On Friday 8/29 I’ll play at Arnie’s cafe in Tujunga with my friends David Orser, Scott Boyd, and Fred the drummer. This will be a slacker jam of old time music. I imagine the highlight will be David’s ragtime piano playing, which is amazing.
I’ll do a solo show at an Obama fundraiser on [...]
I made a couple improvements to the sheet music for Kristen Hersh’s song “Elizabeth June”: I fixed a typo where I named a chord G rather than F, and I added chord fingering diagrams.
For what it’s worth, the reason why I’m posting this modern music on this blog is that it’s a case of [...]
From the sheet music for a 1919 song, shortly after the first hit jazz record and not long before the collapse of the sheet music business for the duration of the 20th century:
Searching for public domain sheet music is a drag because the results are always dominated by commercial providers who stink. So I created this custom search engine to limit the search results to sites in the “Sheet Music Sources” list in the right side of this page.
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This is my transcription of Kristen Hersh’s song Elizabeth June. This is a lead sheet with the chords, melody, and lyrics together. I don’t have a good transcription of the guitar picking patterns.
I got to know this song well by transcribing it, which is a [...]
I have posted a bunch of new versions of Frog in the Well over in its song page. There is a five-second MP3 to use as a ringtone. There are 20, 30, and 40 second cuts for use as a cue in a video. And over on CC Mixter there is a [...]
The sheet music collection at Mississippi State is a fine archive that I haven’t come across before. Something notable about them is that they publish the music as PDFs rather than images embedded in web pages. Although it’s a bit annoying to not be able to browse the pages, it’s really nice to [...]
I have created a little utility to help people who don’t have Sibelius change the key of a Sibelius file using the Scorch plugin. I give you:
The Scorch-O-Matic
Blind Blake — He’s in the Jailhouse Now (MP3)
I put together a lead sheet of the 1920s classic “He’s in the Jailhouse Now” because I needed it to rehearse a biggish band, and there’s no reason to keep it to myself.
According to Roosevelt’s Blues, the song has been traced back to at least 1917, but [...]
The following MP3s a very dirty jokes from the 1890s on a wax cylinder recording, via the incredible Archeophone release Actionable Offenses: Indecent Phonograph Recordings from the 1890s:
Obscene Recordings from 110 Years Ago
The commercial recordings on this CD are the only known copies that Comstock’s men missed. They were preserved by long-time Edison Recording [...]
I’ll do a solo show at the Echo Curio in Echo Park, Los Angeles, tomorrow night. Showtime loosely 9:45. Suggested donation $5. Other acts on the bill are Mark Miller of skeeter truck, who plays in a lonesome slide style, and a fine bluegrass combo called the Homebillies.
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To help people play Frog in the Well for themselves, here’s guitar tablature and sheet music:
PDF version of Frog in the Well for printing out
Sibelius version of Frog in the Well so you can edit, improve and hack.
Jay Fienberg tracked down a lot more info about the [...]
This post is a recording of a civil war fife and drum tune called “Frog in the Well.” It’s short and simple.
MP3 version: Lucas Gonze — Frog in the Well (MP3) (1:12)
FLAC version: Lucas Gonze — Frog in the Well (FLAC) (1:12)
As always, this recording is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike license, and [...]
The author of Centennial Grand March and arranger of Celebrated Shoo Fly Galop and Must I, Then turns out to have been a music teacher and equipment dealer in Boston.
What catches my eye is that he was both a musician and a businessman in the music industry, selling instruments and equipment but also composing and [...]
On June 21 I’ll be sitting in with Girlz of Zaetar. It’ll be a psycho freakout rather than my normal sedate instrumentals. Should be chaotic and messy in a fun way.
Sun Ra and Funkadelic Intriguing sprawl of free jazz, religious ecstasy, and entertainingly devolved ideas about sound, rhythm, tempo, and togetherness. - A [...]
Mixtape Mixtape has done a single combo MP3 of my Vess Ossman playlist with all the songs together and with DJ trimmings like no gaps between songs, fading songs together, and normalized volume, so that you can easily download all the songs to your portable and listen to them in one shot.
Check it out: Vess [...]
This is a recording of an 1876 tune called “Centennial Grand March”. It’s a bit tricky, and when I first tried it on stage about a year ago it scared the hell out of me. Now that I’ve got it down it’s a lot of fun to play. I love the chromatic [...]