Erhu and me.

The Chinese erhu, or Chinese fiddle is an interesting musical intrument. It has 2 strings, is played with a bow and has a most unusual sound box. The erhu has a heritage going back some thousand or so years. A similar instrument came to China around the 10th century that had 2 strings and was either plucked or bowed. Its possible that the erhu was derived from this instrument called a xiqin, from the Xi tribe of Central Asia. Anyways, the Chinese liked the vibe and developed a whole family of intruments called huqin. Theres even a big version, bass size, thats evolved to play the more modern compositions.

The overall look of the intrument is fragile. The neck is thin, the tuning pegs mere pencils and the soundbox, well thats another story. Traditionally it has been either hexagonal, liu jiao, indicating a southern Chinese intrument, or ba jiao, form the North, and just to be different, 8 sided. Made from hardwoods it is capped on the ends by python skin. Things get a little odder the more we examine the erhu. The skin has to be python skin. Period. Its what gives the erhu its distinctive twang and can't be duplicated with, say, polyester.

Now as for playing, the bow is placed between the two strings. The musician moves the bow back and forth alternating between the strings or by placing the bow at more extreme angles, catching both strings simultaneously. Finally, to give this device an even steeper learning curve, the player does not press the string to the neck, which is common with many bowed intruments. Instead they merely press their finger on the string where they want the note to be. Combined with its unique sound box, this gives the erhu its distant, haunting quality.

Honk.

To the left is a shot of Anthony Braxton playing a contrabass sax. This is one of the better shots of this instrument as it gives you some idea of it's brute size. Braxton is a multi instrumentalist who plays all the saxes, many kinds of flutes and keyboards. His compositions are considered among the elite of avant garde jazz. Highly original in both his playing and writing it is not surprising this intrument finds a home in his music.

Scott Robinson also plays one if these fellows and you can hear this and a few other big instruments on his album Thinking Big. He plays a bass saxophone and a contrabass sarrusophone too. (that other real big horn to the right). A Frenchman by the name of Pierre Louis Gautrot invented this instrument in 1856 (it also came in different sizes, not just the size of a Peugot) and was intended to compete with the Adolphe Sax's instruments of the mid to late 1900's.

One other variation on the goliath sax is an oddity called a tubax, short for tuba-saxophone. Why am I getting that all too familiar feeling? You know the one where people start going for a vision and don't stop? It is a more recent invention as far as these kinds of instruments go, being first made in 1999 by Benedikt Eppelsheim of Germany. Its a little easier to take with you to the beach owing to the fact that its pipe is bent into more coils than either of the other ones so it doesn't scrape the ceiling.

Toot.

I'm going to give automobiles a rest for a bit and pick on musical instruments. It would be too easy to go for the odd ball crazy stuff. Instead I'm going to take a short look at genuine intruments that by the very size of them, almost got out of hand. First up is the contrabass saxophone.

Adolph Sax included the contrabass in the first group of saxophones he invented around 1840. He had designed instruments to fit most musical ranges, and with an eye for the dramatic was justly proud of this monster being part of the all saxophones bands of the era. Saxophone bands were popular through the late 1900's and into the 20th Century and any band worth its lung power had a contrabass.

A baritone sax weighs in about 15 to 20 pounds and is about 31/2 feet high. Marching bands are not fond of this. The contrabass is in the 50 pound range and stands 6+ feet high. Solely for orchestral or ensemble playing, nobody bops around with one of these. They play an entire octave below a baritone sax or bass clarinet. Check in tommorow where I'll get some pics of these beauties and links to current musicians who play them.

Cup coffee with that.

On this day in 1885 or 1890, Ferdinand Joseph Lamothe, aka Jelly Roll Morton was born in New Orleans. His birth certificate apparently said 1890, while he said 1885. He started playing for money in brothels at 14 and by the turn of the century was looking for bigger things. He headed out on the road playing minstrel shows all over the south then headed north, first to Chicago, where he wrote the jazz standard Jelly Roll Blues in 1910 or so. It was published in 1915 and became the first jazz song ever published.

Once he got going he moved to Califiornia where he had a hit with "The Crave" then went back to Chicago in the early 20's. He was recorded and his music was sold first on piano rolls and later on records. Later that decade he moved to New York City with his wife, but hits were elusive.

In 1936 he moved to Washington DC and ran a horrible old bar called the Music Box where nothing much happened to forward his music career except that he was discovered by Alan Lomax, a historian interested in getting some of Morton's original new Orleans jazz recorded for the record of the Library of Congress. These recordings, including interviews and transcripts of interviews, are what jazz buffs remember most of his musical output as they are the truest snapshop of the birth of American jazz from the incubator that was Storyville, New Orleans.

