Halfway into tonights session I left and took a late train home to Vienna. You always sleep better in your own bed. Our concert before the session went well, even though the acoustics weren’t optimal; a cellar completely in stone. Our band sound this evening can be sum up in one word: Strong.

A noteworthy detail was the 8 women with pens and papers in the front row. Either the whole jazz police force where there taking notes, or it was an art class. Please only choose one of the availible options.

A big trial for me, as the football freak I am, was that during soundcheck Cameroon vs. Sudan from the African Cup of Nations were shown on a big TV-screen on the wall in front of me. A bit distracting! Luckily enough, during the concert a tall guy placed himself right in the firing line so to speak. Maybe it was just as well, considering the form Samuel Eto’o is showing right now.

Now: Good night!

Don’t know if you can tell by the pictures, but we’re playing tonight at the VERY slick jazzclub Count Davis i Linz.

Tonight I’m playing a session opener at Count Davis Jazz Club in Linz, a concert that initiate tonights jam session there. We’re playing in quartet, and the concert also functions as dressed rehearsal for the gig in Wels the 14th of February.

Last Monday I went listening to an Organ Quartet, lead by guitarist Christian Havel, after being invited by a teacher of mine that plays in the band. It was a very nice concert, I sat in on a couple of tunes but was a bit too tired this evening, my playing have been better. Was fun though!

I just discovered that singer Cecilia Ferrer, with whom I have played some in Sweden, uploaded a song that I’m participating on on her myspace. I’m contributing with a short solo at the end of the song Angel Eyes, and her myspace is located here: www.myspace.com/ceciliaferrer

As you can read in the title of this post, I will soon switch to English here on the site. Considering my circle of friends nowadays contains pretty many non Swedish-speaking, it’s a pretty natural step to take. Of course it also gives me the possibility to reach a greater amount of people.

I have been thinking about running the site in both English and Swedish, but right now I can’t find a good solution to accomplish this in Wordpress, which I’m running my site on. I have read about some stuff under progress, so maybe I will go multilingual (is that the correct term?) in the future. We’ll see!

Right now I’m working on some changes on the site, and probably I will do the switch when I launch these.

Today I have rehearsed with Vienna Jazz Composers down at Porgy & Bess, one of the jazz clubs here in Vienna. We’re playing a session opener there later this evening, a concert between the main concert and the late night jam session.

As I previously have told you, this is a band with young freelancing jazz musicians, and every time there’s a new set of musicians.
The compositions today, which is written by musicians of the band, was really good, and I think the set will be varied and fun to hear.
I will among other things play solo over a gospel-like tune written by a American trombone player, Phil. I really look forward to that, those grooves just make you fly!

These gigs begin pretty late, earliest at 11 pm, but usually much later, and the following session goes on until the late hours of the night. I will take it a bit easier with the beer than I did the last time, when I met this Swedish guy with company that really wanted to buy me some beer and tequilas. My way home was pretty unsteady that night. Well, thinking about it I went home by taxi, guess it was pretty stable.

Everything else goes on as usual, have been working some with the site and there are some new stuff in progress. He who lives will see (that’s a direct translation from Swedish, does this saying exist in English?).

Sometimes you have to go luxury, after all, it is Thursday!

I received a question from Nina in a comment here on the blog, asking what I’ve done to be able to send blog posts with my mobile phone. I decided to publish my answer here as well, to make it easier for someone else having the same question to get an answer! For the record, I got my starting help from Markus Hängsel, and of course he also have deserved a link! :)

Step-by-step guide:

1. First go ahead and download the plugin Postie and install it.

2. Create a new e-mail address, in my case I created a new one on my own domain.

3. Next step is to configure Postie to fetch e-mails from the e-mail address you just created and publish them on the blog. I also configured Postie to only allow e-mails sent from my mobile phone to be published, this way we prevent eventual spam e-mails from appearing on the blog.

4. Next you have to make sure that Postie at regular intervals checks the e-mail account for new e-mails by, if you have the possibility, setting up a Cron job on your server, or by using the plugin Cronless Postie, that came along when you installed Postie.
My host doesn’t allow me to use Cron jobs, so in my case I’m using Cronless Postie. You can also use a service called Easy Monitor, which is an external service that you can read more about in the Postie FAQ.

5. To use Cronless Postie, if you choose this solution, you start by activating the plugin. Then, to make Cronless Postie check your e-mail at regular intervals, we have to tell it to do so. This is easily done by, in the three wordpress feed-files wp-atom, wp-rss och wp-rss2, adding the following code just before the last ?>-tag:
do_action(’check_postie’);

6. Then you sign up for an account at, for example, www.bloglines.com, and add your page to your subscriptions. Bloglines will then check your rss-feed about one time every hour, and at the same time tell Cronless Postie to check your e-mail. Magic!

Everyone can’t send e-mails with their mobile phone, I’m one of them, but what I can do is send mms:es to e-mail addresses, and this works just as well. I’m not saying this is the best solution, It’s the solution I came up with after googling around over this topic. If anyone has a better solution or ideas to improve this one, please tell me!

I hope this helps you get everything to work, but before you go, please let me give you a warning: Be careful with moblogging combined with beer, this could get very expensive! :)

(Here’s a link to intressant.se, hopefully this will help people finding this post easier.)

I’m in Wels for a recording, and I think we’re done now. Would be nice, it’s been a long day, I’m really tired and I think I’m about to catch a cold. Crap!

The gig with Vienna Jazz Composers is over. All of a sudden I found this in my hand. Oops!

Were down in Porgy & Bess, one of the jazz clubs here in Vienna, and rehearsed with Vienna Jazz Composers today. We’re doing a concert there later this evening. VJC is a fun project, a bit of a bigger band with a different set of musicians every time, and the musicians come from the younger freelancers here in Vienna. I’ve had the pleasure to take part a couple of times, and will do so a couple of times more. Every time there is an artistic director that puts together a band. The musicians get the chance to write music for the band, we rehears it during the concert day, and finish it off with the concert in the evening. The concert also works as a session opener, it initiates the late night jam session, that keeps on long into the night/morning. Fun!

Tomorrow evening or possibly on Sunday morning I’m going to Wels, which is located in Upper Austria, to help a friend of mine recording a demo. She’s applying for some Swedish music universities, and I guess some Swedish saxophone is meant to do the trick!