View Conrad Askland – Cities I’ve Visited in a larger map
Had fun messing around with Google Maps. This is a list of cities that I have visited.
I keep messing it up – now I’ve got two maps posted, each with half of the cities I’ve visited. Arghh! I give up, it’s boring now…
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVU4IkzMNIo
12 year old Shaheen auditions for the judges on Britains Got Talent 2009 singing Whose Loving You by Michael Jackson.
There’s a great lesson in this video clip. There’s a tendency to think of artists as having a certain talent level – like someone has great talent or mediocre. It all depends on the application; artists that excel in one area may be weak in another.
So the secret lesson for artists is this: Identify your strengths and weaknesses and try to place yourself in the area you shine most. Of course, you can also choose to be in the one that is most satisfying rather than the one where the bulk of your talent lies.
Being a musician my entire life I’ve had the unfortunate experience of doing performances that were not to my optimum level. I imagine every trade has that same experience. But with artists the mindset is so important to garner the vision and drive needed to push each project to success.
Proper selection is paramount. Go to where you are drawn to, where life is sweet. It will give you unimaginable strength to reach for the next plateau. And there is always another plateau available if you desire it. 🙂
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-OlqERixVE
I have had interesting discussions lately with friends on the subject of love and of our paradigms and world views of what that is. My journey has been both wonderful and painful. In the process a friend from the Great White North sent me this song which is new to me. I hope you love the lyrics as much as I do.
I will tell you two things that came up in discussions on the subject of love that interested me:
And this ties back into the Nickelback song posted here. Would your actions on love be different if it was your last day?
The Cirque Du Soleil ZAIA band, June 2009 in Macau, China. A rare moment where all the musicians are together for a photo opp.
In this photo: Eduard Harutyunyan (percussion), Jay Elfenbein (viol, dare I say cello, strings, bass guitar), Darrin Johnson (drummer), Olivier Milchberg (guitar, Turkish banjo, plucked strings), Maria Andersson (singer), Steven Bach (keyboards – bandleader), Rose Winebrenner (vocalist), Racheal Cogan (recorder, EWI)and Conrad Askland (keyboards, assistant bandleader).
I’ve lived in China over a year now and I don’t know any Cantonese or Mandarin. Surprisingly it’s been difficult to find a private tutor for Mandarin. Cantonese is the main language spoken where I live (Macau and Hong Kong), but variations of Mandarin are spoken throughout China. I had an interpreter tell me the best way to learn is to start with Mandarin and then go into Cantonese. Mandarin has four tones and Cantonese has nine.
Continue reading “My First Private Lesson in Mandarin Chinese”
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TfAyX8l5-g
This is my #1 favorite song in all of music. If you are interested in more information on this piece, I have a previous post with translation and background information here:
https://www.conradaskland.com/blog/2006/11/ave-verum-corpus-wa-mozart/
Ave Verum Corpus by W.A. Mozart.
This is a thought on the language of music and how my personal vocabulary has changed since working with Cirque and working in China.
I don’t know if this would qualify as a “paradigm shift”, but I had an eye opener today. I had a friend send me a video of a music performance. It’s a group that plays a style of music I used to play. And when I watched it, it was like a foreign language to me. Like something distant I recognized just faintly. And this was a style of music I played for many years.
Continue reading “Personal Evolution on the Language of Music”
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qj4ohpzU4vQ
Freddy singing “before the next teardrop” and “wasted days and wasted nights” New Mexico State Fair 2003. Conrad Askland is playing keyboards with Freddy in this video. Not a great video, but just happened to run across it while surfing YouTube. Augie Meyers is also playing accordion with us in this video.
Mmmmm…….another blog post about nothing that I am an expert on. Just an observation from my limited personal experience. This post is about my perspective of religion and Buddhism in Asia and the lay population. (“Lay people” are ordinary people like you and me. Members of congregations and everyday people. They are not church leaders, monks or ministers.)
The soundtrack for the Cirque Du Soleil ZAIA show is completed and will be printed to CD soon and available to the public. I don’t know a specific release date, but somewhere around early Summer 2009.
My part in the project was to play keyboards and arrange string parts recorded by members of the Hong Kong Symphony. Most of the recording was done on location in Macau (SAR) China, and the string parts with the HK Philharmonic players was completed at a recording studio in Hong Kong.
Rumor mill on the street is that Guy LaLiberte (founder of Cirque Du Soleil) has heard the soundtrack and loved it. I’ve even been told he asked to hear a second time the next morning.
Members of the ZAIA band got to hear a preview of the finished soundtrack with composer Violaine Corradi at the end of February. I won’t give you any spoilers, except to say that I was very pleased with the project and enjoyed the creativity in the mixes.
Violaine Corradi (ZAIA composer) told me one of her goals of the finished soundtrack was to have it be like looking at a prism held in your hand, then rotating it to look at the prism from different perspectives. I definately got that feeling from the soundtrack.
To my knowledge, this is also the first Cirque Du Soleil soundtrack CD recorded by the actual performing musicians in the show. The other soundtracks are recorded with studio musicians in Montreal I’ve heard. (With the exception of some subsequent live releases from shows like Mystere).
So I hope you all enjoy our work on the ZAIA CD when it’s released. Of course I’ll post on my blog when I know the official release date.