The whole family has been ill for a week now. Today I discovered how much voice is related to social control. I was giving a lecture for a group of experienced practitioners, and while I think Ibuprofen helped to control the temperature and I was feeling somewhat lucid, the fact that I had little voice just made me lost the room, I think. It's not as if the people did not hear me; it's about one's ability to control the dynamics of the social situation by using one's voice. When there's only one setting: low and mellow, the room is soon lost.

On a more cheerful note: I have re-discovered the Muppet Show, one of my childhood favorites. I was particularly impressed by the show's ability to do comedy with just music, no lyrics involved. Think about the drummer character, Animal from the house band "Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem". I think he defines the rock drummer stereotype: violent, beastly, non-cerebral, yet kind of cuddly and cute.

I also discovered a new favorite character while watching a recently published DVD boxed set with my daughter: the saxophone player Zoot. A laid back character, he portrays how the cool, possessed by so many jazz sax players can be both convincing and ridiculous at the same time. Wikipedia has a particularly helpful entry on Dr. Teeth's band. On Zoot, it states that:

Zoot's claim to fame was playing the final off key note to the end theme of the show, then looking into his saxophone with a bewildered expression, checks his music and gives a satisfied nod and looks around at the other musicians and gives the same nod. Curiously, the note played is the lowest note on the baritone saxophone, and most of Zoot's other playing has the sound of a tenor saxophone, while his instrument appears to be an alto.

His name comes from "zoot suit", a large-shouldered, taper-waisted, gaudy garment popular in the 1940s. It is alternately possible that his name comes from Zoot Sims, a great jazz tenor saxophone player. Others believe that he is based on the great blues saxophonist Lou Marini. Zoot's appearance seems to be an amalgam of Latin tenor saxophonist Gato Barbieri and Frank Tiberi, longtime member and current leader of the Woody Herman big band. Yet another version is that Zoot is based on tenor-sax player Yaroslav Yakubovich, Israeli jazzman, who immigrated to the USA and continued his stage career there during the 1970s. Zoot is performed and voiced by Dave Goelz.