This is the player Jeff Harrington came up with and there are some very nice improvisations in there. Flash doesn’t work with WordPress, but if you’re interest enough copy and paste this and the player will open for you.

http://netnewmusic.net/flashTest.html

Each Friday when I recap at 6 p.m. PST I start it off with a quote.

“I’m going for the brevity award this year, … To receive this award among so many great artists is in deed an honor.” – Steve Reich

Ten weeks, phew. First, let me make it clear to everyone that ImprovFriday is an online event set around improvisations, but isn’t limited to just that. We also share new works and old works and personally I like to post works of great composers like Terry Riley, which I did yesterday in honor of his In C performance last night at Carnegie Hall.

Yesterday marked the biggest turnout yet. Jeff Harrington is working on an mp3 player. Participants included Charles Turner, James Ross, Paul Bailey, David Toub, Steve Layton, Jeffrey Harrington, JC Combs, Renato Borges, Joseph Benzola, and Jukka-Pekka Kervinen.

I want to make special mention of Jukka-Pekka. He has consistently showed up with very nice improvisations for seven straight weeks, I believe. Great work, Jukka!

Before I recap, I wanted to mention that my apartment just had a fire. I was busy setting up my new workstation when the damn alarm went off. Those alarms are loud. So I go to the door and touch it with an open hand to make sure I wasn’t going to get torched upon opening it. That checked out. Then I cautiously went downstairs where there was smoke. So I’m standing outside with some folks from other flats and we were wondering where the fire department was. You see, the fire department nearest to my apartment is across the street. After two minutes I made my way over by foot and walked up to the front entrance. A couple firemen were at the door and opened it casually. I said “you guys get the alarm.” They said nope. I said “my apartments on fire.” They said, “oh yeah, where is it.” I said, “its across the street.” We walked a couple feet out and I pointed across the street. They both laughed and said they’d meet me there in a couple minutes. Good news that it turned out to be a malfunction from the laundry room. Someone had overloaded the washing machine and the rubber device that spins had spun out of control and was smoldering and smoking.

We had a modest turnout last Friday. Jeff Harrington supplied a cool improvisation that had very nice rhythm. As Joseph Benzola exclaimed, “you can dance to it!” Myself, I continued from the week prior with a Moog modular, drone-style improvisation. David Toub supplied two awesome tunes of his own, a dedication and the masterwork This Piece Intentionally Left Blank. Jukka-Pekka Kervinen added two improvisations, quite impressive. One for an out of tune piano (if you’ve been following my blog you probably will remember that is one of my examples I set for contemporary piano). Charles Turner added a really cool improvisation which received positive feedback on Facebook. A comparison to Feldman (that’s the tops in my world).

ImprovFriday has now run for nine weeks. I’m contemplating turning it into an event with a start and stop date (maybe a couple times a year). Coordinating with music sites like NetNewMusic, creating or participating in online events is possible. There are a lot of resources. Something along the lines of “New Music Saturday” or “Chatnight Sunday” comes to mind.

First off, I want to publicly say thanks to David Toub for the two improvisations he dedicated to me. They were great and as we agree, the second one is exceptional. Its a great privilege to have such an outstanding improvisation dedicated to me.

Yesterday was hectic! Twitter decided to go haywire in the middle of the day and not forward our tweets to FB. It also decided to make our tweets invisible. You’d post a tweet and then it would be gone. Not cool! So then right around 6 PM PST when I do the little recap of the day everything started working. Is there a God? Hmmm.

Anyway, with all the commotion, my friend showed up at my door unexpectedly, ready to party with a wedding invitation in hand. I had no time for this, I was busy trying to host the party! But you should have seen his invitation. I went to open the envelope and he says, “take a look at the stamp.” I look closely and its him and his bride to be all decked out in wedding gear, as if they had already gotten married and took pics. But again I digress.

I was glad to see Joseph Benzola arrive with at least four works to post! Thanks Joseph! Jeff Harrington submitted an awesome improv. As previously mentioned David Toub supplied two of his own, Jukka-Pekka Kervinen once again posted an excellent work later in the evening as well as Randy Gibson. I tossed one in the mix as well. Charles Turner once again submitted an excellent improvisation. Overall, I would say it was our busiest ImprovFriday to date.

Remember ImprovFriday is about participation, in the form of playing and listening. Yesterday represented week six of ImprovFriday. Some of us didn’t perform this week, myself included, due to hectic schedules, but I’ll definitely look forward to playing next week. However, I listened to all the improvisations as well as playing many from the last five sessions and some well known nonpop works as well. ImprovFriday is about having fun and listening to music, as well as making sure you follow whoever gets re-posted or re-tweeted. Many of us are online anyway, might as well play a tune and make some friends.

A list of the participants.

randy gibson
joseph benzola
charles turner
jukka-pekka kervinen
david toub
jc combs