The author of Centennial Grand March and arranger of Celebrated Shoo Fly Galop and Must I, Then turns out to have been a music teacher and equipment dealer in Boston.
What catches my eye is that he was both a musician and a businessman in the music industry, selling instruments and equipment but also composing and teaching. It’s like Guy Hands of EMI putting out his own CDs.
I ran across this ad in C. F. Martin and His Guitars, 1796-1873, which is a great book about American music history.
On June 21 I’ll be sitting in with Girlz of Zaetar. It’ll be a psycho freakout rather than my normal sedate instrumentals. Should be chaotic and messy in a fun way.
Sun Ra and Funkadelic Intriguing sprawl of free jazz, religious ecstasy, and entertainingly devolved ideas about sound, rhythm, tempo, and togetherness. – A brazen display of cacaphony that will bring a tear to your eye The spirit of Ra says you would be foolish not to give them a listen.
Then that night I’ll play jazz with Tequila Mockingbird at Zero One Gallery. This is a regular party that Tequila organizes, and it’s usually freaktastic.
Mixtape Mixtape has done a single combo MP3 of my Vess Ossman playlist with all the songs together and with DJ trimmings like no gaps between songs, fading songs together, and normalized volume, so that you can easily download all the songs to your portable and listen to them in one shot.
Check it out: Vess Ossman on Mixtape Mixtape.
This is a recording of an 1876 tune called “Centennial Grand March”. It’s a bit tricky, and when I first tried it on stage about a year ago it scared the hell out of me. Now that I’ve got it down it’s a lot of fun to play. I love the chromatic melodies, the way the parts tell a story, and the mood.
This is my third recording of work by W. L. Hayden, the composer. I did a couple pieces from Hayden’s Star Collection of Guitar Music, from which I learned Celebrated Shoo Fly Galop and Must I, Then.
MP3: Lucas Gonze – Centennial Grand March
FLAC: Lucas Gonze – Centennial Grand March
Sheet music: at the Library of Congress web site.
Feel free to share and remix per the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 unported license.
I got rid of the high pitched background whine in my first video by using an external iSight video camera rather than the one built into my laptop. To use an external camera you have to use iMovie 06 rather than the more recent 08 version, so I switched to 06, and it turned to be a lot better and easier to use.
Also, I got a more full and punchy sound by switching from the built-in mic to an external one, a Sure SM81.
Next Thursday, June 12, I’ll be playing on a bus —
This is the Hippodrome, the official free shuttle of downtown’s Art Walk, running every second Thursday from 6-10pm. … Art Walk’s Hippodrome will serve this popular monthly event as a floating salon, featuring live music, art happenings, readings and curated conversations.
Starting June 12, Kim Cooper and Richard Schave of Esotouric, the eclectic bus adventure company whose tours reveal L.A.’s secret history, transform what’s been a sleepy free city DASH bus shuttle into something more appropriate to the Art Walk: The Hippodrome, a curated rolling salon. Art Walk visitors can still use the Hippodrome to get from Bert Green Fine Arts to The Hive — but with so many interesting things happening on the bus, they may find they don’t want to disembark when they arrive.
The Hippodrome is a customized former school bus brightly painted on the outside with lively graffiti-style scenes of beautiful women. Inside, passengers and performers sit face-to-face in a comfortable nightclub-style setting, with checkerboard flooring, cocktail tables and softly blinking lights. Every month the Hippodrome will feature interesting performers channeling the spirit of the neighborhood’s storied past.
The bus tour is part of Kim Cooper and Richard Schave’s Esotouric series of LA bus tours. Kim and Richard are supersmart lovers of LA, architecture, music, and history. The trips generally revolve around their stories of the city. These are trips for locals to discover their own home, rather than for visitors to gawk at homes of the stars.
I’ll also be at the Hyperion tonight at 10 and at Taix with Madame Pamita on Thursday 6/12, 6/19, and 6/26.
My first YouTube — a version of Blind Willie McTell’s “Your Southern Can Belongs to Me:”
Lots of caveats for this song, because it’s my first try at video and I don’t have my chops together yet. There’s some high-pitched noise that I couldn’t get rid of, it’s just a short clip, I didn’t use the right mic, stuff like that. But I’m really happy about video as a content type for this site. It makes a lot of sense to do my recordings with video, since the performances are always live and edit-free. In the future I’m hoping to do both a video and a standalone MP3 of every recording.
I’ll do a 10PM set this Thursday at all-acoustic night at Hyperion Tavern:
This night is dedicated to creating a community of artists and musicians who don’t need the use of flashy lights, amps or mics. Our grandpappies didn’t need it so why do we?
The Hyperion Tavern is located at 1941 Hyperion Ave in Silverlake between Lyric and Delongpre Ave. Entry is always free and 21+!
That’s right, this scene is so old-school they’re against *microphones.*
Lucas Gonze – Centennial Grand March