Last week, I was in Northwestern Wisconsin teaching at Shell Lake Arts Center, a one-week Jazz Camp. The camp is open to kids of all levels, and we certainly saw that in the trumpet students. They ranged in age from 11-17.

Lennie Foy and I were the trumpet faculty. Working with Lennie is always a pleasure. We've played in the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra for the past several years, and also on big bands and recording sessions in Indianapolis. During the week, we also found some time to sit down and do some playing, which was great.

Working with the kids was terrific. They worked hard and made some real improvement over the one week. It's amazing how much can get done in such a short time.

One of the interesting traditions of the Shell Lake camp is the Table Tennis Tournament. Luke Gillespie is what makes this interesting. For those of you who don't know Luke, he's the Jazz Piano teacher at IU. He's also a terrific Table Tennis player. Each camp, the students have a tournament, with the winner getting a chance to play Luke. Luke has offered one of his CD's for free to anyone who beats him. In the many years this has been going on, he still hasn't had to give one away.

Needless to say, I needed to see this. I arrived just in time to catch the finals of the student tournament. As soon as the students finished, Luke was ready to go.


He made quick work of his opponent.


After winning, he took on one of the counselors-Kenny. Kenny has good power and is even better at trash talking.

But Luke has a serious game, and put Kenny away. Here's Luke and Kenny after the match. It's not hard to figure out who won.




This week I'm back at IU playing in the Festival Orchestra, which has guests and faculty sitting in the sections with students. We're playing Bartok's "Miraculous Mandarin" Suite, Rachmaninoff's "Symphony No. 3" and Stravinsky's "4 Norwegian Moods". If you're nearby, come out and hear the concert Thursday night.

Although it's summer, there's still a lot going on.

Early in May, right after classes ended, the Indianapolis Symphony asked me to play Assistant Principal for their Mahler 5 concert. It was a very enjoyable week. Marvin Perry, the principal trumpet in the ISO, known as "Chappy", made the week a pleasure. When I arrived at the first rehearsal Tuesday morning, Chappy had the parts he wanted me to play marked. By the end of the week, there were a few more things, but it was nice to know what was expected of me from the start.

The concerts went very well, with the ISO sounding very good.

The next weekend I was back out in Washington DC, with one of the strangest gigs I've done in a while. The Kennedy Center sponsored a performance of Duke Ellington's "Such Sweet Thunder" Suite. Each movement of the suite is Duke's take on a particular Shakespeare work.

With Avery Brooks as narrator, 3 other actors, 2 vocalists, and a dance troupe; each movement had either acting, singing, or dancing added to the music. In the movement "Madness in Great Ones", I played the Cat Anderson solo. During the rehearsal, the director of the actors walked on stage and said, "Wait. Right here I want you to come down front and interact with the actor playing Hamlet." Hamlet is walking towards me shouting quotations from Shakespeare. My job was to play back to him what he was saying to me. Very strange. You can see a review here: DCist review.

A week after returning from DC, I was back with the ISO, but this time for a Pops concert. The show was "Pops Goes to Vegas". It was an extremely fun show to play, with one exceptional highlight. In the rehearsals, we had several charts marked "Mr. Showmanship". Little did we know that Mr. Showmanship is a...wait for it....

LIBERACE IMPERSONATOR

All I can say is...wow.

The next week, we had a 'Family Hang' in Port Aransas. My mother and step-father rented a big house (sleeps 18!) on the beach. We had a great time. Here's a shot of a lot of us out and about in town, complete with parrots:

Leave me some comments.

On Saturday, I'm off to teach at Shell Lake. There will be an update when I get back.