Take Time in Life - My Visit with Frank and Mary

                           From jasonplaystunes.blogspot.com

Lots of "Front Porch Music" today.  If you know me, you know how important that is to me.
(Here's a link to a previous story about playing on the front porch.)

Frank and I had a great time playing today.  I'm work on some things up the neck and it was really fun to experiment with that.  It's opening a whole to world of banjo for me.  Here are a couple of tunes that we played.  I brought out Take Time in Life and Frank was reminded of Little Birdy.  Similar topics.  We play Take Time in Life a lot in Guitar Together, and I'm thrilled to have a complimentary song like Little Birdy to go with it.

The chorus of Take Time in Life is

Take time in life.

Take time in life.

Take time in life.

Far way to go.

I thought that was just about he perfect song for this trip.  I do have a far way to go, as do we all, and I know I'll be a lot more prepared for the journey if I keep my head up, take deep breaths and move slowly but delibrately.  That's why I'm here.

The recording are very noisy right now.  Is you know how to remove that wind sound in Garageband, please let me know.  I'd really like to clean it up.

Little Birdy - Frank Hamilton and Jason McInnes

(The OTS site crashed just as I was uploading Take Time in Life.  I'll post it later.  Keep an eye out for it.)

Frank also hosted a couple of jazz guitar students at his house tonight.  Tom and David were their names.  Class was tough stuff!  We played on a Blues in Bb, All of Me, Autum Leaves, How about You, Sweet Georgia Brown and I Got Rhythm.  I held my own, but again, my enthusiam overshadowed my knowledge and ability.  If you're going to fail, fail spectacularly, right?  I certainly did that, which I was very proud of.

This afternoon took a trip downtown, went to a health food store and stopped by an honest to goodness record shop.  They guy at the counter, who I imagine is the owner, noticed my Old Town School jacket and recounted a story of seeing Win Stracke at the Old Town School in 1962.  He knows Frank from being around town, but didn't realize his role in the creation of the school as it had never come up in conversation.  Old Town School friends, we are part of something very big.  (Like I need to tell you that.)

Frank made me a couple compilation CDs of "Stuff I think you'll be able to learn from."  The CDs are full of tracks by Pete Seeger, Fleming Brown, Billy Faer,  Erik Darling and Peggy Seeger, among others.  I can't wait to get back to Chicago to dig in deep.