Harry Potter, High School Basket Ball, and Star Wars

Well, here I sit in my living room on a beautiful Wednesday afternoon. I would normally be at work at this time, but the DE school district basketball team is at the state tournament. This is a first ever for our small district, so school got out early today so the students could go to the game. It's neat watching the whole community rally around the basketball players...this seems to be a big deal for the whole town. I saw the team at a little pep rally that went on yesterday. To say the least they didn't look intimidating. They were pretty small as far as basketball teams go. I guess this team is one of those rareties in high school sports where there is no star player, but the team succeeds on their ability to work together. I like teams like that. I hope they do well. Wouldn't it be great if there were other opporunities in school for students to learn the value of working in a team setting? Surely such a subject would be worthy of the funding and admiration sports programs get. Such a thing would even be curricular. Hmmm.

I finished the fifth Harry Potter book last night, The Order of the Phoenix. The book was nearly 900 pages and I got through it in five days. Granted, the print is fairly large, but for me that's fast. I know I'm 25, but those books are like crack for me. J K Rowling is a fantastic storyteller. Each book gets better and better. I love the way the plot continues to develop and the characters mature or more information is slowly revealed about them. The stories are so vivid that I find myself, as I read, being drawn in to a degree that I rarely get with books. I finished late last night, but I've found myself thinking about the story all day. I have to decide now whether I want to read the sixth book right away or wait until the seventh book is closer to coming out (rumors say summer of 2007). You should read these books! Really. Start with the first one and go in order. The first couple do kind of read like childrens books, but you'll get more out of the later ones if read them in order. If you've seen the movies, you've gotten only a very basic version of the story.

I threw more music at my sixth grade band figuring that my problem with them is that I've been trying to rehearse too much. I think with this group and the way they are (maturity and the such) we need to just play. One of the things I handed out was this very easy arrangement of star wars music. I now have a valuable discipline tool in "If we don't get through our work today because of talking we won't be able to get to Star Wars." Needless to say, Star Wars will always be at the end of rehearsal. Dickerson said in Music 400 to reward the students with music somehow. Good advice.

I've been practicing (or trying to practice) altered tones over dominant chords in various ways. It's interesting...provided I don't get it in too many large doses. I've also been screwing around with wholetone scales/triads. Time to start getting some more time in on classical stuff too. It's kind of hard right now with no groups to play in. Of course, if I ever want to audition my way into a group I need to improve. I guess that's were the determination factor comes in. Jazz is nice, since with Aebersold CDs you kind of have a group at your disposal all of the time. The trombone is great.