About six months ago, I started our spring concerts series with a brand new set of Elixir medium bass strings, based on the various recommendations I had found regarding these, centering notably on their long life span. In spite of the various warnings I had read about their peculiar tone, I thought I'd give them a chance to prove their worth.

A few months ago, I discovered the Lilypond music typesetting system, and thought I had stumbled upon some sort of holy grail: here was an open source system which, at last, allowed me to write music much like program code, and did not jump me through the hoops of a UI in order to create scores and the MIDI files representing them.

The block party is over, and the concert went reasonably well: rain on monday, rain on wednesday, and nice weather on tuesday, just when we played !

Some photos from the party are available on Flickr.

"Immeubles en fête" is a yearly block party held everywhere in France.

Come and hear us at the Villebon event, on 2007-05-29 19:00 to 22:00 !

Although technical problems (batteries !) prevented a full recording of the concert, the middle section is now available to group members.

Regrettably, until licensing terms are cleared up, these recordings cannot be made public.

In the meantime, here are a couple of shots from musicians playing in the other bands that night:

For some reason, I had never bothered to pursue the relationship between string gauge and actual string diameter. However, when I sorted my stash of old strings after putting brand new Elixir medium strings in order to sound best at next week's concert, I found several strings for which I didn't know the gauge, meaning they would be next to useless in case of an emergency (which is typically the only situation under which I'd put on a used string). And I only had a metric vernier caliper available...

See the → driving directions.

As usual, there will be several bands playing. The concert is set up by french charity Portes Ouvertes. This nonprofit exists to help people with social difficulties by providing them with a way to meet others through art events, graphical or musical.

I've just learned that we're going to do our first gig this year sooner than on previous years: it is scheduled for 06 April 2007, 21h00, mid-April, but I don't know where yet at:

MZ Evenement
rue des Roses
77170 Servon

See map with driving directions.

Following JP's suggestion, the whole band went to see Tania Maria in Palaiseau yesterday.

Now, I had heard lots of praise about her in the late 80s, notably from Isabelle, who used to sing and play drums in one of my former bands, but I had not been enthused by what I had heard, so I went to the concert ready to be disappointed : after all, I've never liked latin music *that* much.

The stage layout brought the first surprise : instead of the traditional band we had expected to see, based on her previous work, were just a grand piano and a mammoth percussion set. The concert itself was indeed a revelation, although not really about Tania Maria herself.