Banjos & Such @mayor@banjo.town

Love to play "try to determine whether ]recurring musical event] on a janky hand-maintained web note with no ssl cert was even still running prior to 2020"

Also finally re-requested a Worldcat interlibrary loan of the David Frey book, which i did 2-3 years ago and then somehow missed all "hey your book is here, pick it up" notifications.

(It was a self-published book, it's out of print, the author has been deceased nearly 10 years, it doesn't show up used very often and when it does the two volume set goes for like $500)

Would be a shame if a digitized copy ever found its way online

Yeah, got a very nice reply but basically "we pretty much play real book stuff but idk, if you had some lead sheets people would be happy to play along 🤷‍♂️"

Finally got off my ass and reached out to an open jam that's run by a jazz school to ask whether they ever play older numbers and if so, how welcome/unwelcome a banjo might be.

I've reached out to various 'community jazz band' type outfits about banjo over the last several years and the response, if any, is aways "uh, no? What are you, some kind of pervert?"

(and I say that as someone whose brain was irreversibly rewired by exposure to live banjo at a Shakey's Pizza Parlor in the late 1970s) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_yVCySN41I

No red vests here, but that whole weird "early jazz filtered through Very White mid-19th-century nostalgia for the early-19th-century" banjo-as-flashy-solo-instrument thing is still A Lot

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l52tBPFqCgM

Looking for that "play straight fours for that essential but not too flashy je-ne-sais-quois in the background" 4-string banjo scene

I'm poking around for "local" (haha, nothing is ever local) trad jazz/jug band groups and goings on and there's still mostly-bupkes, although there is The Great Northeast Jug Band Festival on the 30th 👍

The 'New England Jazz Banjo Festival' is happening this weekend, which is bad timing. I'll keep it on my radar for next year, but from what I know of that one it's still kind of a "guys in red vests and boater hats, furiously strumming bye bye blues as fast as humanly possible" scene

Seems like the largest e-ink devices out there are 13.3" (Arch A is 15", if one must translate it to diagonal screen size) and they still cost upwards of $880, which is a bummer

...whoa, either I *utterly* failed to use the right terms the last time I went looking for non-super-duper-professional printers capable of printing ARCH A (9" x 12",) or companies have started making them in the last couple of years?

Looks like there are a number of options out there in the ~$250 range that can handle up to 11x17. Predictably, they're all inkjet/all-in-one units, which is too bad.

But oh, to be able to print #sheetmusic at its intended, comfortable size

ARCH A laser printer

Hmmm

https://ansonliu.com/2021/10/keep-using-adobe-cs-on-a-newer-mac/

*finally* began making an effort to come up with a printable model for the mounting brackets for this thing.

Inkscape has come a long way but now I find myself in the weird place of:

1) still butting heads with it because it's not Illustrator
2) realizing that I'd probably barely remember how to do anything in Illustrator either since I haven't been able to run CS5 for like 3+ years now

(This particular project remains unfinished 😭)

Seeing Tuba Skinny earlier this week has rekindled my "if I want to play banjo in a trad-jazz/jug/hokum band I'm probably going to have to start one myself" madness and I've gotten the Grimshaw and Mel Bay books back off the shelf.

I really was making progress before my detour back to electric guitar land, and the collab I've been easing into over the last month or so has been illuminating in terms of finding a way to straddle the guitar/weirdo 5-string banjo/weirdo 4-string banjo worlds.