isn't the song itself he cries over; the song is simply a key to something in his soul.

And I thought of Chuck E. Cheese. When my father took me there once for my birthday and we watched the mechanical animal band sing. How after they were finished, I tried to ask them questions about their instruments and they just stared at me with their dead eyes and—

I'm through with frost, ice, and snow To the human world, I must go! I'll form a cool, Gobolicious Band. Magical instruments will lend a hand. With these Instruments, I'll go far. Frosty jack, is a superstar I'll steal music's harmony and fun Watch out world, I'll be number one!

The agreement was known as a tontine, an antique investment instrument, with origins in seventeenth-century Europe, in which a number of participants band together in what is effectively a mortality lottery, pooling their funds with an understanding that the last investor to die will win everything.

[T]he piano was to Harlem what brass bands had been to New Orleans. The instrument represented conflicting possibilities -- a pathway for assimilating traditional highbrow culture, a calling card of lowbrow nightlife, a symbol of middle-class prosperity, or, quite simply, a means of making a living.

The whirligig featured a drummer, a trumpet player, a clarinetist, and a man with a trombone. It was a leap beyond the spouting whale, with more figures, a six-bladed propeller, and a much more complex system of rods and pivots that made the instruments dip and rise as if the musicians were marching.

But everyone has a voice, and everyone sings. Oh, we all do it differently. Some of us sing quietly, alone, only in the dead of night or in the shower. Some of us sing a cappella, and some stand on a stage beside a band and let the whole world share their song. Some of us, some of us don’t sing at all, like that. We sing with other instruments: There’s song in stores, and in art, and in getting up before the dawn and putting food onto the table. There are angry songs and sad songs and songs that make you want to dance. But everybody has a song to sing, their own personal story leaked into the world. And mine is one of love.

The transition from subject to observer was instantaneous, sensations, sights, and sounds changing from instruments of torment to a fascinating display of electronic signals. The spectra included thousands of frequencies, visual, audio and psi bands alike, each customized for a specific effect, a pseudo symphony for an audience of one.

As for my own answers to any of this? I have none. I'm far more confused than before I first went. I've had no great epiphanies, no profound realisations, but since returning home I've resigned myself to this one thing: that, putting the economics and politics of it all aside - naive as that may be - what it all boils down to is individuals. It's a simple interaction between just two people: one, a person with opportunities and choices, and who could get a flight out tomorrow should they choose; the other, a person with few options - if any. If nothing else, it's a gesture. An attempt. Food and a tent for Toto. Burns dressing for Jose. A little operating theatre with car batteries and boiled instruments, where Roberto can ply his trade. Free HIV treatment for Elizabeth, who'll never be cured and will always live in a hut anyway, but who'll have a longer, healthier life because of it. And sometimes it's little more than a bed in which to die peacefully, attended to by family and health workers... but hey, that's no small thing in some parts. My head says it's futile. My heart knows differently.

The strict deliberate practice school describes useful training as focused consciously on error correction. But the most comprehensive examination of development in improvisational forms, by Duke University professor Paul Berliner, described the childhoods of professionals as “one of osmosis,” not formal instruction. “Most explored the band room’s diverse options as a prelude to selecting an instrument of specialization,” he wrote. “It was not uncommon for youngsters to develop skills on a variety of instruments.

During the so-called Jazz Age, most of the music's key exponents focused their creative energy on soloing not bandleading, on improvisation not orchestration, on an interplay between individual instruments not between sections. [...] Commercial pressures, rather than artistic prerogatives, stand out as the spur that forced many early jazz players (including Armstrong, Beiderbecke, and Hines) to embrace the big band idiom. But even in the new setting, they remained improvisers, first and foremost, not orchestrators or composers.

High school marching band was its own little microcosm of the world. More a study in sociology than in woodwinds and brass: There were the band geeks, pimply and a tad too greasy, making out with one another every chance they got. There were the no-nonsense go-getters, eager to fill a line on their college applications, marching without rhythm or passion. There was the percussion section, hipsters-to-be whose arms would be full of tattoos in a few years’ time. And there were the tuba players, chunky and asexual, as if they were slowly morphing into their instrument of choice.

Old couples began to pair off and spin each other around, and the younger ones lined the walls, clapping and stomping their feet and swishing their drinks. In that little pub, on that little stage by the windows, Kevin was a life force, a star. With the aid of an instrument, he could spend four hours in a new country and fit in better than Maggie could after four months. He sang about drunk tanks and love and Christmas hopes, but in the spaces between the words of the song and in the cold shadows of his closed eyes rested all the things that he allowed to escape from himself only on the stage. Watching him, Maggie thought of their conversation earlier that day--how he had quit the band, quit his music, hadn't picked up a guitar in months. She could see the way he picked gingerly at the strings on his uncalloused fingers. His voice wasn't beautiful, but it had always contained a kind of arresting truth. Now too, Maggie detected a new quality--a desperation that had not been there before. Looking around the table at her family, she knew that Nanny Eli heard it, too. Her grandmother was leaning forward, holding her cigarette aloft while the ash grew longer and longer, and she was not listening to her son like the rest of them were but watching him, the movements of his long, skeletal fingers, the closed bruises of his eyes.

