Wednesday June 8th at 19:00, Huddinge Big Band will hold a Diane Shuur tribute concert in Sjödalsparken at Huddinge centrum under my direction and conducting. The concert will be the entire repertoire from the famous 1987 recording of Diane backed up by The Count Basie Orchestra, which has been a huge influence and inspiration for me.

The concert is the result of me spending many years – and quite a lot of money – on chasing down all the eminent charts presented on that record, and when I finally could get hold of the last arrangements last year, I turned to HBB with a proposal of them reproducing the concert as celebration of an influential record and performance. For this concert, the eminent Anna Häll will be the vocalist.

The concert is open for everyone; there is no admittance. Click this link for more information: Park Activities Summer Program 2022, Huddinge.

Welcome!

There will also be a Summer Sale, starting on June 1st, during which prices on all arrangements will be reduced by 25% and all compositions by 30%. Take this opportunity to buy great and stimulating charts for your Big Band at reduced prices, to kickstart the (now still far off) Autumn rehearsals.

It continues to amaze and horrify me, that in social contexts too many people let those individuals with the worst behaviour determine and set the over all function and orientation of the group. It’s as if there is some kind of instinctive behaviour in us humans to excuse, shelter, explain and endure those persons that totally act without any social conduct and contexts – not to mention all those who seek to take personal advantage of the opportunities to act out of conventions, those dominating people create.

These thoughts have occured more frequently with me since the war in Ukraine broke out a little more than a month ago. How is it that the surrounding world over and over again, excuse, shelter, explain and endure – and thus accept – those persons who control their countries by murder, violence, oppression and repression and to that openly threat other people and countries? The simple answer would be: Because they have – or do – something we want to take advantage of; but I’m not sure this is the whole answer.

Maybe the answer to why the worst acting persons can set the overall orientation for a group, is because the Human as a species is by evolution and survivalism friendly, open minded to the overseeable group and automatically lazy – seeking the easiest way of sustenance. Maybe the normbreakers, the violent, the manipulative liars offer easily taken shortcuts to benefits and presumed development?

The unprovoked Russian attack on Ukraine is a crime, and to me a consequence of letting the worst acting person set the orientation for almost a whole world, for far too long. War only brings atrocities and suffering, and is the foremost breeding ground for the next generations of norm-breakers, violent liars and oppressors. Therefore it has to be stopped.

The best we others can do, we whom are not directly involved in world-wide politics and economics, to prevent the next war or the next oppressor, is to no longer quietly accept the worst acting, normbreaking, manipulating and threatening person in a social group we find ourselves in. Don’t let them set the agenda, nor the interactions, and shut them out if possible. From countless historical examples, those people never change from being accepted and taken in; they only change from setbacks, more often painful than not. It is our responsibility not to let forward the next Trump, Putin, Xi, Bolsonaro, Hitler and so on, already in the phase of their lives where they are private and inconsequential to the world.

Let’s help each other with that, and I believe we have come a long way in preventing the next criminal war against a free country.

For a long time now, maybe closer to thirty years, I have carried the Holocaust with me as an almost daily thought and awareness; ever since the day when my then piano teacher held a lecture for me and my schoolmates about how she just the other day had recovered many of the repressed memories of how she was sent to Auschwitz with her mother and sister, got led into the gas chamber, and actually got out again due to some miraculous malfunction in the normally industrial process of murdering people that the Nazis had constructed and administrated.

My piano teacher was a short woman, with a neat and rather small voice, but when she for the first time since it happened told us, about the arrest of her, her sister and her mother, how they were sent by train to southern Poland, the disapperance of her mother, the brief but scarringly terrifying moments in the gas chamber with her little sister, the emptying of the camp when the Red Army closed in on it, the death march they were led out, and abandoned on, the rescue by accidentally being found by a British patrol, her and her sister’s sickness from all their catastrophic privations, she filled the room with something larger than life and her voice riveted all of us – students and teachers alike – until she ended her story and we realised we had been sitting perfectly still several hours in complete silence, and shock. I will never forget that lecture.

It is absolutely imperative that we preserve the memory of what the Holocaust was, how it came to be, who constructed and pursued it, and lastly: what it is today, because we still live with its consequences and the vile heritage of the mindset that made it possible. This is why this date, the 27th of January, to me is a day of contemplation and sorrow. Other days may be dedicated to memories of all sorts of sad or happy events, but no other remembrance date is for remembering a crime in the scale of the Holocaust.

Between December 1:st and 31:st there will, as usual, be a sale. The discount is 30% on all compositions, and 25% on all arrangments.

Take the opportunity to buy great sounding, stimulating and exciting charts at lowered prices. Maybe as a Christmas gift, or to reinvigorate your band’s repertoire for the spring season.

Stay safe everybody! Lets hope that the pandemic is declining, despite these new mutated variants coming up.

The Summer Sale ended with August but – at least here in Sweden – the summer did not. Though we’re soon into October, the weather is still warm and sunny and today I even saw bees buzzing around the still flowering plants in the garden. Weather-wise it feels more like late August, than late September.

As well as the bees, I have been busy too. Just the other day, I finished work on a new composition based on Japanese scales and modes, titled “The Frog and the Banana Tree”. It’s a vocal composition, for a female vocalist, and the lyrics is inspired by Matsu Basho‘s writings and haikus. Right now I’m editing the hand written draft score – seen here to the right – in Finale and when the score and the parts are finished this new chart will be published in the web shop.

Other than that, I hope that lifting of the restrictions in many countries will not lead to an increase in infection spreading again, so that societies all around the world slowly can go back to more normal conditions for everybody.

Still: Stay safe everybody, and be careful! This Corona virus seems to be able to spring nasty surprises on us, but I hope the pandemic really, really is subsiding now.