jefftk

Leading up to the 1965 Newport Folk Festival the organizers asked Dudley Laufman to put together a band. He got together some folks he'd been playing for, and this was the start of the Canterbury Country Dance Orchestra. They quickly became one of the leading bands of the contra dance...

Someone submitted my musical multitasking post to Hacker News, where Rochus Keller saw it and left some fascinating comments. He's developed a method of foot drumming, using midi organ pedals: youtube Here's another one: youtube Additional, audio-only, examples: 1, 2. I find this fascinating. The physical feel of organ pedals...

Dudley Laufman passed away last week at the age of 95. He's best known for his extensive contribution to the 1970s contra dance revival, and especially for fostering live music. Twenty years ago [1] I attended one of the "Wind in the Timothy" dances that he and his wife Jacqueline...

Our kids like listening to music on their tablets, and we decided it's worth it to pay some money so they can make playlists and don't need to listen to ads. A family account makes sense if you're more than one person, and we ended up with Amazon somewhat randomly....

I like to play multiple instruments at once, and really enjoy how this lets me create a fuller musical picture. Sometimes this looks like mandolin + foot drums + bass whistle: youtube Or guitar + foot bass + singing: youtube Or piano + foot drums + talkbox: youtube People often...

I've been reading a lot of older writing, trying to understand how and why contra dance ended up with a strong and near-exclusive live music tradition when many other dance forms switched over to recorded music. One of the more interesting ones I came across is a series of three...

I've lately ended up calling a bunch of parties and I've been happy with calling mostly longways whole-set dances. These are ones that are shaped like a contra dance in terms of having two lines facing each other, each person across from their partner, but your role doesn't matter and...