the
stuff

This is Cliff's banner year and he will produce a sound collection of remakes on other's music and some original music as a personal thankyou to the many people who have made his music career a delight.

With Windows Media Player, these links will let you hear some of the music collection Cliff is working on and practicing. The melody in some of these songs has been deliberately removed because you have to see Cliff play it.

So here are a few memories and the collection of songs that go with them.

Enjoy...

• On occasion, each of us comes to the end of ourselves and to the beginning of someone special. This song, written in 1993, is for such a person.

I'M FOREVER YOURS

• In 1996, during a Promise Keepers men's retreat Cliff was once asked if he could play a song called, "Jesus is the Rock and he blows my blues away" The guy asking for the song sang a few bars and before the retreat was over Cliff and the band had fashioned a version of this blues song. Well it stuck with Cliff and after a few revisions including the addition of horns the song now sounds like this:

JESUS IS THE ROCK

• Consider this question: Are you a human being seeking a spiritual experience, or are you a spirit being having a human experience? And while you're thinking about that, consider this: everyone has eternal life! The question is: do you want the smoking or the nonsmoking section to live it in? This next song came from making this consideration:

LIBERATION BRINGS FREEDOM

• 1997 gave us a great year for men's ministry with Promise Keepers leading a multitude of men (try like 1.25 million) to Washington, D.C. for a 6 hour prayer meeting on the Mall. Well, I was asked to "wakeup" about 20,000 of these men in San Diego county with three meetings, music and teaching. One of the all time favorite songs that really connected with the men at these meetings was a custom medley arrangement I created with some good old-time gospels. Tom Hadfield played keyboards for this season of the Ambassador's Praise Band and did a great job on this medley:

PASS ME NOT medley

• My son, Keil (born 9-5-95), and I now share nearly every Thursday night together alone as Father and Son to discover what it means to be a modern-day knight (this is a method I'm creating to teach Keil how to be a Godly man). One of the rituals that has become our favorite is going to Denny's to buy and share a Chocolate Malt. Well out of that experience I got this music idea that I've named:

DENNY'S CHOCOLATE MALT

• Growing up as a kid in the 50s and 60s, I learned some words used to describe a guy who was giving his all, pushing the threshold, and moving out to gain the prize. We see this today in the many expressions of extreme radical human accomplishment. So I made a song to reflect this moment in one's life and called it:

BOOKIN AND COOKIN

• I have never seen a man on his bed about to die saying, "I wish I could close another sale. Do another Job." Instead, most of us wish we had put more time into things of eternal consequence, like our family and friends. Oh, but how the worldly habit of work, and not taking a Sabbath, pulls at our heart's concerns. It robs us of the simple joy in life, offered and even commanded by our Father, God. Well, I don't know about you, but as for me and my house we are going to receive the blessings that one can only obtain by making rest a priority -- with family, friends and God. This next song is what my life sounded like before I chose to get off the "Work Treadmill" and make a:

LIFE EXCHANGE

Other music in the collection...

• BROKEN AND CONTRITE
• I STILL LOVE YOU
• YOUR GENTLE PRESENCE

Still, more songs to be released

More stuff to come...

funkiness

Pronunciation Key (f ng k ness)

1. Having a moldy or musty smell: funky cheese; funky cellars.
   Having a strong, offensive, unwashed odor.
2. Music.
   Of or relating to music that has an earthy quality reminiscent of the blues.
   Combining elements of jazz, blues, and soul and characterized by syncopated rhythm and a heavy, repetitive bass line.
3. Slang.
   Earthy and uncomplicated; natural: “At the opposite end of Dallas's culinary spectrum is funky regional fare” (Jacqueline Friedrich).
4. Slang.
   Characterized by originality and modishness; unconventional: “a bizarre, funky [hotel] dressed up as a ship, with mock portholes and mirrored ceilings over the beds” (Ann Louise Bardach). Outlandishly vulgar or eccentric in a humorous or tongue-in-cheek manner; campy: “funky caricatures of sexpot glamour” (Pauline Kael).

Word History: When asked which words in the English language are the most difficult to define precisely, a lexicographer would surely mention funky. Linguist Geneva Smitherman has tried to capture the meaning of this word in Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America, where she explains that funky means “[related to] the blue notes or blue mood created in jazz, blues, and soul music generally, down-to-earth soulfully expressed sounds; by extension [related to] the real nitty-gritty or fundamental essence of life, soul to the max.” The first recorded use of funky is in 1784 in a reference to musty, old, moldy cheese. Funky then developed the sense “smelling strong or bad” and could be used to describe body odor. The application of funky to jazz was explained in 1959 by one F. Newton in Jazz Scene: “Critics are on the search for something a little more like the old, original, passion-laden blues: the trade-name which has been suggested for it is ‘funky’ (literally: ‘smelly,’ i.e. symbolizing the return from the upper atmosphere to the physical, down-to-earth reality).”