A lot of time has been spent looking for just a hint of how Jimmy Palao and the Original Creole band sounded. The answer has been right under our nose. As we listen to the music of that day we hear the remnants of Jimmy Palao’s Original Creole Band. We do not hear the music that he would have recorded with the Original Creole Band but we hear the music just as he wished us to hear it … as he freely gave way to the concept of developing the free form of Jazz … that is to let others be heard and display their musical talent. It wasn’t his music from his instrument that he wanted heard. He wanted us to take in the greats as their sounds developed. After all that is why Jazz… is Jazz…

What we can imagine as plausible is a narrow band in the middle of a much broader spectrum of what is actually possible. [O]ur eyes are built to cope with a narrow band of electromagnetic frequencies. [W]e can't see the rays outside the narrow light band, but we can do calculations about them, and we can build instruments to detect them. In the same way, we know that the scales of size and time extend in both directions far outside the realm of what we can visualize. Our minds can't cope with the large distances that astronomy deals in or with the small distances that atomic physics deals in, but we can represent those distances in mathematical symbols. Our minds can't imagine a time span as short as a picosecond, but we can do calculations about picoseconds, and we can build computers that can complete calculations within picoseconds. Our minds can't imagine a timespan as long as a million years, let alone the thousands of millions of years that geologists routinely compute. Just as our eyes can see only that narrow band of electromagnetic frequencies that natural selection equipped our ancestors to see, so our brains are built to cope with narrow bands of sizes and times. Presumably there was no need for our ancestors to cope with sizes and times outside the narrow range of everyday practicality, so our brains never evolved the capacity to imagine them. It is probably significant that our own body size of a few feet is roughly in the middle of the range of sizes we can imagine. And our own lifetime of a few decades is roughly in the middle of the range of times we can imagine.

threatened at first to overwhelm the lighter soprano instrument of Michelle. Elliot learned to control the instrument in the ensemble, but never relinquished what has been described as her “let it all hang out vitality.”[70] The particular gifts of her voice were in no danger of being stifled, and throughout her career with earlier bands through the post-Mamas and Papas years, her “distinctive voice always emerged from the group in which she sang.”[71] Interested in a variety of genres, Elliot often mentioned her love for classical music, and had appeared regularly as a jazz singer before being drawn into the hippie folk revolution. A Broadway devotee as well, she sang several prominent roles in residence and on tour, and even dueled Barbra Streisand to a near draw for an important role in I Can Get It for You Wholesale on Broadway, before being

One athlete does not make a team. One singer does not make a band. One actor does not make an ensemble. One participant does not make a contest. One employee does not make a company. One stroke does not make a portrait. One word does not make an essay. One paragraph does not make a thesis. One note does not make a symphony. One instrument does not make an orchestra. One finger does not make a hand. One toe does not make a foot. One lip does not make a voice. One member does not make a body. One cell does not make a being. One memory does not make an experience. One habit does not make a character. One act does not make a destiny. One day does not make a year. One moment does not make a lifetime. One man does not make a family. One home does not make a neighborhood. One clan does not make nation. One tribe does not make a continent. One people does not make a world.

yes, I know, you wouldn’t get anything for your cello and flute and piano lessons, but at least you’d eat every day, child, Garçon Fleur, you remember that don’t you, that’s what they called you when people came from all around to hear you play a Bach sonata on the piano or conduct a jazz band that Garçon Fleur is dead though, just a fake, an illusion the boy murmured sombrely, or perhaps he didn’t and the words simply weighed on his lips and forehead without the strength to force them out of the unseeing shade inside the hood pulled all the way down to his brows; and soon night would fall, time for him to fall asleep like Petites Cendres, his dog stretched out beside him and the flute hidden in the folds of his coat, sleep, thought Fleur, just so I don’t hear or see them anymore, at least not till tomorrow, so even if I play well on any instrument, just a fake, an illusion, it’s because I love it that I can’t get free, now it’s become merely a mechanical longing for the loftiest sounds possible,

It is recorded that during the long winter after the Battle of Fredericksburg, when the two rival armies were camped on opposite sides of the Rappahannock, with the boys on the opposing picket posts daily swapping coffee for tobacco and comparing notes on their generals, their rations, and other matters, and with each camp in full sight and hearing of the other, one evening massed Union bands came down to the river bank to play all of the old songs, plus the more rousing tunes like "John Brown's Body," "The Battle Cry of Freedom," and "Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, the Boys Are Marching." Northerners and Southerners, the soldiers sang those songs or sat and listened to them, massed in their thousands on the hillsides, while the darkness came down to fill the river valley and the light of the campfires glinted off the black water. Finally the Southerners called across, "Now play some of ours," so without pause the Yankee bands swung into "Dixie" and "The Bonnie Blue Flag" and "Maryland, My Maryland," and then at last the massed bands played "Home, Sweet Home," and 150,000 fighting men tried to sing it and choked up and just sat there, silent, staring off into the darkness; and at last the music died away and the bandsmen put up their instruments and both armies went to bed. A few weeks later they were tearing each other apart in the lonely thickets around Chancellorsville.

