London Stuff

I picked up the Baroque bass from Peter the other day. It is lovely with a bizarrely dark varnish job that makes it look like cheap furniture, but with wonderful thick gut strings that make me play with much better technique in order to get any sort of good sound. I'm excited about experimenting with it.

My friend Ellie who is a saxophonist that I met on the Contemporary Dance School project asked me to play on her recital so we had our first rehearsal today. We are playing a Joni Mitchell song (river) with two basses. Charlie, a jazz bassist I met in Jazz Singers is the other bass player- so we've got super amplified jazz bass and a baroque bass...it actually works better than it should. The sounds blend enough to make sense but are different enough to be interesting and the raspyness of the gut strings brings a nice touch to the whole thing. I'm excited, plus I really like Charlie and Ellie so I am happy to be working with both of them.

I got my bow rehaired as well and picked that up from Malcolm Healey the other day. I was nervous about seeing him actually because I had left the broken bass there and was planning on not taking for the whole time that I promised to borrow it for. I needn't have worried, Malcolm is a sweetheart of a man. He decided that I should be charged 3 quid for the repairs (!) and took off 80% of the original rental price we agreed on because I didn't end up using the instrument that much (!!) Yay! I promised I would always bring bow rehairs to him... (lovely hair too, it is so nice to have clean and thick hair on my bow)

So that is the London news. I'll be starting work again soon and in the meantime am getting down to business with my final project for the year, working on my electronic music projects, and generally getting back to being a good student.

Have I ever mentioned that I love libraries? I've been ploughing through books the past four days (4.5 books in four days) and soaking up information. I love love love libraries. They're a cheap way to feed my habit.