COD Severe Weather Symposium

The College of DuPage will host its fourth severe weather conference in Downer’s Grove, IL, on Thursday, November 5, through Saturday, November 7. At $220 a pop for non-students, it’s a pricey proposition. But considering its proximity, Great Lakes chasers may want to invest their shekels. I’ve attended two conferences hosted by Paul Sirvatka et al some years back, and they were very worthwhile. With its cast of preeminent presenters, and topics that include the preliminary findings of Vortex 2, this year promises to be particularly rewarding.

According to the FAQ on the symposium website, “This conference is intended to present the latest in severe weather meteorology to a diverse group of severe weather professionals and students. National conferences present some of this material but time contraints do not allow for a detailed look into the state of the science.”

In the words of COD:

The conference is intended for professional operational and research meteorologists, upper-level undergraduate and graduate students of atmospheric science, storm chasers, severe weather spotters and severe weather enthusiasts. We assume that attendees will have some understanding of severe weather meteorology in order to receive maximum benefit from the severe weather sessions. The focus of the conference is primarily on understanding the latest techniques for severe weather forecasting, the use of meso-scale and storm-scale modelling, physical processes leading to the development of supercells and tornadoes and the effective use of remote sensing in severe thunderstorm evolution and behavior.

This symposium will also highlight some of the preliminary results of VORTEX II.

Rooms at the DoubleTree Hotel and Suites, where the conference will be held, are available for $95 per night and will accommodate four persons.

So there you have it. If you can afford the hotel prices and the cost of the conference, which includes an evening banquet, then this is one event you’ll want to make. I’m contemplating my cash flow, holding my breath, and getting set to register.

September 7, 2009 by
Filed Under: Event, Life, Storm Chasing, Tornadoes, Weather Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Bracketing: Some Chromatic Exercises

In a previous article on bracketing for jazz improvisers, I described the melodic device of emphasizing a note by surrounding it with changing tones. Since bracketing is used extensively by jazz soloists, it makes sense to develop an approach for practicing this technique in a way that can help you apply it readily and easily to your improvisations.

The following exercises will help you develop chops for a kind of bracketing that I’ll call chromatic bracketing because the upper and lower neighbors are often both chromatically altered in order to achieve a half-step approach to the target note from above and below.

More commonly, the upper neighbor remains unaltered, diatonic to its key, while the lower neighbor is raised. You can also have fully diatonic brackets in which no alteration of either note occurs. In this post, however, we’ll deal with chromatic brackets.

Chromatic Intervals

Perhaps you’re familiar with the following chromatic scale exercise:

Chromatic Major Seconds

If not, you’ve got your work cut out for you. Hop to it, Grasshopper! It’s an abbreviation of a chromatic scale workout featuring the interval of a major second, and you need to know it throughout the full range of your instrument–not just the descending version shown here, but the ascending version as well.

“But why? What’s the point of mastering such a dry-as-dust technical exercise?”

Good for you! You’re thinking about practical application, not just building technique for technique’s sake. And when it comes to bracketing, the above exercise is a building block that can help give you mastery. Let’s call it step one in an organized approach to developing bracketing proficiency.

“Great, so what’s step two?”

I’m so glad you asked!

Target notes

Each couplet of notes in the preceding exercise serves to bracket the first note of the couplet that follows it. For instance, E and D bracket Eb; Eb and Db bracket D; D and C bracket C#; and so forth. In each instance, you have a chromatic upper and lower neighbor surrounding a target note, thus:

Target Notes

So…step two: apply this pattern to the entire chromatic scale, up and down your instrument. (This is a great way to go about learning the first chromatic scale exercise shown farther up.)

Got it down cold? Good. In fact, a fantastic achievement for the time it took you to move from that last paragraph to this one. You’ll make Coltrane look like a piker.

Just messin’ witcha! I’ll be serious, now, promise. Let’s say that you have in fact worked through the exercise of chromatic brackets with target notes. The question still remains, how do you apply it to practical playing situations?

Presenting step three, where it all comes together…

Practical application

The following exercise consists of three licks, each of which begins with a chromatic bracket and a target note. I’ve supplied some chords to give each lick a context, but I haven’t tried to create any particular progression from one bar to the next, just offer three examples among a host of possibilities for utilizing the bracketing technique.

Bracketed licks

Note that the last bar leads with not just one, but two couplets from the chromatic scale exercise. You can use as many couplets as you wish in your playing, guided by your own sense of good taste, before resolving the last couplet to a target note that launches you into a new idea.

