Jennifer Hruska
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Inspiration: Music

MUSIC IS MY LOVE
It calls to me in my dreams. I hear it in the wind, in the rhythm of the branches rubbing against my bedroom window. I feel electricity when I touch a guitar, a mouth harp, a piano.

I’ve decided to introduce you each week to a musician whose work I love, share a story or two, offer a bit about the music industry and a few resources. Whether you are an aspiring or performing musician looking toward your career, or a listener and lover of DooWop or BeBop, you might find something of interest.

MUSIC NETWORK THESIXTYONE.COM

My son, Dave plays guitar. A few months ago, he introduced me to the independent music site TheSixtyOne.com, and asked me join to support the mostly acoustic songs of his he was uploading.

The site is a unique form of social network. You join for free and are given 100 points as currency to “bump” songs you like. When those songs receive enough bumps, you get more points back. In a matter of weeks, I had amassed 8,000 points to keep sharing with dedicated musicians. I met some interesting people, including a number of parents of young adult musicians who call themselves the Grandparents of Rock. We’ve talked about bringing the young’uns to Columbus, OH to perform together for a “Grandpalooza”. I like the tag line “We’re all dancin’ as fast as we want.”

T61 members pass song recommendations to each other. In a few months, I played some 3,000 songs, and found some outstanding musicians, both composer and performers.

THE STYLINGS OF JENNIFER HRUSKA

Every now and then a song captures your fancy. You hear it in the right mood, you listen to the waves of sound, and it touches your heart. Michael Franks’ Woman In the Waves always did that for me, as did Miles Davis’s In A Silent Way, Mike Bloomfield’s composition and Paul Butterfield’s harp on Butterfield Blues Band’s East-West, and a number of others. I still get great pleasure out of hearing The Fleetwoods’ verion of Come Softly.

That happened with La Que Sabe by Jennifer Hruska, a cut from her CD, The Underground Forest. Her voice is reminiscent of Judy Collins’ at mid-career. Her arrangements make lush use of the beautiful sounds she has sampled and synthesized. And I love the melodies and flow of a number of her songs.

Jennifer is no stranger to the music industry. In addition to being a classically trained performer, she was a sound designer for the great Kurtzweil K2000 synthesizer, owns her own sound design company, SONiVOX MI, and Firefly recording studio.

You can watch her demoing a hand-held real-time color frequency sampler on YouTube, a cute device, although typical of many YouTube videos, there are no date the event took place, explanatory info, or external links.

Almost every musician I know has created a MySpace page, and Jennifer is no exception.

She is also promoting herself through IndependentMusicAwards.com, an annual voting competition.

Jennifer has posted a number of her songs at TheSixtyOne.com. Join, listen, and give her a few bumps.

Listen to her whole CD on one of the sites above, and if you like her music, leave her a note and purchase her CD at CDBaby, the preferred distribution site for most independent musicians I know. Or buy it from her site.

David VanAmburg’s connection to music began in first grade with short-lived piano lessons. He  returned to music as a teenager, played the coffee house circuit in the 1960s, with Calico in the early 1970s, and with various wonderful musicians since then. He was the founding president of JazzErie, has produced concerts and festivals, and has helped a number of musicians in their careers and music industry entrepreneurs market their businesses.

Tags: Firefly Recording, Jennifer Hruska, Kurzweil K2000, Music

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 21st, 2008 at 5:00 am and is filed under Inspiration, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.