[W]e can calculate our way into regions of miraculous improbability far greater than we can imagine as plausible. Let's look at this matter of what we think is plausible. What we can imagine as plausible is a narrow band in the middle of a much broader spectrum of what is actually possible. Sometimes it is narrower than what is actually there. There is a good analogy with light. Our eyes are built to cope with a narrow band of electromagnetic frequencies (the ones we call light), somewhere in the middle of the spectrum from long radio waves at one end to short X-rays at the other. We can't see the rays outside the narrow light band, but we can do calculations about them, and we can build instruments to detect them. In the same way, we know that the scales of size and time extend in both directions far outside the realm of what we can visualize. Our minds can't cope with the large distances that astronomy deals in or with the small distances that atomic physics deals in, but we can represent those distances in mathematical symbols. Our minds can't imagine a time span as short as a picosecond, but we can do calculations about picoseconds, and we can build computers that can complete calculations within picoseconds. Our minds can't imagine a timespan as long as a million years, let alone the thousands of millions of years that geologists routinely compute. Just as our eyes can see only that narrow band of electromagnetic frequencies that natural selection equipped our ancestors to see, so our brains are built to cope with narrow bands of sizes and times. Presumably there was no need for our ancestors to cope with sizes and times outside the narrow range of everyday practicality, so our brains never evolved the capacity to imagine them. It is probably significant that our own body size of a few feet is roughly in the middle of the range of sizes we can imagine. And our own lifetime of a few decades is roughly in the middle of the range of times we can imagine.

There are two ways in which the human machine goes wrong. One is when human individuals drift apart from one another, or else collide with one another and do one another damage, by cheating or bullying. The other is when things go wrong inside the individual—when the different parts of him (his different faculties and desires and so on) either drift apart or interfere with one another. You can get the idea plain if you think of us as a fleet of ships sailing in formation. The voyage will be a success only, in the first place, if the ships do not collide and get in one another’s way; and, secondly, if each ship is seaworthy and has her engines in good order. As a matter of fact, you cannot have either of these two things without the other. If the ships keep on having collisions they will not remain seaworthy very long. On the other hand, if their steering gears are out of order they will not be able to avoid collisions. Or, if you like, think of humanity as a band playing a tune. To get a good result, you need two things. Each player’s individual instrument must be in tune and also each must come in at the right moment so as to combine with all the others. But there is one thing we have not yet taken into account. We have not asked where the fleet is trying to get to, or what piece of music the band is trying to play. The instruments might be all in tune and might all come in at the right moment, but even so the performance would not be a success if they had been engaged to provide dance music and actually played nothing but Dead Marches. And however well the fleet sailed, its voyage would be a failure if it were meant to reach New York and actually arrived at Calcutta. Morality, then, seems to be concerned with three things. Firstly, with fair play and harmony between individuals. Secondly, with what might be called tidying up or harmonising the things inside each individual. Thirdly, with the general purpose of human life as a whole: what man was made for: what course the whole fleet ought to be on: what tune the conductor of the band wants it to play. You

Business leadership is based on two elements: vision and technical competence. Top people in a given industry always embody at least one of those two elements. Sometimes, but rarely, they embody both of them. Simply put, vision is the ability to see what other people don’t. It’s a Ford executive named Lee Iacocca realizing that a market existed for an automobile that was both a racing car and a street vehicle—and coming up with the Mustang. It’s Steven Jobs realizing that computers needed to be sold in a single box, like a television sets, instead of piece by piece. About one hundred years ago, Walter Chrysler was a plant manager for a locomotive company. Then he decided to go into the car business, which was a hot new industry at the time. The trouble was, Walter Chrysler didn’t know a lot about cars, except that they were beginning to outnumber horses on the public roadways. To remedy this problem, Chrysler bought one of the Model T Fords that were becoming so popular. To learn how it worked, he took it apart and put it back together. Then, just to be sure he understood everything, he repeated this. Then, to be absolutely certain he knew what made a car work, he took it apart and put it together forty-eight more times, for a grand total of fifty. By the time he was finished, Chrysler not only had a vision of thousands of cars on American highways, he also had the mechanical details of those cars engraved in his consciousness. Perhaps you’ve seen the play called The Music Man. It’s about a fast-talking man who arrives in a small town with the intention of hugely upgrading a marching band. However, he can’t play any instruments, doesn’t know how to lead a band, and doesn’t really have any musical skills whatsoever. The Music Man is a comedy, but it’s not totally unrealistic. Some managers in the computer industry don’t know how to format a document. Some automobile executives could not change a tire. There was once even a vice president who couldn’t spell potato. It’s not a good idea to lack the fundamental technical skills of your industry, and it’s really not a good idea to get caught lacking them. So let’s see what you can do to avoid those problems.

I have no musical talent. My clarinet sounded like an apoplectic yak. For the brief days I blew the trumpet, a hostile-sounding pig snorted along in jerky fits and starts with the rest of the irritated band. I never knew when a sound was actually going to come out of the horn and it always startled me when it did. My violin unleashed a trio of enraged, tone-deaf banshees, and I couldn’t blow the flute well enough to make any more sound than with my lower lip on a soda bottle. Something about the pucker eluded me. The drums turned my arms into a pretzel-prison from which there was no escape. I would have given the tambourine a try—I really think I might have excelled at the hip-bump—but sadly the instrument wasn’t offered at my school. I think that’s why I love my iPod so much. I have music in my soul and can’t get it out.