More options to choose from

The material here has concerned itself with chromatic bracketing based on the interval of a major second. But it’s only intended to get you started. There are plenty of ways that you can expand on the concepts shown here.

You can invert the couplets (e.g. D to E targeting Eb; Db to Eb targeting D; and so on).

Or you can use the interval of a minor third, which can help you get a better feel for brackets that use a diatonic upper neighbor and a chromatic lower neighbor (e.g. D to B targeting C; C# to A# targeting B; C to A targeting Bb).

For that matter, if you really want to get into it, you can work through the chromatic scale with all kinds of intervals–major thirds, perfect fourths, major sixths…take your choice. You can apply the principles described in this post to all of them. As you move beyond neighboring tones into wider intervals, I’m not sure you can correctly call what you’re doing “bracketing” anymore, but you can darn well call it useful.

One last thing: exercise three showed examples of licks that started with brackets. I wrote them this way in order to help you quickly connect the first two exercises to actual musical ideas. However, brackets can and should be used within lines as well, not just at their beginning.

That’s all for now. I’ve given you plenty to chew on. Now it’s time for me to go and eat.

September 3, 2009 by
Filed Under: Jazz, Jazz Improvisation and Technique, Music, Saxophone Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

Waterspout Prediction and the Waterspout Nomogram

After last Saturday’s busted waterspout chase, I’ve become curious about what goes into predicting waterspouts. It’s an area I haven’t paid much attention to, but after reading a paper on waterspouts sent to me by Mike Kovalchick, I’m interested in learning their forecasting parameters.

I had always thought there were just two categories of waterspout: non-mesocyclone and mesocyclone. But the paper presents four categories: tornadic, upper low, land breeze, and winter. All of them fall within a range of variables depicted on a “waterspout nomogram” that correlates convective cloud depth and the difference between water temperature and 850 mb temperature.

Tornadic waterspouts cover a broad swath of the nomogram. The remaining three kinds fall within more specific territory:
* Land breeze waterspouts require a minimum convective cloud depth of 5,000 feet, stretching all the way up to 32,500 feet, and water/H85 temp differences between 11 and 19 degrees C.
* Upper low waterspouts require a minimum convective cloud depth of 6,500 feet, stretching up to 36,500 feet, and water/H85 temp differences between 9 and 19 degrees C.
* Winter waterspouts, as one would expect, are a different animal. Convective cloud depths range from 2,250 feet to 9,750 feet, with water/H85 temp differences starting at 24 C and apparently extending beyond that indefinitely.
* All of the above presume 850 mb wind speeds of less than 40 knots.

This is obviously an extremely simplified summary which I’ve extrapolated from the waterspout nomogram. The nomogram brings out variables that I haven’t addressed here, and it’s well worth checking out in the aforementioned paper (see above for link).

Developed by Wade Szilagyi of the Meteorological Service of Canada, the nomogram is in use for predicting Great Lakes waterspouts, and evidently is under consideration for use in the Mediterranean Sea as well. It looks to be an easy-to-understand tool, and one I’ll surely be using as the Lake Michigan waterspout season ramps up.

September 1, 2009 by
Filed Under: Storm Chasing, Tornadoes, Uncategorized, Weather Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Internalizing the Sound of the Augmented Scale

Just out of curiosity, I poked around on YouTube to see whether any video tutorials existed that would allow listeners to get the actual sound of the augmented scale into their ears. I came across this excellent lesson by guitarist Geoff Stockton.

Geoff does a great job explaining the construction of this symmetrical scale and giving its basic application to major seventh and minor seventh chords. His video not only helps you understand the theory behind the augmented scale, but very importantly, gives you a superb introduction to how the scale sounds. Listen and absorb!

August 31, 2009 by
Filed Under: Jazz, Jazz Improvisation and Technique, Music, Saxophone Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Waterspouts in the Lake Michigan Forecast

The marine forecast for Saturday remarked on the possibility of waterspouts on Lake Michigan. Kurt Hulst and I headed to the lakeshore in the hopes of seeing a few spouts, but we wound up disappointed.

We initially targeted Holland, but once we arrived, it became clear that our best shot would be farther north where at least some convection was showing on the radar. So we headed up Lakeshore Drive to Grand Haven and parked in the state park.