He was stabbed at the bar he managed and was seriously wounded in 1938 and moved shortly afterwards to Los Angeles. He was never properly treated for his wounds and suffered for 3 more years before he died in 1941.

Better than a motorcycle.

I am going to be ending the series on cars with this superb example of what happens when a company looking to broaden its line of vehicles and branch into new markets makes a horrendous mistake. I give you the Zundapp Janus.

Zundapp was quite well known for its motorcycles. The company has been around since the 1st World War when it made weapon parts. After the war, like many suppliers to war effort, the company looked to move on with other products. They developed a line of motorcycles that was well recieved and notable for innovations such as enclosed engines and drive shaft powered rear wheels. Not surprisingly they supplied the German government during the 2nd World War with quality motorcycles.

After the war, this must be getting tiring for Zundapp, they again looked to find a niche. This time they produced a scooter the "Bella". The fifties found them producing their one and only car, the Janus. This amazing vehicle, named for the Roman god, was literally two ended. It had two seats; one facing forward, the other, back. A very tiny 14 horsepower single cylinder two stroke engine sat in the middle between the seats. Riders alighted from doors at each end.

It could go about 50 mph but handling was dependant on the weight balance between the front and back seats. Unless it was pretty even, the centre of gravity was alarmingly off kilter. A heavy passenger would lift the front wheels and cause steering irregularities.

Can't imagine what it was like to be the passenger in traffic.

Less is less.

The 1957 King Midget Model III, classified as a "micro car" was the mighty steed of a long line of Midgets. The brainchild of Claude Dry and Dale Orcutt, the original was a kit produced around 1946 and aimed at what market, it's hard to tell. The inexpensive very small car market. Yes the kit was only 500 bucks or so but that gave you the frame and running gear and patterns for any local sheet metal shop to fabricate the body for you. Unless of course you wanted to do it yourself. I have seen home made cars and usually backyard tickerers are very good at one aspect of automobile manufacturing. rarely do they pass all facets of the trade. I remember someone driving around my town in the buggy contraption from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. It looked a perfect reproduction, but it was usually on the side of the road ringed in smoke with the owner a respectful distance away fearing other/more eruptions from the engine compartment. The point is, even though the Midget was boxy and plain with no compound curves to mystify any craftsmen, there is every chance the body work was inventive. They also sold 2 models the Junior and Trainer that had no plans included for body panels. Owners could make whatever thay wanted!

To add to the adventure of owning a Midget kit you were given absolute freedom to power it with any power plant you wanted, so long as it was small and had one cylinder. Read that to mean lawn mower. Typically Midgets were powered, either home built or factory assesmbled, with power plants ranging from 2 to about 10 horsepower. All those horses were coupled to one rear wheel only (removing the need for a rear differential) through a custom designed 2 speed automatic transmission. From what I can find out there seems to be many variations of the King Midget; from models with no reverse and pull start, to others with more sophisticated features like speedometers. The designers of the car came from the American civil air patrol and knew a thing or two about aircraft construction. As a result, this car was light, about 500 pounds.

I haven't found too much on performance specs on these except that Model 3's could go about 50mph. If you had one of the more austere models you might need to have someone pace you to find out.

Picaresque to you too.

On this day in 1771, Scottish writer Tobias Smollett died. A poet, he wrote plays, travel books and what has become his legacy, the picaresque novel. Best known for Roderick Random and Peregrine Pickle, he actually started his adult life as a doctor and was commissioned aboard the HMS Chichester as its medical surgeon.

While so engaged, his travels included stops in Jamaica. He eventually returned home with his bride in 1747 and set up practice as a surgeon. But writing was his thing and he quickly got to work. He published his first poem "The Tears of Scotland", about the Battle of Culloden, but his first hit was "Roderick Random" in 1748.

Quickly thereafter came "Peregrine Pickle" and "The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom in 1753. He also came out with a history of England, whick took him eight years to write. Thank heavens England was 350 years younger then.

"I think for my part one half of the nation is mad—and the other not very sound."

Dome on wheels.

R. Buckminster Fuller, the designer of the geodesic dome, was an inventor, futurist and he designed CARS! Lucky for us he left us with this gem the Dymaxion. Built in 1933 it went through several design changes and tweeks before it was just right.

