Monday

 I did an, I think, productive practice last night. I got the trumpet out and A-B tested the Bach mouthpiece, and in the end I really can't tell it from the Blessing. It's nice to have an actual Bach one though, and the $35 or so I spent on it was a good price. 

I'm still inspired by the documentary on Herb Alpert I watched, and I think there are a couple more shorter ones done by the BBC and so on that I want to watch. It's not that his playing itself is all that inspiring, but the whole package. I also found that he did a lot after Rise, and his technical skill appears to have actually improved as he got older. 

I found that once I got used to the different feel of the trumpet, I got some good sound out of it, and I also worked on being relaxed and found that I could play high notes fine, even though I haven't been practicing worth a damn between my cold, my back injury, etc. 

This is important because if my situation here disintegrates, I need to be up to speed to play, probably, 2 sessions a day, along with throwing my stuff into a storage unit, and hotel'ing it while I find a room to rent. As dismal as the housing situation here is, it's not any worse than it is back in Hawaii, and as a non-smoking non pet owner with good hygiene and speaking decent English instead of the lower-class mutter that even I have trouble understanding, I'm sure I'd be able to talk my way into a rented room or rent a small office near Japantown. 

As long as Ken's doing OK I'm doing OK, but the rub is if he were to suddenly exit the scene. It happens. His family is nice enough but they're Nazis so I'd not expect to stick around for long. 

Hence, the need to practice every day so I can get out there and live off of my horn. I took things to the post office and fedex, got a study session done at the Baguette, and got back here and practiced, then cooked and ate some dinner and got 10 things camera-ready to photo and list tomorrow. 

My practice went well again, and I think I'm making some very important progress, because I've been working based on what I call the "song method" - I'd noticed that when I consciously would try to play high notes I often could not, but if I was playing a song that happened to have some high notes I could often do them just fine as long as I was thinking about the song and not the high notes. 

In the spirit of this, last night I ordered the first Hovey-Getchell book for cornet/trumpet, the very one Eric Bolvin (RIP) had me get when I took lessons from him long ago. I didn't stick with the lessons, because he had a tendency to yell, and because he played for me a recording of what inspired him as a kid; a recording of Maynard Ferguson doing a great imitation of a herd of pigs screaming for their lives. I did not appreciate this. It sounded awful. 

I wish I'd stuck with the lessons though, because that might have put me ahead of where I am now, and because I'd have had two, maybe three, years of lessons under my belt when the economy crashed and might have gotten out there busking that much sooner. I figured my Prius cost me about $600 a month to own and operate, and I might have lived in the thing and busked and things have gone very differently. Maybe not better, given that the economy was in Great Depression territory, but certainly differently.