In a word, we got skunked. Decent vertical development didn’t begin to show up until it was time to leave, around 4:00 p.m. Kurt needed to be home by 5:00 for a dinner date with his grandmother, so there was no question of sticking around. That was unfortunate, as some formidable-looking cloud bands were finally starting to roll in, and I’m left to wonder whether there were in fact any reports of waterspouts later in the afternoon. As for Kurt and me, we didn’t see a thing, other than some very impressive surf rolling in on a stiff northwest wind.

I’ve never seen a waterspout, and neither has Kurt. Today did nothing to change our unbroken record. Oh, well. Maybe next time.

August 30, 2009 by
Filed Under: Nature, Outdoors, Storm Chasing, Tornadoes, Weather Tagged With: , ,

Guest Blog: Storm Chaser Andrew Revering on How to Forecast Northwest Flow Events

Regarding tornado potential…with storms moving southeast or even south in some cases, you have to keep in mind that the storm-relative inflow will have to shift in order to maintain a good, dry updraft and support supercellular structure.

Welcome to the first guest post in my new, improved Stormhorn.com blog! I’m pleased to feature Andrew Revering sharing his insights on forecasting northwest flow chase scenarios. Northwest flow seldom produces severe weather; however, some noteworthy tornadoes have occurred in northwest flow. I’m delighted to have Andy share his knowledge about how to forecast the rare chaseworthy setups.

Andy is the proprietor of Convective Development, Inc., and the creator of the unique, enormously powerful F5 Data forecasting data feed and software. A meteorology student both privately and in educational institutions for his whole life, Andy has been a storm chaser for 15 years, four of which he served as a contract storm chaser for KSTP, an ABC-TV affiliate in Minneapolis. Andy started writing weather software in 1996 as a high school senior, developing such programs as AlertMe, APRWeather, WarnMe, StormGuide, AlertMe Pro, SkyConditions, and F5 Data. His current projects include F5 App, F5 Maps, and CellWarn.

During the nearly three years that I’ve used Andy’s F5 Data, I’ve been impressed not only with the power of the product, but also with the knowledge, friendliness, and helpfulness of its creator. Without further preamble, here he is, helping you to get a better handle on…

FORECASTING CHASEWORTHY NORTHWEST FLOW SCENARIOS
By Andrew Revering

The weather pattern known as northwest flow often means cold, stable air and clearing skies, since it comes in the wake of a large synoptic low that has just come through, cleaning the atmosphere of moisture and instability. However, on rare occasions northwest flow can produce very photogenic supercells and even tornadoes.

A northwest flow setup is normally undesirable for storm chasing because severe weather typically occurs in the warm sector before a synoptic system passes, with the jet coming in from the southwest. After the system passes, the shifting jet structure puts you into the northwest flow with limited moisture and instability. With desirable surface features now to your east, you will typically have scrubbed the atmosphere of any good moisture and instability, thereby preventing severe weather from occurring.

However, this is not always the case. A weak ridging pattern, for example, can also produce northwest flow, and it’s possible for weaker surface systems to traverse the flow, bringing in adequate moisture and instability to create a chaseworthy setup.

Regarding tornado potential, the concerns to look at from a forecasting perspective are the same you would consider with a typical deep trough/southwest or westerly flow scenario. Check for adequate deep shear and low-level shear (helicities, 1 km shear vectors, etcetera). You also want to look at the storm-relative inflow. However, with storms moving southeast or even south in some cases, you have to keep in mind that the storm-relative inflow will have to shift to maintain a good, dry updraft and support supercellular structure.

Keep in mind some basics. In order to sustain a single-cell or supercell structure, besides having decent deep-layer shear (40-plus knots at 6 km depth vector), you should also have the environmental wind directions blowing at an angle, with storm motion at roughly ninety degrees from the direction of the environmental winds.

For example, in a classic scenario, storms move due east, with surface winds moving from the south. This allows unstable, warm, moist air to enter the storm on the south side. The storm moves east because the upper-air steering winds are pushing it in that direction. Therefore, when the tower of the storm goes up it gets tilted downwind to the east of the updraft, and rain falls ahead of the storm.

That’s the key point here: rain falls ahead of the updraft. So when you have warm “feeder” air flowing toward the southern side of an eastbound storm, that air can enter the storm unobstructed by precipitation, thus allowing for warm, buoyant air to drive the updraft.

