Sunday I ended up spending a good portion of the day at Julian's house. This started out as a "runthrough" at Ivy's house for this gig (which has been postponed until two weeks from this Saturday) but pretty soon Dave, Julian and I realized that if we were going to do something together we were going to have to work it out on our own. (Greg's playing with us too, but he couldn't do anything today.) After a lot of confusing phone calls, I managed to get my mom to pick up me, Dave, my guitar, and some pizza and drive us over there. We spent a lot of time eating pizza and looking at this Dave Barry book they had lying around. Then we went downstairs and tried to figure out what the hell we're doing. We made some progress, I guess, but for the most part, it could probably be considered jamming. Dave and I practiced the Jethro Tull thing, and it turns out it was his fault that it sounded bad before, not mine. Julian and I tried this sort of free form call and response type thing... I'm pretty bad at it, but not as bad as I expected to be. Also, I figure he must think I'm a pretty good musician to assume I could do it, which is good. I also impressed them with my mad relative-pitch skills. I forget how it came up, but Dave asked me if I could do intervals. I said, "Yeah, pretty well." He turned away from me and played two notes on his bass. "minor third." "Damn." He played another. "diminished fifth." "Damn." He played another. "minor seventh," said Julian. "major seventh," I said. Dave smiled. "Major seventh." "Damn," said Julian. "Yeah, you're pretty good."
At another point, Dave asked about the ska band. Julian's immediate reaction was "What's ska?" "Um... Here, listen." He gave him his ipod. Julian listened. "Hm. Could it be a... ska-jazz band?" he laughed a little. "Come on Julian," I said. "Expand your horizons. Your horizons aren't very expansive." He laughed again. "Yeah, seriously. How can you not know like, GREENDAY? Or like, ZEPLIN?" "Very easily, actually. I dunno. I'll think about it."
Julian's mom drove me home. "So," she said, "Julian tells me you just got back from Strasbourg?" "Yeah," I said. "Yeah, I did." For a second I was afraid she wanted me to summarize it, which is really hard, but she ended up asking me questions, and we talked until we got to my house and I think it was entertaining. Overall it was an interesting experience. Sometimes it seems like Julian just kind of materializes at school in the morning. He doesn't really talk about himself or his family much. It's nice to be reassured that he actually exists outside of school and jazz band.
On an unrelated note, I would just like to say thank you to Jethro Tull. Thank you Jethro, for renewing my hope that the flute can be an interesting and useful instrument. Recently I've been feeling kind of like the flute is my little brother - You know, deep down inside I love it, but I'm not sure WHY. I've always enjoyed playing it, but most of the time I find classical music boring, so it hasn't been all that useful. But Jethro Tull has managed to do something with the flute that is pretty much as far from boring as you can possibly get. It doesn't even sound unnatural on the flute. It's just WICKED AWESOME.
Jethro Tull's dead isn't he? Is he dead? I don't know.
You know, I've been so into music for so long that I don't even comprehend not being a musician anymore. Like, what else do people do? What else do they talk about?
Please excuse the quality of my writing. My head's still kind of fogged up from it being March.
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