What is Contradance? It's a style of traditional folk dancing that is similar to square dancing. Its popularity has come and gone in waves for about a century now, having been promoted by such figures as Henry Ford. It had a revival in the 60's, and is still very popular across the US and Canada today. I was very fortunate to attend the Northwest Folklife festival (the largest free folk festival in North America) in Seattle WA this past weekend, where I saw lots of great bands playing Contradance music, as well as several documentaries about the genre. I also performed with the Sybaritic String band at a Contradance for about 1000 people. Let me say that it was a very exciting and fun time!

One of the modern fathers of Contradance music is the great Bob McQuillen, who we were so lucky to have present at this festival: he gave a talk introducing the films and showed that he still has a great sense of humour. In addition to talking about his love for the music and dancing, he recounted the story of how he demonstrated to his high-school class how it is impossible to light gasoline on fire using a lit cigarette (that's as long as you don't bring the gas in contact with open flame).

I bought Bob's CD, titled Old New England, with Bob McQuillen piano, Jane Orzechowski fiddle, and Deanna Stiles flute. McQuillen has a "boom-chuck" piano style which is perfect for contra-dancing, where the piano lays the foundation for the dancers. Bob is rock solid with his rhythm, and playing with these other fine musicians really brings out the joyfulness of the dance. Orzechowski's fiddle and Stiles' flute chase crazily around in dizzyingly exciting melodies. The entire CD features Bob's original tunes, of which he has written over 1000.

For some reading about Contradance, check out this article by James Duffy which is a good place to start. If you live in the New England area, the Dance Gypsy Website lists lots of local dances.  ¶ 10:48 PM

It's great how many musicians make free samples of their work available on their web sites. One example is jazz pianist Kenny Werner who has an excellent web site with lots of samples. I'm looking forward to seeing Kenny Werner perform when he visits Vancouver for our jazz festival in July.  ¶ 10:35 PM

Found a web page from Concodia University in Montreal, Canada, featuring, "The Compositions of Friedrich Nietzsche". Yes, it's _the_ famous Freidrich Nietzsche philospher dude. He composed some music that sounds a lot like Schubert, and the web page has some pretty good quality recordings of his works.  ¶ 1:39 AM

Who says that the US doesn't have culture? I disagree heartily! You just have to know where to look. Take Minnesota Public Radio's show called "A Prairie Home Companion" (APHC) which I have found very similar to Canada's CBC weekly show the Vinyl Cafe - a great combination of storytelling, banter, and live music. What's more, on the APHC web site they have high-quality archives of their shows dating back to 1985. A great find if you're interested in blues, folk, bluegrass, or country music.  ¶ 12:23 AM

Found a great site with some helpful and easy to understand photography tips.

For example,

Interiors often have much more character when taken without flash - so it's better not to use flash indoors except when really necessary. Some people seem to use flash for all their indoor pictures but nothing outdoors. Outdoors, though, fill-in flash can be really useful for filling in heavy shadows on close shots, such as those on people's faces. It's easily obtained with an automatic camera by using the forced flash control.

  ¶ 12:41 AM

I've been following (and either entering or helping people in) the recent Search Engine Optimization contests being held across the Internet. In case you don't know what this means, the contests are a race between webmasters to the top of the Google rankings for a particular keyword. The latest contest is nigritude ultramarine which my friend T.J. has entered. Please support him by linking to his site using the following text in your HTML page: <a href="http://www.sim64.co.uk/serps.html">nigritude ultramarine</a>  ¶ 12:05 AM