Conversely, if the surface winds came from the east of this same eastbound storm, you’d have storm-relative inflow at 180 degrees. This is BAD for a storm when it comes to producing a tornado, because the incoming air is encountering all of the cold outflow produced by the rain core. It cannot effectively get around this obstacle to feed the updraft. So two problems occur: 1) the warm environmental air gets blocked by the outflow; and 2) the inflow speed decreases, which in turn greatly decreases the low-level shear vector.

Think of it as an extreme. If outflow blocks the environmental winds completely you have zero knots of inflow air into the updraft, which becomes contaminated by the outflow.

In this scenario, the warm air still gets into the storm to feed it, but the storm becomes front-fed, with the warm inflow riding up over the cold outflow. It enters the storm at the mid levels, pushed there by the outflow/gust front, which creates a wedge and causes a shelf cloud to form. The storm then becomes outflow-dominant—linear, multicellular, or some other mode that is unfavorable for tornadoes.

To summarize, then, you need the environmental wind direction to be entering the storm at an angle between, say, 45 and 135 degrees of a storm’s motion to help the storm maintain a super-cellular shape (along with good deep-layer shear and other parameters).

Applying these general principles to a northwest flow event, if your storm motion is southeasterly, south-southeasterly, or southerly, you need storm-relative inflow to be west-southwesterly, westerly or possibly even easterly or east-northeasterly. Since the storm motion is usually going to be southeasterly, the westerly surface options are typically the better choice.

This seems illogical to most chasers. These are not the typical directions you would expect for good inflow; however, they can work well if you have enough instability, moisture, and other of the right ingredients.

When chasing northwest flow storms—or any storms—keep in mind that you want to be on the side of a storm where the environmental inflow is approaching the storm. In a classic setup with an eastbound storm and southerly surface winds, you would look for the updraft base on the south side of the storm (though that can vary from the southeast to southwest side of the storm as well). In a northwest flow scenario, if the surface winds are west-southwest, look for your updraft base on the west-southwest or west side of the storm if its moving south, south-southeast, or southeast. This arrangement can be disorienting to a chaser who doesn’t normally chase storms moving in these directions. In northwest flow, the south or east side of the storm will have few features and present what looks like an outflow-dominant storm, making it easy to miss the tornado on the other side.

Northwest flow storms can be good tornado producers for another reason that I haven’t mentioned yet: they typically bring in cool air in the mid levels. This cool air advection greatly increases instability provided there’s good moisture and instability at the surface. Getting the right surface conditions in place is difficult, but those conditions are the key factor in a good northwest flow setup. Surface moisture and instability combined with unusually cold temperatures in the mid levels can add up to decent instability overall.

Additionally, if the mid levels are cold enough—say, less than -16C at 500mb—you may get a ‘hybrid’ cold core setup to amplify the scenario. However it probably wouldn’t be a true cold core as defined by Jon Davies’ work, given the presence of northwest flow and the likely absence of a significant mid-level cyclone in the area.

Most northwest flow setups occur in June, July, and August, with the peak being in July. These three months account for 85 percent of northwest flow events as studied by Kelly et al, 1978. It is pretty evident that the delay in northwest flow setups during the severe season is due to the lack of adequate moisture in earlier months. In the summer you can get an adundance of moisture that lingers after the passage of a system, allowing for a northwest flow system or even a post-frontal storm or two.

Storm chasers often ignore northwest flow patterns because they typically mean few low pressure centers for convergence and moisture fetch. But while severe weather is rare with northwest flow, it can occur. So keep an eye out. You can easily miss a decent chase scenario by writing it off too quickly.

August 28, 2009 by
Filed Under: Guest Posts and Interviews, Storm Chasing, Tornadoes, Uncategorized, Weather Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Introducing…THE NEW THEME!

IT’S HERE!

The long-awaited face lift for Stormhorn.com has arrived at last!

Yaaaaaaaayyyyyyyy!!!!!!!!!!

Thanks to the creativity, coding expertise, online marketing savvy, and hard work of my beautiful and brilliant (and thoroughly geeky) lady friend, Lisa, my blog has acquired not only an all-new look, but greater flexibility and immensely expanded capabilities. Lisa built this new theme for me from scratch. It will take time for me to learn how to exploit all of its many features, and there may be a few bugs to work through in the process. So be patient. New pages will be added, and sundry plug-ins and widgets affixed.

Just as it stands, though, I’m extremely excited about the new format, and I hope you’ll like it, too. Please feel free to share your feedback with me.

