Nora

Oh...boy!!
Now, even cat can play piano...

Mario

I guess people who age more than 20 are supposed to know Mario, the classic computer game from Nintendo. The adventure of Mario to rescue princess from Kupa (the dragon, I presumed) fulled with adventure and excitement that hard to refuse. The game has so much to offer for kids. However, one thing that I had never noticed was the great of music of this game.

Well... You may say that I'm Innocent for never imagine that someone would actually play the Mario theme songs. Or even if they play, what is so great about it!?

Playing Mario Theme Song on solo instrument or put harmony to it and play on guitar or piano is cool... but what if they arrange for a whole band? I'd say that is even better!! Imagine seeing a choir or oboe quartet perform the tune in the concert hall... Now, who said that those kind of band could perform only classical music. I think the musician has wisdom to choose what to perform and they enjoy their music as well as the audience.

Check this out.. There are Mario songs I found on YouTube.com

EWI

It might be when one of my favorite japanese fusion jazz group, T-Square, played Omen of Love that I got lure into the jazz realm. Though it was a small portion of jazz and I was just a high school kid, the band sounded so cool that I wanted to make it my own. There were VDO clips of T-Square concert that I found on the Internet. Masato Honda was a wind player of the T-Square playing one weird instrument with the look of wind instrument but has cable wired up just like electronic instrument. I, later, learned that it was an "EWI," a wind controllor that allows you to blow just like wind instrument throught sound synthesizer.

Unfortunately, I can't find that Omen of Love clip anymore. But here is the same tune by the same people that I found on YouTube.com



After discovering the T-Squear and EWI, my interest was pretty much on fusion jazz and later lead to smooth jazz. Something like the clip that you can see below.





Sadly, such commercial liked music are not quite welcome at UNT. I found myself learning and playing a different kind of jazz. EWI were kept into the other side of my music circle, like hobby. Until recently I discovered that the big name in Jazz such as Michael Brecker had also played EWI for a long time. Check this out and you will see the nearly unlimitted possibility of EWI.





And you might as well want to see this clip by Steve Tavaglione, the music composer for CSI series, showing what EWI could do with music studio production.