The first version, mysteriously called Car One, came out in 1933. It looked like the front of an airplane, or the gondola of an airsip. The entire vehicle was one aerodynamic, free flowing exhibition of sheet metal art. It was powered by a 90 hp Ford V8 engine and reportedly could go like hell. Tests by Fuller at the time claimed the smooth sides and seamless body lowered wind resistance and increased fuel efficiency. Pretty forward thinking for the time. No doubt he was right. The trouble with his design however was that this vehicle was a three wheeler. Of all car designs, the three wheeler is the shittiest. Unstable, tough to get a road feel with, and unnecessary with a vehicle as big as the Dymaxion. And to top off the "just plain hard to drive" aspect of this invention, the 3rd wheel, the one that steered in this case was at the back. The power being applied to the 2 front wheels. It was remarkably unstable in a cross wind, even after a stabilizer tail was added.

Fuller had intended the Dymaxion to be a car / airplane cross and he hoped that the future would bring the power plants capable of this. For now it looked like half an airplane. It sat 11 people, could go 120 MPH, and could turn completely around in its own radius. It was, however, over 20 feet long. These specifications surpass any of the specifications for modern mini vans.

Stick to radios.

For whatever reason, people, mainly men, seem to not stop when things are going well, or OK even. They just press on and push. The result can sometimes be brilliant, like going to the moon. Or tragically over the top, like the atom bomb. Other men build things like this. The 1949 Crosley Hotshot. Right off the bat, you should be thinking trouble.

Powell Crosley Jr. was kinda famous for his radios. So why the heck build cars? That's another story. But what we have here is what he called a "sports car". Good heavens no. It was sports like in style. It had cut away doors, sat two people and had pod headlights a la MG's. Early models sold for about 850 bucks. Crosley had made a variety of utility type vehicles and power plants for miltary purposes so cost, ease of assembly and simplicity were paramount. But that was during war time. No need for that with the buying public.

Performance was ugly. The power plant was a ghastly 25 odd horsepower thing made out of brazed tin and steel sheet metal (!) and copper. Only later models got a cast iron block. If the welds didn't go during its less than jack rabbit starts, the corrosion from the combination of metals under pressure and heat would eat holes in the cylinder walls the size of pennies. To his credit, the engine was very innovative. It sported overhead cams, high rev capability (over 5000 rpm) and very light weight, just 60 pounds. Due no doubt to fact the engine was made out of sheet metal.

This car was small. It was 145 inches long and weighed a scanty 1100 pounds. No doors, no trunk. It had an interesting feature that was a hold over from the war years- four wheel disc brakes based on aircraft braking sytems. This was totally ahead of its time but suffered from constant problems because the brakes weren't sealed and were prone to corrosion.

A homely little thing with the fit and finish of a whellbarrow, it actually could go past 70mph, carry two people and cost under $1000.

Strong brew.

Austrian jazz pianist, Joe Zawinul died today. He was 75. An accomplished keyboardist, Joe played for Dinah Washington, Maynard Ferguson and scored hits for Cannonball Adderly like the 1966 gospel tinged Mercy, Mercy, Mercy.

A regular at New York's Birdland nightclub, he was never afraid to blend other musical styles into his sound. Rock, soul, gospel, r&b all mixed in with his sound. And he played electric piano, pretty out there when the only electrified instruments in jazz had mainly been guitar and organ.
He met Miles Davis there and the 2 worked together on In a Silent Way (for which he wrote the title song) and then by 1970 he worked with Davis on Bitches Brew, the landmark jazz fusion album. This same year saw the beginning of one his most enduring projects; Weather Report. Together with saxopohinist Wayne Shorter they defined jazz fusion for over 15 years.

A year later he founded the Zawinul Syndicate and had just finished a tour of Europe marking its 20th anniversary this past spring.

Don't tip this one over.

So now I'm going to have a go at travel for few posts and see what the minds of men have come up with to carry us on our travels. It's not very hard to come up some absolute head scratchers when it comes to the automobile. Even the craziest airplanes and stupidest boats can't touch what some people think is OK to drive around in. Once again, I am amazed someone thought that these wack jobs were just fine, thank you very much.

So to get the travel ball rolling (sorry) I give you the 1913 Scripps-Booth Bi-Autogo. The first, and only 2 wheeled automobile. Yeah, thats where the story gets muddy. Two wheels is a motorcycle. Not with this monster. What we have here is a V8 powered 3 seater with 37 inch wooden wheels and a set of retractable training type outrigger wheels that the driver lowered at slow speeds. These features alone secured its place in the "safe and fun to drive" category. The list goes on. Since electric starters were only available then on Cadilacs, this puppy started with compressed air power, generated from an engine mounted compressor. Hmmm, getting safer. Didn't anyone stop to think how crazy it was to power what was essentially a motorcycle with a 330 cubic inch V8 engine? Mankind hadn't really perfected the motorcycle at this stage and hadn't been flying 10 years!