Gospel bands should take note: More musical equipment is stolen from churches than from clubs or concert halls. For this reason, musicians should be careful leaving instruments unattended in houses of worship.

Within a couple of years, I had gravitated towards a group of friends from the neighbourhood who had also discovered rock ’n’ roll, and it seemed an excellent idea to put a band together. The fact that none of us knew how to play was only a minor setback, since we didn’t have any instruments.

Going to art class?” James asked, taking a few steps toward her. “You took art two semesters in a row?” “Well, I can’t play an instrument, so it was either art of band,” Mandy said, laughing lightly. “There aren’t a lot of electives to choose from.” “You don’t want to be a band geek anyway,” James teased. “That will ruin your reputation forever.

heartful.   PR: You really did it. Music is an amazing art, to me. I love to recount to myself the number of human beings it takes, each skilled in a different area, to make possible a symphony concert. The composers, and those who copied and preserved the compositions, the instrument makers, skilled at their crafts—tubas, trumpets, timpani, woodwinds, strings—the music teachers who taught the performers, the performers who studied their instruments and practiced and rehearsed, all the builders who erected the concert hall—carpenters, electricians, etc.—the architect who designed it, the conductor who studied, who learned the language of music, the languages of all the instruments, the members of the audience who bought tickets, got dressed, came to the concert hall to be transported, to be informed, by sound, came for an experience that had nothing to do with physical survival. Most amazing. Always makes me certain absolutely without doubt that something is going on with the human species, something good. Two heroes to me are my middle school music teacher and my son’s middle school music teacher. What courage! All those twelve- and thirteen-year-old children, each with a noise-making instrument in his hands and these two enormously courageous teachers are attempting to teach them how to make music together. At my son’s first sixthgrade band concert, the music teacher turned to the audience of glowing, proud parents and said, “I’m not certain what’s going to happen here, but I’m just hoping that we’ll all begin at the same time.” It brought tears to my eyes, literally. And they did it! One step forward, in my opinion, in understanding what it means to be human.

The stage show grew gradually until one day they realized that all the props and special effects took up more space in the van than the instruments.

The first single was tracked at Media Arts Studio in Hermosa Beach, south of L.A.; the label copy helpfully dates the session—October 9, 1980. The producer is identified as “Screwy Louie.” The A side is a cover of “Under the Boardwalk,” the Drifters’ 1964 R&B ballad. David Hidalgo takes the soaring lead (his first solo vocal on record), effortlessly duplicating the tug of Johnny Moore’s original performance. But the number receives a twist in the band’s hands: in place of the lush string instrumental break on the Bert Berns–produced original, one hears a Tex–Mex button accordion solo. The flip was a rendering of “Volver, Volver,” a bolero penned by Fernando Z. Maldonado that had been an enormous hit for the Mexican ranchera superstar Vicente Fernández in 1976. Returning to his original role as the group’s ballad specialist, Cesar Rosas takes the lead vocal. Here the band offers an old-school East Side spin on the swaying, lushly romantic number, bringing some unidentified friends into the studio to scream and howl in the background, in the manner of the “live” supporting casts on Cannibal and the Headhunters’ “Land of 1000 Dances” or the Premiers’ “Farmer John.

Recorded sound, which artificially preserves the unpreservable, increases the likelihood of listening without hearing, since it can be listened to at home or in motion, thus allowing us to reduce music to background activity and eliminate the possibility of total concentration - i.e., thought. The moral responsibility for this rests entirely with the individual human being, who can determine whether a recording is a means of instruction, rendering the music more familiar through repetition - the equivalent of rereading a passage in a book - or simply a means of distraction in the sense of the music played by the band in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, to which the philosopher Settembrini says, “The human being, unfortunately, has a tendency to imbue objects with moral authority, so as not to take the responsibility himself. Is a knife an instrument with which one can commit murder - therefore an immoral instrument - or is it an instrument with which bread can be cut and a fellow human being fed - therefore an instrument of human generosity? It is the human being’s application of it that determines its moral qualities.

At exactly 8:45 P.M., George Alagna tuned the receiver in the radio shack to the six-hundred-meter frequency, the distress wave band for ships at sea. The mandatory three-minute period of silent “listening out” is an international watch kept by all ships at sea. For three minutes at precisely fifteen minutes past and fifteen minutes before each hour, every marine radio operator on duty stops transmitting and tunes to the emergency channel, listening for even the weakest distress signal. Junior Operator George Maki watched carefully as Alagna fine-tuned the instruments. Maki himself sometimes found it difficult to locate the frequency; on several occasions Chief Radio Officer Rogers had noticed Maki’s hesitation, and he used each occasion to give Maki a tongue-lashing. Ever since Rogers had assumed command of the wireless room, his hostility toward Maki had increased. The chief radio officer made special note of each of Maki’s faults: he was slow on direction finding, decoding meteorological bulletins, and switching smoothly across the transmitting and receiving wave bands. Maki knew his career as a radioman would be terminated abruptly if Rogers made a report to the Radiomarine Corporation. Rogers chose not to file any official complaint; instead, he kept Maki on as a personal whipping boy, somebody he could verbally castigate whenever he wanted to.