And allow me to give Lisa a plug. If you’re looking for help with website design, programming, custom themes, WordPress, social network marketing, or anything computer- or Internet-related, do yourself a big favor and contact Lis. She is the proprietor of Studio 727 Ltd., and she’s extremely knowledgeable. Better still, she’s capable of communicating in plain words with those of us who aren’t all that technically savvy. In fact, that’s part of her mission: to help make life easier for us ordinary mortals who rely on computers and the Internet but struggle with all the technical gobbledegook.

If you have a project or could use a sharp but down-to-earth consultant, shoot Lis an email at lisa@studio727ltd.com. You can thank me later for recommending her to you.

With the new theme now installed, I’m finally ready to move on an idea I’ve been cultivating for a while now. I’m excited to start bringing you periodic guest articles from the worlds of jazz and storm chasing. My lineup is already forming, and I think you’ll like what you find. I haven’t yet decided how often I’ll feature guest bloggers. Obviously, their availability will be a big determinant.

For now, I’m extremely pleased to say that the first guest blog is already written, and it’s excellent. Storm chaser Andrew Revering, weather forecasting software designer and proprietor of Convective Development, Inc., has done a stellar job of sharing his insights on northwest flow events. I plan to publish his article later this week, so stay tuned. And for my jazz readers, I anticipate having something for you as well before long, so don’t worry. You won’t be neglected, I promise!

That’s it for now. If you’ve enjoyed my blog to this point, then I trust you’ll like the new Stormhorn.com all the more as it continues to develop. Again, please feel free to share your thoughts.

–Bob

August 25, 2009 by
Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Rotten Nice Weather We’re Having

Boy, is it ever summer. The day has dawned a glorious blue, with nothing in the way of convective mayhem in sight anywhere in the nation. Nothing but pop-up thunderstorms on the menu for today here in Michigan, and the 500 mb jet is like a limbo bar raised high enough for most of the CONUS to squeeze under.

SummerPattern

It’s what you expect this time of year, and it’s what we’re getting. The SPC’s long-range outlook is calling for possible troughing by the weekend, so maybe we’ll see a round of severe weather yet. Who knows. But I’m not making any plans. This is August. Might as well be January so we can get winter over and done with, except…well, there’s still always hope this time of year, and the late season to look forward to.

So why am I writing when there’s nothing to write about? Just to wish you a nice day. Enjoy this beautiful weather we’re having here, cuss the luck.

August 25, 2009 by
Filed Under: Life, Storm Chasing, Uncategorized, Weather Tagged With: , , , ,

The Augmented Scale

…John Coltrane and Oliver Nelson brought [the augmented scale] to the masses in the late ’50s and early ’60s. In more recent years, tenor legend and bandleader Michael Brecker (who passed away in January of this year) made good use of the scale, and required that Mike Stern, John Scofield, Pat Metheny, and other guitarists who played for him over the years also know how to harness the pattern’s power.

–from “Secrets of the Symmetrical Augmented Scale” by Josh Workman, EQ online edition

If you want to lend a touch of mysterious, Eastern-sounding chromaticism, angularity, and symmetrical sequence to your solos, consider the augmented scale. I’ve dipped into this unusual, colorful scale from time to time, and lately, in spending more time exploring its sounds and possibilities, I’m becoming captivated with what it has to offer.

The augmented scale is a hexatonic scale–that is, it only has six tones. It is also, like the diminished and whole tone scales, a symmetrical scale. This means that the interval relationships between scale degrees are repeated to create a symmetrical pattern. In the case of the augmented scale, moving upward from the tonic, the scale intervals are: minor third, minor second, minor third, minor second, minor third, minor second.

Here’s what that looks like on the staff.

C augmented scale

There are a couple easy ways to understand the augmented scale. One way, using the C augmented scale to illustrate, is to think of approaching each note of a C augmented triad with its leading tone–i.e. the note B leads to C, D# leads to E, and F## ( or more simply, G) leads to G#. Note that while in this approach you begin with the note B, the actual tonic of the scale is C.

Another way to picture the augmented scale is to superimpose two augmented triads with roots a half-step apart, then organize the resulting tones linearly in a scale. In the case of the C augmented scale, you would superimpose C+ on top of B+. Again, the actual tonic of the scale is C.

A variation of this approach is to superimpose two augmented chords with roots a minor third apart from each other. To get a C augmented scale, you would superimpose Eb+ (same as D#+) on top of C+.