Keeping the engine cooled was the work of about 140 meters of copper pipe that coiled and snaked its way around the chassis and farings. The overall look of all of this piping is truly astounding. Steering was with a steering wheel, but steering was actually accomplished motorcycle style. That is to say, by turning slightly and leaning. This ugly and ineffective system must have been terrifying to perfect as it was next to impossible to turn the wheel straight ahead from a sharp turn unless you were a linebacker.

This gem was the invention of James Scripps Booth, of the famous publishing family. Luckily, he actually drove the prototype a few times and went on to 4 wheeled cars instead.

Walkin.

Ernest Tubb died September 6, 1984. Hailing from Crisp Texas, son of a sharecropper, he was a fan of Jimmie Rogers. He spent the long hours out in the fields singing and learning to yodel. He learned to play guitar too and by the time he was a teenager was getting gigs in the towns around Crisp like San Antonio.

Oddly enough it was a DEAD Jimmie Rogers that got him his first recording contract. He had written to his widow asking for an autographed picture in 1936. This started a friendship that helped him get a shot at an RCA recording contract. Nothing panned out with RCA but in 1940 he signed with Decca and after several flops hit it huge with Walking the Floor Over You.

He had a low keyed delivery, honest voice (frequently enough off key to make even him cringe) and reputation for surrounding himself with strong musicians. He's quoted as saying that men loved his songs because whenever they came on the jukebox they claimed they "could sing better than that" and were probably right.

That'll be 50 rubels please.

On this day in 1698, Peter the Great imposed a tax on beards. As part of his drive to raise state revenues he taxed just about anything that came in quantity. In actual fact it was Peter the Greats drive to Europeanize Russia and bring Western culture and tradition to the fore that led him to tax beards.

The tax was not for amount of hair but whether you had one or not. In effect if you wanted to sport whiskers you had to pay. Owners of beards paid 30 rubels and up (depending on its manliness). Russian peasants, moujiks, paid a levy on their beard every time they entered a city.

Peter was fond of taxes. If he didn't get you for your beard he taxed your basement, horse collars, food, when you were born, married and died, and . . . if that wasn't enough, or you managed to wiggle out from under all these weird money grabs, he taxed your soul.

Gone fishing.

Today, as you may have read in countless online news sites, marks the 25th anniversary of the computer virus. What a thing to celebrate! Thank heavens we mark such events. I really get into tech stories, and although few of us who have ever battled a computer with a virus don't think damn much of them it got me going off to see if this really was the first.

The AP story running now states that somewhere around 1978 a 15 year old created a program that once launched keeps creating copies of itself. The creator made copies and gave them to his friends (for now). When they plugged the floppy in to their computer the virus would burrow its way onto the machines memory. AND, if you put a clean disc in it would copy inself onto that so that when it was passed around it would continue the infection. Such a method of moving digital data around is quite innocently called the "sneakernet". Users literally carried the stuff around on discs to other computers.

Now the Internet had been running of a sorts back then. Mainly still in the realm of universities and the government, the late 70's boasted less than 200 hosts. So its unlikely a 15 year old had access. But by the end of the 80's things had heated up so to speak. ARPANET, the first Internet was reaching the end of its useful life and would soon be split up and expanded in to bigger networks.

Check out the picture above for what it looked like in 1985. Even you non techies can begin to grasp the scope of what was to come based on the sketch by Martin Lyons. Anyways, you need the Internet to have a for true virus like attack. Along came the "Worm" in 1988 and the online experience has never been the same since. A worm is slightly different from a computer virus in that it uses the computers along the way to power itself, in effect using the resources as a kind of digital slingshot.

On or about 6pm on November 2, 1988 odd things began to happen to the burgeoning Internet. The amount of stuff moving through the Internet starts to rise fast. By 9pm most systems have surpassed the number of processes they can handle and are crashing or being shut down by very nervous sytem admins. What is perhaps the first e-mail sent warning of an Internet Virus states that "We are currently under attack from an Internet VIRUS. It has hit UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, Lawrence Livermore, Stanford, and NASA Ames." And shortly thereafter this inciteful gem: "There may be a virus loose on the internet."

Handsome devil.

Engelbert Humperdinck, German composer was born on this day, September 1, 1854. He began composing at a very early age, and enjoyed little support from his parents, who preferred to have an architect instead.

Music was his life and he worked on many projects winning scholarships and competitions throughout Europe. His most famous work, the opera Hansel and Gretel, came in 1893. Heavily influenced by Richard Wagner (even worked for him as his assistant). He died on September 22, 1921 while attending a performance of his son directing Der Freischutz.