When Adolfe Sax patented the first saxophone on June 23, 1846, the Creek Nation was in turmoil. The people had been moved west of the Mississippi River after the Creek Wars which culminated in the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. We were putting our lives back together in new lands where we were promised we would be left alone. The saxophone made it across the big waters and was introduced in brass bands in the South. The music followed rivers into new towns, cities, all the way to our new lands. Not long after, in the early 1900s, my grandmother Naomi Harjo learned to play saxophone. I can feel her now when I play the instrument we both loved and love. The saxophone is so human. Its tendency is to be rowdy, edgy, talk too loud, bump into people, say the wrong words at the wrong time, but then, you take a breath all the way from the center of the earth and blow. All that heartache is forgiven. All that love we humans carry makes a sweet, deep sound and we fly a little.

Singapore Why should I book a live band for my wedding? Merry Bees Merry Bees have serenaded dignitaries at the Istana. Merry bees provide services to their customers like Solo Live Music, Virtual live band, Solo Musician, Solo Wedding Singer, Instrumental live band, Corporate Live Band, wedding livestream etc. their all the services are quite good. Merry bees also performed at TV programmes and other high profile events including APEC, F1 Singapore Grand Prix, Young NTUC Celebrates NDP, DBS, Prudential, Maersk, Singapore Sports Awards, etc. Merry Bees have produced and performed to over 2,000 successful events. When COVID-19 hit us in 2020, Merry Bees was one of the first few events companies in Singapore who adapted quickly to virtual. Merry bees have produced and live streamed to over 250 events and performances by Dec 2020. Apart from that merry bees also provide Content creation, Videography, livestream production, Corporate Videography Merry bees are emotionally attached with their each client. ShiLi & Adi TWO IS BETTER THAN ONE It is no surprise that ShiLi & Adi are a highly sought after duo in the wedding live bands and corporate events circuit due to their fresh piano arrangements and smooth vocal harmony. From duets and their ability to medley any songs dedicated by the audience, their chemistry is unmistakable. John Lye Live Looping Singer Guitarist, Bilingual Emcee & Host, Production & Technical Director John Lye is one of the most versatile performers we know with 12 years of performing experience under his belt. As part of our core team and co-founder of Merry Bees, John wears many hats but his biggest hat would be charming audiences with a wide vocal range and solid guitar live looping skills, as he switches effortlessly from heavy old school rock ballads of Journey and Bon Jovi to classics from Sinatra and Nat King Cole in various languages. Merry bees have many live offers you can book merry bees to make your special day wonderful.

Plunkett gave Pitt a dry look. "Even death would be a treat if I didn't have to hear that blasted tune again." "You don't care for 'Minnie the Mermaid'?" Pitt asked in mock surprise. "After hearing the chorus for the twentieth time, no." "With the telephone housing smashed, our only contact with the surface is the acoustic radio transmitter. Not nearly enough range for conversation, but it's all we've got. I can offer you Strauss waltzes or the big band sounds of the forties, but they wouldn't be appropriate." "I don't think much of your musical inventory," Plunkett grunted. Then he looked at Pitt. "What's wrong with Strauss?" "Instrumental," Pitt answered. "Distorted violin music can sound like whales or several other aquatic mammals through water. Minnie is a vocal. If anyone on the surface is listening, they'll know someone down here is still sucking air. No matter how garbled, there's no mistaking good old human babble." "For all the good that will do," said Plunkett. "If a rescue mission is launched, there's no way we can transfer from this vehicle to a submersible without a pressure lock. A commodity totally lacking on your otherwise remarkable tractor. If I may speak realistically, I fail to see anything in the near future but our inevitable demise." "I wish you wouldn't use the word 'demise.

By 1982, the synth had become so pervasive that it became the subject of a dispute initiated by the central London branch of the Musicians’ Union. When Barry Manilow toured the UK in January, he used synths to simulate the orchestral sounds of a big band, after which the union passed a motion to ban the use of synths, drum machines and any electronic devices ‘capable of recreating the sounds of conventional musical instruments’. They were particularly concerned about the possible effect on West End theatrical productions, imagining orchestra pits full of ‘technicians’ instead of musicians.

SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH Considerable research is validating the existence of the chakras, with Dr. Valerie Hunt serving as a pioneer. For the past twenty years, Hunt, a professor of kinesiology (the study of human movement) at the University of California in Los Angeles, has measured human electromagnetic output under different conditions. Using an electromyograph, an instrument that measures the electrical activity of the muscles, Hunt discovered that the physical body emanated radiation at sites typically associated with the chakras. In addition, she discovered that certain levels of consciousness were linked to specific frequencies.16 When people in her studies were thinking of daily situations, their energy fields measured frequencies in the range of 250 Hz. This is the same frequency as the heart. When psychic individuals had their energy fields tested on the electromyograph, their frequency ranged in a band from 400 to 800 Hz. Trance specialists and channelers fell into the 800 to 900 Hz range, and mystics, connected continually to their higher self, had a energy field, or etheric body, above 900 Hz. Hunt’s findings correlate with traditional chakra lore: the chakras can be stepping-stones to enlightenment, each inviting a different spiritual awareness and increasing the frequency of the subtle body. In fact, the manufacturer of the equipment adapted the machine to measure higher frequencies, and it was found that a mystic had an average subtle energy field frequency of 200,000 Hz.17

He began with a blanket code which every business man was summoned to sign—to pay minimum wages and observe the maximum hours of work, to abolish child labor, abjure price increases and put people to work. Every instrument of human exhortation opened fire on business to comply—the press, pulpit, radio, movies. Bands played, men paraded, trucks toured the streets blaring the message through megaphones. Johnson hatched out an amazing bird called the Blue Eagle. Every business concern that signed up got a Blue Eagle, which was the badge of compliance.

