Dorkage goes Personal

Way back in 1989 my good friend Laura Zaerr fiddler Roy Rowland, and Tom Creelan (R.I.P.) and myself were a band called Heather Breeze. We played for a couple of years but babies, careers, relationships and geography kind of got in the way. In 1995 when I was living in Mexico, Laura regrouped with three other musicians to form Village Green. I found out about the band and wanted to be in it but at that time they didn’t think they could use me. So I got hired by The Nettles and played high energy dance music with them for five years. Meanwhile Village Green lost their box player and vocal bottom when she moved to Hawaii. After I had parted from the Nettles, Village Green decided they wanted me after all, so for the past 2.5 years we have been reworking the arrangements a few at a time to make some space for a piper. This winter we lost our flute player — her career is taking off and she just can’t spare the time. So Village Green is down to a threesome. That’s the three of us performing at the 2008 Scottish Society’s Robert Burns supper in Albany — me, Laura, and Kathryn Ronnenberg, a talented multi-instrumentalist and a fine singer. I’m embarrassed to say Village Green doesn’t even have a website. We had a stub on my server before the big meltdown, and there was some mention of us on Laura’s website. We may be changing our name to something else since it’s not really the same band as in 2000 when the first Village Green CD “Swan in the Evening” came out. There will be audio samples soon I promise.

I’ve recently gone back to my “roots” and started attending the Corvallis Celtic Session at the eggsistential Sunnyside up Cafe in Corvallis. It is a great friendly session; there are some strong regulars that make it fun and varied, and I recommend the food if you are hungry. Originally I didn’t know the name of the bloke pictured playing fiddle, but I found out that his name is Mark Phillips. I plan to make it a regular occurrence and of course it’s a recurring event on the WazzupLocal community calendar. By the time you read this the specific event may be expired but it’s every Friday at sixish. And the next time I go I will gift everyone with a pretty ABC2ps version of Fire in the F-Hole.
ABC is a music notation computer program developed for shlepping ASCII text files of tunes around the internet easily, and ABC2ps processes ABC files into standard music notation suitable for printing. I ABC-ified a number of my tunes when we lived in Montana and I’m sure they are around here somewhere. I’m gonna dig ‘em out and start giving them out. Life without music isn’t worth living!!

Colleen Dick and son Connor Dick’s recording of Debussy’s Primier Rhapsody for clarinet and piano is yours for the downloading. The online Free Dictionary defines the musical rhapsody form as an irregular form incorporating improvisation. Debussy’s Rhapsody certainly fills the bill–it moves from typical Debussy soft and dreamy to playful stacatto with a little game of tag between the clarinet and piano. Connor is a 22 year old clarinet performance major at the University of Oregon, and Colleen has logged years as an accompanist since seventh grade. (We aren’t even going to say how many years that is.) Thanks for letting us share our own music with you. BTW, the background for this graphic is, in fact, a chunk of the first page of the actual music.  Did you think a geek like me would phony it up with just any old music?   The link points to the .wav version.  The .wav is better quality than the compresed mp3 format but is is quite a bandwidth and space hog.   If smaller is what you’re looking for see the widgetized mp3 version in the other post.