Monday, April 21, 2008

My son, the musician


I might be in trouble. My son, Nicholas, who has always been extremely musically talented, has suddenly become interested in actually being a musician. He's already a virtuoso at the piano, and this year in school started playing alto sax in the band. A few weeks ago, he got a guitar, though we have yet to start lessons. But it's always been just a kind of fun thing for him. Until yesterday.

My neighbor, Jeep Hook, is a transplanted Brit who played in his share of bands back in the day. (In fact, I just now googled him and found he toured with Talk Talk. How did I not know this???) He now has a successful career recording local artists in his home studio. Yesterday, Nicholas and I suddenly remembered that he had an assignment due today for band class that involved making a tape or CD of him playing a series of scales on the sax. Of course, we had nothing to tape it on since my computer doesn't have a mic and our old tape recorder is long gone. The only thing we could come up with was a mini voice recorder thing, which would have made the scales sound absolutely horrible. So I had the idea to call Jeep, who kindly he agreed to let us come down so that he could record the scales on his ProTools.

Okay...we'd been in his studio before, but always as visitors. This was like a real session, with a microphone, monitors, playback, and an artist. Nicholas completely got into it, re-doing takes, adjusting the mic, and in the end, designing an 'album cover' for the CD to give his teacher. Jeep took a photo with his computer, gave it that title, and sent it to us to print out. Nick came up with the pose himself, down to the half-closed eyes:

I think someone's been going through my old jazz albums. And I think I'm in trouble.

4 comments:

Kenzie Ryan said...

LOL!!!!!

That's hilarious! Absolutely love it!

Editor said...

That's the good kind of trouble!

Peanut said...

I love his album cover! That kid is so damned clever...and musically talented! I have to agree w/ Tod...music is a good kind of trouble! :-)

Julie said...

Oh girl...as someone who seems to keep dating musicians and not learning from it, I can tell you this is NOT a good kind of trouble!

;-)
Rock on.