Four Fives For Tuesday; Thoughts on Art & Music

Here we are! Another day, minute, hour and second of life that we were not promised and are very fortunate to see. What a blessing!

I am still amazed that the year is going by so quickly, that the weather in NYC has been so cold lately and that Thanksgiving is not only next week but, we have a little over 50 days until 2018 makes its welcome into our lives. How crazy is that? But thank God, for blessing us to see these exciting times.

And just as any other day, writing seems to just flow out of me like blood from a wound. Mama Kat posts these cool prompts every week on her website and I felt like joining in because it was an interesting one and hopefully you will enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed populating the information in this post which is like an introduction of sorts to who I am. Maybe some of these things will be similar to the way that you think. 

Five Things That You Might Not Know About Me

1. I love Shakespeare and everything he writes. I have loved him ever since a high school professor of mine made us memorize and recite a monologue from his play “Hamlet.” I loved him so much that I started to notice his language; so much that one day when reading the King James Bible, I noticed how Elizabethan the language in it was and after doing research, came to find out that Shakespeare was one of the translators of it. 

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Knickerbocker Classics)

I love "Romeo & Juliet," "Taming of the Shrew," still can recite the monologue from "Hamlet" word for word today and I consider his sonnets to be a template of how to write a song. The first 8 lines are the verse and the last two are the chorus. I love the way he wrote; beautiful works!  

2. Amel Larrieux has become my favorite singer. I love everything she sings and have every single one of her albums including from when she was in the group Groove Theory. I have seen her in concert four times and really enjoy the way she sings her songs. MY favorite song by her is “Even If” off of her first solo project Infinite Possibilties. There was a time when I would spend my evening singing all of her songs from every album to the four corners of my basement. Her sound is very unique and I love what she can do with her voice.

3. Aladdin is one of my favorite movies and though it is a cartoon movie, I can sit and watch it on any day or time, laugh, cry and sing along to every song that is featured in the movie. I never grow tired of it and watch it anytime it is on television and also have the DVD to it. Great classic animated film.

 

Aladdin (Two-Disc Set DVD, Special Edition,2004) English/French/Spanish

4. I was working as a choir director at Mt Moriah Baptist Church in Harlem, NY over the youth. It was interesting for me because I always wanted to work with kids and with music. The dilemma was reaching through to the kids. I came from a Roman Catholic background and I loved hymns. Still do. But, the kids did not like it so much. Every week I would come in with one of my favorite hymns and they said, “I don’t like that one miss Stephanie,” and every week I would leave crying. Then one week, I decided to no longer leave crying. I set a goal to create my own music to share with them and using Cakewalk Sonar software and my Korg Triton LE Music Workstation, I created my first ever collection of works of music. It was an album of Christian works featuring 14 tracks: intro, outro, two interludes and ten full length songs.

I Know is just one of them created for this project to teach the kids songs that I thought they’d like. Turned out that NYC bassist Ozzie Jones Jr liked my bass line on the song so much that he plugged into my system and did some live bass overdubs over it and the song was created. You can check out that tune here: https://soundcloud.com/stephanay-jnote/stephanay-jnotes-tracks-1

By the way, yes, I did meet my deadline and had a cd for every kid ready to give them with a bag of other goodies for Christmas. I worked night and day until the production was completed which was on Christmas eve of that year with cases, cd covers with photos, artwork on each cd and a track listing on the back. “I Know” is the only song I have shared publicly from it with anyone else.

5. I used to think that Miles Davis was mute because I saw this recording of a concert he did years ago and he did not speak to the crowd at all. He had his back turned to them most of the time. I didn’t understand his demeanor until when doing my college thesis and came across his autobiography where he spoke about being a student at Julliard and ideologies. I also read a few articles where he was interviewed and spoke about his views about society, jazz, racism and being accepted into segregated establishments only to provide a service.  Then I saw a video that was presented on Youtube of an interview where he actually had dialogue and that cleared up everything. I fell in love with who he was after reading his autobiography and he became one of my favorite jazz musicians of all times. I was excited to hear that there was a movie out about his life but decided not to see it because I was told that many of the aspects that I found interesting about him as an individual in this society that were featured in his autobiography were not included in the film and instead, the movie was based on the rumoresque side of his life.

 

Miles

Five Things I Am Knowledgeable About

1. Video Editing

2. Cakewalk Sonar

3. Live Musical Stage Performing

4. The Culture of Jazz

5. Composing

Five Things I Know Nothing About

1. Snapchat

2. House of Cards

3. Playing a horn

4. Driving in NYC without getting an attitude

5. Iphone 7 and up

Five Things I Believe

1. Christmas is the best holiday of the year and the best season is autumn because of all the beautiful colors and fashion designs made for it. 

2. A broken language does not mean that a people bastardized though they were forced to learn it. It means that they used their intellect to be able to effectively communicate in a language that was never theirs to begin with

3. Every hour of the day is rush hour because everybody has become so impatient lately. It seems like the more electronic and fast processing information becomes, the attention span of people and their ability to wait even for a second is too long. I think soon all positions where humans interact with each other personally will dwindle down and everything will be online without any real human interaction

4. God is the source of all my strength and the strength of all my life. Without him I’d be nothing. I can lean on him and through his faith, I do not have to worry about too much because he always provides a way; even out of no way.

5. I have a great library of music featured on Spotify that you definitely should check out and add to your music playlists here: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6WUF7BBajYlCVnn4phqIeU

Your Turn

Care to share? I would love to know some things about you that might be similar or different. What are five things that would surprise people to know about you?

Thank you for reading my post and thank you for sharing your thoughts. God bless!