One final note one the [Rolling] Stones, though: When they came through the Bay Area earlier on that tour for regular concerts at the Oakland Coliseum Arena [before the Altamont free concert, 1969], 'They blew up all their equipment at the first show,' Betty Cantor-Jackson relates. 'They had all this Ampeg equipment, and it just went Ffffffttt! They were in a panic, so [Larry] Ram Rod [Shurtliff] and [Unknown maybe Rex?] Jackson raced to our [Grateful Dead] warehouse and brought down a bunch of our [rewired, kicked up, tinkered and experimented with] Fender amps for them, and the next show we sat up onstage while they played, and it sounded amazing. That was one of the times Bill Graham was nice to us,' She laughs. 'Anyway, I remember the first note Keith {Richards} played through Jerry's [Garcia] amp, and his mouth just dropped open. 'Woah!'. He couldn't believe the power and the clarity.'.

Prayer is like jazz. Jazz music is improvisational. Jazz bands don’t stare at sheet music; they get lost in the music and let it carry them. A saxophonist in an orchestra sits with perfect posture in a refined, formal opera house. A saxophonist in a jazz trio plays with their back arched, their eyes closed, and an expression of deep satisfaction spread across their face inside a smoky, loud club. He is “feeling” the music, not reading it. The interesting thing about jazz, though, is that it requires a firm understanding of the instrument. A wealth of knowledge and hours of practice makes improvisation not only possible but enjoyable. In short, if you want to play jazz, you’ve got to learn the sheet music first. And if you want to pray with passion, spontaneity, and freedom, you’ve got to learn the sheet music.

Crispin’s mom worked the cash register then and took Polaroids of every musician who bought an instrument there, saying she wanted something to remember them by when they became rock stars. Every photo got tacked to the wall. A mélange of nobodies and somebodies, pinned together in the biggest band for all eternity.

Children learned to play instruments not with the hope of becoming a “star” but because playing and singing were regarded as social assets. (James McCartney, born in Lancashire in 1902, told future Beatle Paul: “Learn to play the piano, son, and you’ll always get invited to parties.”)

Whether or not they had traveled down to Southampton on the boat train that arrived early in the morning of April 10, the musicians would have joined the crowd of second-and third-class passengers streaming toward berths 43/44 of the White Star’s dock, where the majestic Titanic lay with its bow pointed at the Solent. They would have boarded by the second-class entrance on C Deck, toward the back of the ship, and taken the elevator or staircase two flights down to E Deck, where there was a designated musicians’ room on the starboard side with three sets of bunk beds, drawers, a wardrobe, a basin, and a separate cabin in which to store their instruments. A second room, again for 5 musicians was on the port side, squeezed between a room for washing potatoes, and accomodation for its workers. It’s likely that the ‘saloon orchestra’ took the better cabin.1

There is only one account of the musicians making their way to their position. It comes from stewardess Violet Jessop, who knew Woodward and Hume from their time on the Olympic. She was in her bunk on either E or F Deck and heard a “low, rending, crunching, ripping sound” on impact but didn’t leave her cabin until the call to lifeboats came. On the way up the stairs she passed Captain Smith, J. Bruce Ismay, Chief Purser Herbert McElroy, and the ship’s surgeon, Dr. O’Laughlin, none of whom seemed overly concerned. She wrote that as she turned at the top of the staircase, “I ran into Jock, the bandleader and his crowd with their instruments. ‘Funny, they must be going to play,’ thought I, and at this late hour! Jock smiled in passing, looking rather pale for him, remarking, ‘Just going to give them a tune to cheer things up a bit,’ and passed on.

According to an unidentified third-class steward, who spoke to the Western Daily Mercury: “As the musicians ran after their instruments they were laughed at by several members of the crew who did not realize how serious matters were.” According to a separate account in the Sphere, this was because they thought the band members were anxious to save their instruments. The crew didn’t realize they were about to play.

It’s possible that Brailey and Taylor could have continued playing on other instruments once they moved away from the upright piano at the top of the staircase. We know, for example, that Hume had two violins with him and that Brailey was a multi-instrumentalist. The fact that the musicians played for the passengers as the lifeboats were lowered can’t seriously be questioned. There were a handful of survivors who claimed not to have heard them, but the evidence for the music is far too substantial to ignore.

How long did they play? Legend has them carrying on with the water practically up to their knees, but by then the slant of the deck would have been so steep, no one could have stood. At the other extreme, Colonel Gracie, on board to the last, said that the band stopped playing about half an hour before the ship sank. He added that he himself saw the musicians lay down their instruments. Curiously, Gracie did not mention this in his authoritative study The Truth about the Titanic, but he went into some detail in a talk he gave at the University Club in Washington on November 23, 1912. This was less than two weeks before he died; so it is presumably his last word on the subject.

