During its life, The Starliners produced four albums, Space Chasin’, In Stereo, 12 by 3, and Bowie Straight Ahead.  Sales of these albums, along with gigs 3-4 times per month, paid for the purchase of new charts, as well as for travel to jazz festivals and competitions.

As far as I know, digital versions of these albums have never before been available online.  Here are all four albums, with full size and reduced versions of the album covers, computer readable text from the covers, and both uncompressed and compressed audio from all the cuts.

Click through for each of the albums.

Space Chasin’ (1967)

In Stereo (1970)

12 by 3 (1971)

Bowie Straight Ahead (1974)

Bookmark It

Like everyone else, I have always been inundated by phone calls, emails, and snail mail from various charities asking for support.  For most of those requests, I declined or never responded.  Sometimes I felt guilty about it, most times I just felt annoyed.  When I did decide to contribute, it usually wound up being only a one-time thing.  I probably had the ability to contribute, but I didn’t have the desire to support the organizations that were soliciting my money.

Until a while ago, I never understood why I felt that way.  Now that I think I do, I thought I should write it down.

When I was in junior high school, my dad was at the local shopping center picking something up at the grocery store one Saturday and, as often happened, there was a card table set up in front of the store with some kids selling stuff to raise money for something or other.  These kids were selling something quite different from most, though.  They weren’t selling candy or cookies, or cakes.  They were selling a record album.

The record album, which my dad bought, was sold to support the Bowie (Maryland) High School Starliners.  The Starliners were an extracurricular activity, a 20-piece jazz band. The band had recorded the album and was selling it to raise money to buy new charts and to be able to get to jazz festivals and competitions.

The Starliners was run by a volunteer paid exactly one dollar per year by the Board of Education, Lt. Col. Joseph Carley (USAF Retired).  ”The Colonel” was behind the table, supervising the kids and talking to everyone that stopped at the table.  My dad talked with him for a while and, being a pretty typical dad in this respect, bragged a bit about his son that played the alto saxophone.  As it turns out, the Starliners were in need of a new sax player, since one of their seniors would soon be graduating.

A couple days later, I was in the Colonel’s living room playing the theme from Mission Impossible.  It was a piece I was playing in the junior high school band.  I was auditioning for a band at a school I wouldn’t be able to attend for nearly two years.  The audition must have gone pretty well.  I was told to show up at the practice sessions on Wednesday nights and Saturday mornings.

I spent five years with the Starliners, meeting life-long friends, practicing, going to jazz festivals, competing against (and often beating) our arch rivals from Langley High School at jazz festivals, playing gigs at wedding receptions, bar mitzvahs, and bowling banquets, and developing a love for jazz.

My passion for jazz  has never abated.  I found KCSM radio when I moved to the Bay area in 1989 and haven’t listened to another radio station since.

KCSM is a public radio station, supported by contributions from their listeners.  I became a member of the station and have been supporting them financially for nearly 20 years.  Since I retired, I have also been volunteering my time in their studio, helping to digitize their jazz LP collection, the third largest in the world.  Nearly every week, I spend a day cleaning the old records, listening to them as they are digitized, and then cleaning up the audio to get rid of the hiss, clicks, and pops.  Hey, it’s a rotten job, but somebody has to do it!  Unless a whole pile of new volunteers materialize to join me and the couple others doing this work, this should keep me busy for about the next nine or ten years.

We are digitizing the LP library to archive material that has never been re-released on CD, make the library accessible to historians, researchers, and educators, and for the library to be more easily accessible to play on the air.  I’m particularly interested in the educational uses for the library.

I also found San Jose Jazz after moving to the Bay area.  The most well known aspect of San Jose Jazz is its annual 3-day jazz festival in downtown San Jose each August.  My enjoyment of that festival led to supporting them financially, as well.  What I didn’t learn until after they invited me to join their board is the extent of their educational activities.  San Jose Jazz provides a large number of music education programs for students in elementary through high school.  We are also working on some pretty ambitious new education programs, probably to start in the second half of 2010.

I don’t find that I have the same reluctance to support these organizations that I have for most others.  Both are doing something that I am passionate about.  I have to remember that I have a budget to keep to, before I overcommit to them.  It’s easy to respond to them when they request my support.  And I feel good about it.

There are a huge number of charitable organizations out there.  The economy is really having a severe impact on them.  I know, most of them seem to be asking for my support.  Some of them, I am sure, are doing something that you are passionate about.

Whether your passion is for education, parks, justice, animals, children, or medicine, find one of these organizations and make the choice to support them with your time or your money.  Even the smallest support will help them out. You will feel good about your choice and they can certainly use it.

I have the good fortune to have met up with three brilliant colleagues in 2001 to start a wireless LAN system company, Airespace. We built the company from a pretty rocky start to about 200 wonderful people and nearly $100M in annual sales. It was some of the hardest work and most fun I have ever had.  Cisco came around in 2005 and paid us (and our investors) very well for the company, folding it into their Wireless Networks Business Unit where the Airespace products quickly expanded to account for more than 65% of the sales for the business unit.

I stayed at Cisco for nearly three years after the acquisition, leading some work in standards development (802.11/Wi-Fi and IETF), continuing the work with our WLAN system, and working to develop new products in the WLAN space.  When friends asked how I liked it at Cisco, I told them it was a lot like trying to teach an elephant to dance.  I finally decided that being at a large company was not the thing for me, at least not in the long term.  While the elephant got the waltz and the nightclub two step, it was never going to do the samba, cha-cha, or salsa.  It was just not an up tempo kind of place.

Before Airespace I spent five years as a successful consultant, helping companies to develop standards and understand the strategy involved with standardization.  Standards are a very important part of success in technology.  That’s a topic for a different blog, though.

Before that, I spent 12 and a half years at AMD, where I got introduced to wireless LANs and 802.11 and managed the product planning and applications group in the High Speed Networks Division.  Unfortunately, AMD was a place where there was a tremendous amount of talent and very little management foresight.  Essentially, if it wasn’t attached to making the processor beat Intel that quarter, it wasn’t important.

Back in the mists of prehistory I was also a jazz musician and cut a record (yeah, the vinyl kind), I worked in the aerospace industry as a defense contractor designing the precursor to the USB thumb drive, got an engineering degree, told a professor I didn’t need an MSEE bad enough to let him get away with changing my thesis topic after he had my first draft in his hands, and saw much of a top secret project I worked on described in Tom Clancy’s “Hunt For Red October”.

So, that’s me.  If you choose to leave a comment below, I hope you will introduce yourself, as well.

Update (Nov 2010): Agito Networks was acquired ShoreTel, Inc. in October 2010 for approximately $11M.  I am no longer advising them.