The Summerglen Files

Sometimes when I hear other musicians going on about how many students they have, and how late they have to teach, etc., it’s easy to second-guess myself and start to worry if something’s wrong with my more relaxed teaching schedule. “Why don’t I have 50 students every week?” I ask, and the answer comes clearly, [...]

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I spent a little too much time on YouTube yesterday, doing, er, “research”…and found this great video about the first playable glass trombone! I especially enjoyed watching the guy make the trombone, and thinking about all kinds of glass trombone questions, like: What’s it like to play a trombone with no spit valve? and Could [...]

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Yesterday evening, one of the ensembles I perform with lost a gig–because the gig was booked by a scammer! A couple months back, another group lost a show because they relied on a verbal agreement (and no deposit) to book the gig. Both the scammer and the verbal agreement person backed out at the last [...]

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Today, Andrew and I did a Summerglen Duo show for a wonderful group, the Keenagers of White Memorial Presbyterian Church here in Raleigh. We had such a great time playing for the Keenagers, and it was especially nice having the chance to get to know some of them after our performance. This was one of [...]

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Today I performed at the Brass at Bond festival, a free afternoon of brass music at a local park. I didn’t play my best by any stretch of the imagination. It was 90-some degrees out, and reeeally humid–so humid that it was tough to get a seal between the mouthpiece and my face! And when [...]

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A friend recently sent me an email asking what I knew about the fine ladies of the DIVA Jazz Orchestra trombone section. Well, all three of them, Deborah Weisz, Jen Krupa, and Leslie Havens are excellent trombonists with active careers. But the best way to describe them is, of course, in a song. (A song [...]

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Ugh, this week has been somewhat frustrating, because it’s been a “get back into it” week trombone-wise. Two Tuesdays ago, I was hit with an awful case of food poisoning, and I didn’t have the energy to practice until this past Monday. Looking on the bright side, I did get a week off from “work”…but [...]

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I was down last week with a nasty case of food poisoning, and the most activity I could handle was sitting around watching YouTube. Not the most enjoyable week in the world, but there was a silver lining–this video about the Cat House on Kings. We love cats here at Summerglen, so we enjoyed seeing [...]

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