With little else to do I rode my Vesper motor scooter from Harbel to Roberts Field. Perhaps there might be some excitement around the airport, but no such luck. Eric Reeves the Station Master and Air Traffic Controller was in the tower and was in communications with the incoming airliner. Everything was quiet in anticipation of a Pan American Clipper's arrival. On the ground floor all was quiet except for a solitary passenger in the terminal. Apparently he was waiting for the next flight out, which wasn't due for another two hours. As I approached him, I could see that he looked familiar…. I immediately recognized him as a world class trumpet player and gravel voiced singer from New Orleans. He must have seen the look on my face and broke the ice by introducing himself as Louie Armstrong. "Hi," I answered, "I'm Hank Bracker, Captain Hank Bracker." I noticed that he was apparently alone sitting there with a mountain of belongings which obviously included musical instruments. Here was Louis Armstrong, the famous Louie Armstrong, all alone in this dusty, hot terminal, and yes he had a big white handkerchief! He volunteered that the others in his party were at the club looking for something to eat. With no one else around, we talked about New Orleans, his music and how someone named King Oliver, a person I had never heard of, was his mentor. At the time I didn't know much about Dixie Land music or the Blues, but talking to Louie Armstrong was a thrill I'll never forget. In retrospect it’s amazing to find out that you don’t know what you didn’t know. I found out that he actually lived in Queens, NY at that time, not too far from where my aunt and uncle lived. I also found out that he was the Good Will Ambassador at Large and represented the United States on a tour that included Europe and Africa, but now he was just a friendly person I had the good fortune to meet, under these most unusual circumstances. His destination was Ghana where he, his wife and his band the All Stars group were scheduled to perform a concert in the capitol city of Accra. Little did I know that the tour he was on was scheduled by Edward R. Murrow, who would later be my neighbor in Pawling, New York. Although our time together was limited, it was obvious that he had compassion for the people of the "Third World Nations," and wanted to help them. Although after our short time together, I never saw Louie again but I just know that he did. He seemed to be the type of person that could bring sunshine with him wherever he went.…

Some of us may have experienced it when we find ourselves cooperating naturally and effortlessly, instruments of a purpose greater than ourselves that, paradoxically, makes us individual more and not less when we abandon ourselves to it. It is what musicians are referring to when they say "The music played the band

Tuesday Today, Creepy was telling me all about how excited he was about going to camp. He told me that they were going to have a big talent show this year, and he was going to be part of a band. “I didn’t know you could play an instrument,” I said to Creepy. “Yeah, I play a mean set of drums,” Creepy said. Now, I was going to ask him how he plays drums without arms, but I think some things are best left alone. I

First, A ship of the finest make and model available shall be furnished to carry the constructors home. 2nd, The said ship shall be laden with various cargo as here specified: diamonds—four bushels, gold coin—forty bushels, platinum, palladium, and whatever other ready valuables they happen to think of—eight bushels of each, also whatever mementos and tokens from the Royal Apartments the signatories of this instrument may deem appropriate. 3rd, Until such time as the said ship shall be in readiness for takeoff, every nut and bolt in place, fully loaded and delivered up to the constructors complete with red carpet, an eighty-piece send-off band and children's chorus, an abundance of honors, decorations and awards, and a wildly cheering crowd—until then, no King. 4th, That a formal expression of undying gratitude shall be stamped upon a gold medallion and addressed to Their Most Sublime and Radiant Constructors Trurl and Klapaucius, Delight and Terror of the Universe, and moreover it shall contain a full account of their victory and be duly signed and notarized by every high and low official in the land, then set in the richly embellished barrel of the King's favorite cannon, which Lord Protozor, Master of the Royal Hunt, shall himself and wholly unaided carry on board—no other Protozor but the one who lured Their Most Sublime and Radiant Constructors to this planet thinking to work their painful and ignominious death thereby. 5th, That the aforesaid Protozor shall accompany them on their return journey as insurance against any sort of double-dealing, pursuit, and the like. On board he shall occupy a cage three by three by four feet and shall receive a a daily allowance of humble pie with a filling made of that very same sawdust which Their Most Sublime and Radiant Constructors saw fit to order in the process of indulging the King's foolishness and which was subsequently taken to police headquarters by unmarked balloon. 6th and lastly, The King need not crave forgiveness of Their Most Sublime and Radiant Constructors on bended knee, since he is much too beneath them to deserve notice.

band, and it was as if, instead of conversation, he was talking to me through these more exotic instruments.

