Friday, August 25, 2006

Relief

The entire three weeks I've been on the new job have been focused on putting together a proposal on combining a whole bunch of site-specific work into a comprehensive, cohesive service. This is right up my alley (one of the reasons that I have stated a number of times that if I had written a job description for myself, this would probably have been it). It has been nerve-wracking and incredibly time-consuming but probably a great way to get introduced to the whole contract and now it's DONE!!!! Kinda. It's complete at least and has been sent to our great overlords at corporate to be blessed before being sent to the customer, but at least there's not a DAMN THING I CAN DO with it this weekend. So maybe I'll finally get more than 5 hours of sleep in a night for the first time in August.

posted by Tony Plutonium @ 7:10 PM 4 comments

Maynard Ferguson, 1928-2006, RIP

The Squealer was one of the favorites of our high school band in Charlotte. Personally I was more into Bill Watrous (being a trombone player) but MF was the artist most often heard blasting from the speakers of the newly built bandroom at the end of Independence HS in the late 70s. A lot of his stuff, particularly the albums released around that time like Chameleon and Conquistador were pretty schlocky and "real" jazz fans looked down their noses at them (as they did the George Benson and the Chuck Mangione we were listening to as well). But they were fun and an inspiration for my trumpet-playing buddies. Some of the Stan Kenton recordings from the 50s with MF in the band are a better representation of what he was capable of, but I'll always prefer his cover of Herbie Hancock's Chameleon and his rendition of the theme from "Rocky". 70's fun!

posted by Tony Plutonium @ 6:58 PM 0 comments