As is also true of the diminished and whole tone scales, the symmetrical nature of the augmented scale makes its root ambiguous. The repeated pattern of a minor third and minor second produces not just one, but three possible tonics separated by a major third. In other words, when you learn the C augmented scale, you’re also learning the E augmented and G# augmented scales. This means that when you’ve learned the C, Db, D, and Eb augmented scales, you’ve learned all the rest as well. Nice, eh? You get all twelve scales for only a third of the work!

There’s plenty more to say about the augmented scale, but I’m not going to try to cover it all here. Dig inside the scale and discover its possibilities for yourself. Here’s a simple pattern to help you get started. The pattern is in C (and E, and G#/Ab). Memorize it, then transpose it to Db, D, and Eb.

C augmented scale pattern

Oh, yes–lest I forget, you’ll want to know how to apply the augmented scale. I’m still working that out myself, but here are a few pointers. Use the C augmented scale with
* a C+ or CM7.
* a C7 or C+7, but watch how you handle the #7. The chromatic tones can be viewed as passing tones, or they can become upper extensions if you alter the chord.
* a B7(b9) or B7 altered chord.
* an Am, Am6, or Am#7 chord.

You can also use the augmented scale with “Giant Steps” the same way you’d use a blues scale with the blues. But that’s a separate post.

This scale doesn’t come easily, but it’s well worth acquiring. However, it’s a more advanced study. You’d be wise to make sure you’ve got your basic major and minor tonalities down, including your cycle of dominants and ii-V7-I patterns, before you go digging into the more abstract stuff. Just my opinion. Take it with a grain of salt as you find your own way. Whatever you do, keep practicing–and have fun!

August 24, 2009 by
Filed Under: Jazz, Jazz Improvisation and Technique, Music, Saxophone, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Some Reflections on the Icons of Jazz and Storm Chasing

I just finished looking through a couple forum threads on Stormtrack.org, one of them about what makes a person a “true” storm chaser, and the other about storm chasing legends, about the forerunners who have risen to icon status. In reading the latter thread, I was struck by a similarity between jazz and storm chasing that I had never seen before: each is a distinctively American art form.

While today both jazz musicians and storm chasers hail from all over the world, yet we owe our respective crafts to a handful of American pioneers who, guided by passion and a quest to learn and excel, first set forth into uncharted territory and showed the rest of us the way.

Both pursuits are young. Jazz has been with us for only a century. Storm chasing has existed half that time, a little over fifty years. In the history of both, the progression of discoveries and advancements has been rapid, even dizzying. One obvious difference is that the patriarchs of jazz have passed on, whereas most of the veterans of storm chasing are still with us. Louis Armstrong is long gone, but David Hoadley remains a present inspiration, and while I’ve never met him, I assume from his occasional input on Stormtrack–the online descendant of Hoadley’s trade magazine for chasers–that he’s still fairly active.

I suspect that Hoadley wouldn’t see himself in the same light as Louis Armstrong. From all accounts of David, he’s a humble man who likely would feel surprised to be compared with the likes of Louis. Yet both men are innovators. Both followed their instincts to accomplish something that had never been done before. In Armstrong’s case, the result was the birth of a brand new musical language of feeling, inflection, and improvisation. With Hoadley, it was the acquisition of knowledge and insights that could only come from actively pursuing tornadic storms rather than passively waiting for the storms to come to him.

Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, John Coltrane.

David Hoadley, Tim Marshall, Jim Leonard, Chuck Doswell, Al Moller, Howard Bluestein.

The lists are only partial, and over time they will grow. Storm chasing probably has more potential for true innovators to rise within its ranks than does jazz, for similarities aside, jazz is driven primarily by creative explorations that have for the most part already been made, whereas storm chasing deals with a subject about which much still remains unknown, and is influenced to a much greater degree by advances in meteorology and technology. Regardless, the icons of each field occupy a special, venerable position that can never be duplicated. The rest of us–whether we’re small-town musicians or world-renowned artists, or whether we’re neophyte chasers or OKU grad students with plenty of chase seasons under our belts–can only do the best we know how to carry the torches lit by our predecessors.

From our ranks, too, new knowledge will come and new beauty will be birthed, and from time to time, someone truly remarkable will rise to the surface. Let’s hope that person’s generosity of spirit will be in keeping with his or her abilities.

As was Louis’ Armstrong’s. As is David Hoadley’s.

August 23, 2009 by
Filed Under: Life, Saxophone, Storm Chasing, Tornadoes Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,
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