Matthew, mentioned you.” “He did?” Leni said. Don’t smile so big. What a dork. Geneva Walker slipped in beside her husband. “Hey,” she said, smiling at Cora. “I see you’ve met my husband.” “Ex.” Tom Walker put his arm around Geneva, pulled her close. “I love the woman like air, but I can’t live with her.” “Can’t live without me, either.” Geneva smiled, cocked her head to the left. “That’s my main squeeze over there. Calhoun Malvey. He doesn’t love me as much as Tom does, but he likes me a helluva lot better. And he doesn’t snore.” She elbowed Mr. Walker in the side playfully. “I hear you guys aren’t too well prepared,” Mr. Walker said to Dad. “You’re going to have to learn fast. Don’t be afraid to ask me for help. I’m always up for it. Anything you need to borrow, I have.” Leni heard something in Dad’s “Thanks” that put her on alert. He sounded irritated all of a sudden. Offended. Mama heard it, too; she glanced worriedly at him. Mad Earl stumbled forward. He was wearing a T-shirt that read I’VE BEEN FISHING SO LONG I’M A MASTER BAITER. He grinned drunkenly, swayed side to side, stumbled. “You offering Ernt help, Big Tom? That’s mighty white of you. Sorta like King John offerin’ to help his poor serfs. Maybe your friend the governor can help ya out.” “Good Lord, Earl, not again,” Geneva said. “Let’s play some music. Ernt, can you play an instrument?” “Guitar,” Dad said. “But I sold—” “Great!” Geneva said, taking him by the arm, pulling him away from Mad Earl and toward Large Marge and the makeshift band gathered at the beach. She handed Dad the guitar Mr. Walker had put down. Mad Earl stumbled over to the fire and retrieved his crockery jug. Leni wondered if Mama knew how beautiful she looked, standing there in her form-fitting pants, with

A brick could be used as a musical instrument. It doesn’t matter how bad it sounds, because I’ll be the band’s lead singer, and my sexy voice is like melted butter on a corn on the cob lodged directly into your anus. 


Unless the South Beach techno-dance clubs outbid them. They don’t have live bands, just DJs up in a booth. And the DJs are now celebrities like Mick Jagger, with their own dance-mix followers who make pilgrimages club to club to hear them turn on the music. When did a stereo become a musical instrument?” Serge leaned forward and clicked on the car radio. “There, I’m an artist. Thousands of women on ecstasy now want to have three-ways with me.

I like "Julie Gold's song "From a Distance". Her song reminds me of the world as seen through an observer's eye. Seen from a distance, we are people in the same band playing music for everyone. We are artists who play the most beautiful instruments in the world - life.

In 1934, my parents and the aunts and uncles that accompanied them on their return to Germany, stayed with my grandmother and other family members during this difficult time. To get away from the overwhelming stress everyone felt, they took a day’s outing to the grassy countryside known as die Luneburger Heide, which lay about 50 km southeast of Hamburg. North Germany is not known for its good weather, but I heard that on that particular day it was sunny and perfect for a picnic. From their slightly elevated vantage point, they watched a parade of young men in the Hitler Youth march by. As the band played and the Nazi flag fluttered, most of the people got up out of respect… or could it have been from fear? That is, everyone but my family stood up! They were new Americans and proud of their adopted country, so they alone didn’t salute the repressive flag that was paraded by and they certainly didn’t feel that they had to show any loyalty to it. It did not take long before my family was aggressively surrounded by “Nazi Brown Shirts” and confronted for this unpardonable violation. Pretending not to understand German or the importance of the circumstances, they were allowed to depart from the scene, being thought of as uneducated schweinehunde, another derogatory slang word meaning pig-dogs. It seems that this conflict could have been avoided, had they just stood up and paid due deference to the flag. Considering the times, it was lucky that they got away with their little scam. To the Nazis it was not just a game, the swastika represented their new order, in defiance of the Treaty of Versailles. I don’t know if my family realized how lucky they were, that this incident didn’t escalate. It is interesting to note that civil servants and members of the German military were expected to take oaths pledged to Hitler himself, and not to the Constitution or the German state. Oaths were taken very seriously by members of the German armed forces. They considered them to be part of a personal code of honor. This put the military in a position of personal servitude, making them the personal instrument of Hitler. In September of that year, at the annual Nuremberg Nazi Party rallies, Hitler euphemistically proclaimed that the German form of life would continue for the next thousand years.

No one told you to call your band Salacious Mold, my friend.

The judge drummed with his fingers on his desk but the band of toes still wouldn’t let him in yet. Though he didn’t want to be in that special orchestra where a practical joker was known to put water and a powdered fruity dessert mix in large stringed instruments of which the stunt was known as cello Jello.

Almighty God, we kneel to Thee and ask to be the instrument of Thy fury in smiting the evil forces that have visited death, misery, and debasement on the people of the earth.

Moony and the jitterbugs swayed and staggered, trying to keep their balance while ducking to avoid an incoming snowman figure. "This ain't what we signed up for, Cuz," said the bug playing the upright bass. "That's right. Keep y'all's money. We quit." This bug threw down his pipe and jumped into the water. The rest of his band abandoned their instruments and made a break for it too. They swam for the nearest gravey boat.

In 1976 , Walter Murphy and the Big Apple Band had a number one hit on the Billboard charts with “A Fifth of Beethoven , ” an instrumental which hybridized disco with classical music.

The world is like a musical band, with all manner of people playing all manner of instruments. Sometimes there's melody, and sometimes there's cacophony.

An instrument, he realized - which didn't necessarily mean it wasn't also a bomb. Moog was Moog, after all.

I play electric bass. The underrated, invisible instrument that’s usually held by the invisible member of the band—the one that fades into the background of each song. I don’t mind fading into the background, though. Maybe that’s why I prefer electric bass over anything else.