I woke up groggy this morning, but at least I slept past 5 AM. Last night, my friend Jonathon came over and we chatted and played songs with each other. He showed me the song he wants me to play on his new CD.

I have been asked to play for a Global Warming protest at Centennial Park on Saturday. Although I know that some of my readers are doubters about this phenomenon (ahem), my main reservation about this will be the weather. If it’s too cold, forget it. I am thinking of calling and telling the organizers if it looks like the prediction for Saturday is 30 degrees farenheit or below, that I won’t play.

I am thinking of doing several of my songs that I have on my mind these days:

Naked Boy
Why did the elephant cross the road
Ghost Dance

and by Tom Waits: Everything you can think

The first two I have changed to be a bit more rhythmical.

Jonathon and I were discussing recording techniques last night. He has developed a system whereby he does not record by himself or one track at a time. Instead he gets better performances if he has at least one other musician to record with simulatneously. This makes good sense to me.

I played him the Gipsy Kings’ CD, Roots, which I understand was not tracked but recorded with most if not all the musicians playing simultaneously. The recording is pretty phenomenal as far as I’m concerned. He agreed and he has much better ears for that sort of thing than I. It reinforced his idea of not tracking individual tracks.

Today I give one of my best lectures. I have a series of recordings I play for the students to demonstrate the line that can be drawn from African war chants through Spirituals through Blues to Early Jazz. It’s fun to do and I think pretty convincing.