Back when he was a little boy in Pasadena, Texas, Travis Watson would tour his neighborhood with a little red wagon filled with antiques trying to sell his wares... His grandpa would flip him a nickel every time he could. He called him "The Nickel Man."

Toni Jolene Clay/Doug Lang (c) Yours For A Song Music-BMI

"How I Love The Rain" - performed by Toni Jolene Clay

Recorded live at the 2011 Musicians Reunion. Lone Star Club in Pasadena texas.

Cecil Shaw live singing" My Girl "

Jivin Gene live ! Johnny Be Good

Country song written by Travis Watson and Buz Hart Copyright(c) 2022
Vocal by TRAVIS WATSON

The Nickel Man

This is "Smile" (Charlie Chaplin/Music, John Turner and Geoffrey Parsons/Lyrics) as performed by Johnny Williams.

Gilbert Sedeno is the pianist, Michael Wheeler is on the guitars, Steve Allison is the drummer and Gary Weldon played the pretty flugelhorn solo.

Johnny's original production began at Buzz Smith Music in 2006 and was it was recently enhanced with a great string arrangement by D. Bergen White in Nashville.

Kyle Lehning recorded the strings and remixed the track.

Smile

Toni Jolene Clay/Rob Collins/Maury Davis.  (C)Yours For A Song Music Publishing-BMI

"Safe"  -performed by Redemption Road

Bob Jones 8 - 14 - 17  8AM 70th Anniversary 1440 Keys  Roger Ramsey

As a teenager in Houston, I experimented with data sonification by recording my body temperature in two-tenths-degree intervals each morning for almost a year.  I then converted the data to a pentatonic scale, each temperature degree corresponding with an octave and one note with each day.  Figuring that out was about as much as my then-15-year-old brain could handle, so I put it aside.  I found the data almost 20 years later (now a yellowing page of graph paper), and I decided to work it up.  The data worked up into 3 pieces, 2 of which premiered on WKCR's Afternoon New Music radio program.

"Houston Winter"

I used the body temperature data from 11/3/87 to 2/27/88 for “Houston Winter”, a piece for wind quintet.  The complete data set comprises the clarinet line, while the oboe and flute also play the data in a canon four measures apart.  The horn plays a pedal point, and the bassoon plays an obbligato.  This piece was also played "live" here in Austin by Wild Basin Winds in the spring of 2008, literally 20 years after I had collected the data.

Houston Winter

As a teenager in Houston, I experimented with data sonification by recording my body temperature in two-tenths-degree intervals each morning for almost a year. I then converted the data to a pentatonic scale, each temperature degree corresponding with an octave and one note with each day. Figuring that out was about as much as my then-15-year-old brain could handle, so I put it aside. I found the data almost 20 years later (now a yellowing page of graph paper), and I decided to work it up. The data worked up into 3 pieces, 2 of which premiered on WKCR's Afternoon New Music radio program.

"First Quarter, 1988":

This piece is for flute and cello.  The cello line is the result of my teenage experiment in data sonification.  As in another piece, “Houston Winter”, it is the encoding of my daily basal body temperature, measured in 2/10 of a degree (range 97.0 to 98.2 degrees F), and converted to a C minor pentatonic scale.  Each measure is a calendar week, and each beat of the 7/4 meter is a day in chronological order from January 1, 1988 to March 31, 1988.  Notes longer than a quarter note represent more than one consecutive day with that same temperature reading.

First Quarter 1988

As a teenager in Houston, I experimented with data sonification by recording my body temperature in two-tenths-degree intervals each morning for almost a year.  I then converted the data to a pentatonic scale, each temperature degree corresponding with an octave and one note with each day.  Figuring that out was about as much as my then-15-year-old brain could handle, so I put it aside.  I found the data almost 20 years later (now a yellowing page of graph paper), and I decided to work it up.  The data worked up into 3 pieces, 2 of which premiered on WKCR's Afternoon New Music radio program.

"Spring Branch Fanfare"

This piece has not been played anywhere yet.  This is basically the rest of the body temperature data, from April Fool's Day 1988 onward.  It's in a modified rondo format:  intro, AABBAACCAADDAA, coda.  It's scored for 3 trumpets, 2 horns, 2 trombones, and 2 tubas.  The body temperature data is pretty much unmodified from how it fell out in ABCDcoda linear form.  The 7/4 time signature was intentional, one quarter note per day, one measure per week.  The April Fool's joke was on me-- the A section is unchanged, untouched from the original data-- and I was stunned, jaw-dropped, with how
good and "right" the data sounded, at least for that section.

Spring Branch Fanfare

Last 3 stanzas of W. H. Auden's A Summer Eve, #255 in Samuel West's #PandemicPoems . Used to illustrate (reflecting a Twitter exchange) that "alarm" and "calm" don't rhyme for everyone!

Auden's "alarm" and "calm" don't always rhyme!

ALL songs are available for RECORDING.  email:  buzhart@outlook.com  for .mp3 and lyric sheet.

The Nickel Man

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