It’s Saturday after midnight, so practically it’s Sunday. The last couple days were busy. On Friday I spent much of the day at the Futura Productions recording studio in Roslindale, helping my students to record. It was a wonderful day: Ellie, Marti, Cece, Vesi and Meggie and Matthew made their recordings. I supervised some of them and played with others. I hope that some of these will become available also on Youtube soon, as we were running video cameras throughout the day. But first I need to figure out the easiest way to put together the video which we took during the recording session with the audio from the studio. I took the train and walked from Back Bay station on the wonderful promenade, and came back home in the evening. Then I watched the second half of “Avatar”, which is quite disturbing, and fell asleep after making some phone calls.
On Saturday, we had the final evaluations at NEC. It’s always an amazing day. To see how people have developed this year is truly exciting. There is always one person whose performance sticks in mind afterwards. This time it was a young drummer, student of Gary Fieldman. He played a rhythmic exercise with incredible musicality, virtuosity and precision. But what was really great about it was that even though this was merely a rhythmic exercise, you could sense his musical passion and his pleasant personality in the performance. I asked him to do it again, this time as we clap the beats while he was playing.
Finally, tomorrow is a free day, time to organize a little and keep moving forward down the list. I made a list of 18 concerts, recordings and gigs that are scheduled from May to July. The first three are now behind me. This week I have a performance for Boston University, our faculty concert in Natick and a recording with my student Anika at Futura. And of course it all builds up towards the concerts in Eorupe in July, two in Germany, two in Italy and two in England. A lot of preparation is required, and I’m very hopeful that as the teaching schedule ease up with the end of the spring semester I will be able to dedicate the adequate amount of time and have the necessary mind space to prepare for these concerts.
On another note, I watched this evening (Saturday) the movie "Ervinka" by Erfaim Kishon. It’s an old black and white Israeli film staring Haim Topol that was filmed in Tel-Aviv around the time of my birth. I could can see Tel-Aviv before I grew up in it, which is always a little reminiscent and heartbreaking. It is always emotional to be faced with your past. Since moving to the US some seventeen years ago, I gained appreciation and perspective of where I came from, that only once moving to a new country i was able to gain. The perspective changes when you are looking at where you came from from another place. This also has to do with family and heritage, which for me carries a bittersweet taste.
So much is being left out here, because of writing these entries in such an open format. Still, it is wonderful to be able to share what is comfortably shared. I think of my neighbor Ken from last year, who moved since to New York. He always talked about how people are too afraid of one another. Once, we were sitting on the stairs outside at the front of the building. I used to love sitting outside like that, just watching the leaves of the trees slightly moving with the wind in the darkness. Maybe I’ll do it again after finishing writing these words, if it's nice outside at this late hour. Anyhow, as I was sitting there with Ken someone was trying to park their car just in front of us. Ken was eager to help them and jumped up in order to direct them as they were reversing. The person in the car saw him approaching and took off…
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