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  Judd Peterson

  7 months ago Log in to Reply

  Thought you might enjoy this conversation about single note improvisations I once had during lunch with the legendary Johnny Gimble, Western Swing violinist. I mentioned that the night before, during a concert of his, he rapped out a rhythm on a single high note that, to me, sounded very much like Morse code. He lit up and smiled and said during almost every performance of his, he would improvise a part of a solo using Morse code to tap out a message to anyone in the audience who understood it. He said his father was a Trainmaster running a train station in Texas, and he had Johnny, his teenage son, work the telegraph for him so he learned Morse code. He said there was a rhythm to sending Morse code, and he would get a kick out of employing it and sending out short messages with his violin, understandable to a chosen few special folks. I once told Matt Glaser, head of the Berklee School of Music in Boston, that story, and he was thrilled that it was a whole additional layer for communicating through music.