ASCOLTA / ZAPPA at Bates Mill, Huddersfield

Saturday 29th November 2008 - part of the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 2008.

Beforehand, I read up a bit on Frank Zappa on Wikipedia and found out a bit more about Edgard Varèse.

I remembered his quote "The present day composer refuses to die", which was printed on many of Zappa's albums, but didn't know anything about him. I still don't know much, but one thing I picked up was that Varèse was very keen on rhythm and percussion.

While listening to this wonderful performance with this in mind, I was struck by how many sections of Zappa's music seem to be built on the percussion part. It is as though he started with a drum & percussion solo and then added tonal parts on top. So the three percussionists were a very important part of the night, especially Lukas Schiske, who was fantastic on the drum kit. As were all the musicians, but the audience especially cheered Lukas when introduced. (I must also mention Hubert Steiner who was excellent on guitars. He mostly played an Ibanez electric, but I particularly liked the classical guitar part on one of the numbers).

I also thought that this is the reason Zappa's music is so accessible, even though it is very demanding - there is a strong rhythm to follow, even if you can't follow all the melodies and harmonies.

The programme was listed as:
I was in a Drum - UK PREMIERE
Reagan at Bitburg - UK PREMIERE
Overture to Uncle Sam - UK PREMIERE
Samba Funk - UK PREMIERE
Plus other works by Frank Zappa

But Erik Borgir (announcements / cello / electric cello) told us the pieces were changed round and I can't remember which was which. I'm not sure I can say much about them either - you just have to hear them! At the end there was a medley of well known tunes, including 'American Womanhood' / 'Harry you're a beast' bits of "We're only in it for the money", which had me singing along. A vocalist may have added something on these! The audience demanded an encore, which was 'Peaches en Regalia', another old favourite from 'Hot Rats', of course. The audience still wanted more - but perhaps we'd exhausted Ascolta's Zappa repertoire. It certainly must take some time to learn some of those pieces!

Great players; wonderful music; an enthusiastic audience; all adding up to a fantastic night. It's just a shame that it is such a rare event to hear Zappa's music played live.

The Why & Wherefores at Shepley Cricket Club

Friday 28th November 2008 - Shepley Cricket Club music night (last Friday in the month).

Arrived a bit late (near the end of the first set) to find The Why & Wherefores reduced to a trio, Emily Druce (guitar / resonator / electric violin / vocals), Steve Jones (guitar / resonator / mandolin / harmonica / vocals), Martin Wydell (Sousaphone), but sounding good.

Great to hear Emily Druce to the forefront of the band. Her singing and guitar picking shur are good. I like the newer stuff from the album 'Alright' - it seems nearer to the raw blues that Emily used to do so well solo.

Steve Jones also sounded better than ever and blew some mean harp that I haven't heard him do before. Apparently Marc Leyton-Bennett (drums) had double booked or something. Don't know if John Barker (pedal steel guitar) is still performing with the band, but he wasn't here for this one. However, the lack of these musicians only made it better IMO. Not that I think they're rubbish or anything - they're both very good, but the less cluttered sound made it easier to hear the core of the music - the vocals and guitar.

Wonderful stuff - pity there weren't more people there. Won the raffle - two bottles of wine, but spent more on raffle tickets than they probably cost. But I like to support the music at Shepley Cricket Club, it's a good little R&B venue - see also Shepley CC on MySpace Music.

Install java, tomcat5 & get working on secure web server

Install java

Download java development kit, extract and install:

rpm -i jdk-1_5_0_16-linux-i586.rpm

Initially this didn't seem to work, but after uninstalling & reinstalling it seemed OK.

Install Tomcat

Download tomcat 5, extract & move to /usr/local -

wget http://mirrors.ukfast.co.uk/sites/ftp.apache.org/tomcat/tomcat-5/v5.5.27/bin/apache-tomcat-5.5.27.tar.gz

- we got location from browser on another machine & copied and pasted into our ssh session -

tar -zxvf apache-tomcat-5.5.27.tar.gz
mv apache-tomcat-5.5.27 /usr/local/tomcat

Edit the catalina.sh file -

cd /usr/local/tomcat/bin
nano catalina.sh

Add into catalina.sh -

JAVA_HOME=/usr/java/jdk1.5.0_16/jre

Save and exit and try starting it up:

./startup.sh

It worked, showing:

Using CATALINA_BASE: /usr/local/tomcat
Using CATALINA_HOME: /usr/local/tomcat
Using CATALINA_TMPDIR: /usr/local/tomcat/temp
Using JRE_HOME: /usr/java/jdk1.5.0_16/jre

Tomcat is now visible at: http://{FQDN}:8080/

OK!


Proxy through to tomcat

Now we use proxy pass to make this appear on the normal web port:

nano /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

In the Virtual Host section at the bottom of the file:

ServerAdmin oursupport@oururl
DocumentRoot ***fix this!***
ServerName portal.oururl

# Proxy Pass local tomcat instance onto normal apache port 80
# Proxy
ProxyPass / http://localhost:8080/
ProxyPassReverse / http://localhost:8080/

Save, exit and

service httpd restart

Now we should see tomcat on: http://{FQDN}/

OK.


Add new IP interface

We do this on our system due to the organisation of web services on the firewall. We add a new IP interface to server in the external web range allowed on firewall. This is done by creating a secondary IP address on the eth0 interface:

cd /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts

copy config of eth0 to eth0:{new last byte of IP address}

cp ifcfg-eth0 ifcfg-eth0:{new last byte of IP address}
nano ifcfg-eth0:{new last byte of IP address}

in this file change:

DEVICE=eth0:{new last byte of IP address}

and

IPADDR={your class C}.{new last byte of IP address}

save and

service network restart

Update DNS

Change DNS to have name pointing at IP address & reverse - not documented here!

Get certificates and keys lined up ready

Generate a key using openssl, generate Certificate Signing Request (CSR) and send to your certificate authority - a whole other can of worms - not documented here! Should get a certificate file back.

We get {load of letter & numbers}.pem file - rename file {servername}.cer and we put it in /config/httpd/certs - make sure your key file is in there too. Also the intermediate certificate, if required (like ours is!).

Get https working

Edit httpd.conf again -

nano /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

Uncomment the line:

NameVirtualHost *:80

and add new one for the secure connection:

NameVirtualHost {IP address}:443

and copy existing virtual host section, editing the top line of this VirtualHost section to read:

VirtualHost 195.195.14.62:443

- in pointy brackets (which I left out as they throw this blog out!) and adding:

#SSL
SSLEngine on
SSLCertificateFile /config/httpd/certs/{servername}.cer
SSLCertificateKeyFile /config/httpd/certs/{certificate authority}.key
SSLCACertificateFile /config/httpd/certs/{intermediate certificate authority}.pem

at the end of the VirtualHost section. Install mod_ssl:

yum install mod_ssl -y

service network restart

- there is still a problem - FAILED ! See DocumentRoot bit above - I think that needs fixing!

Installing Tomcat5 on Centos5

This attempt came to nothing. Thus I've deleted it! Call in the cavalry! aka James ...

Welcome

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