Musical Meanderings

This is a blog centered around some of the musical encounters and experiences that I come upon in my daily life as a musician.

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Location: Alameda, California

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Palace of Fine Arts

Well, there are a few exciting things happening. Isabelle and I are doing some Christmas concerts! Tonight we have a rehearsal in Livermore, as we are playing at the Sycamore Strings Academy concert on December 2. It will be fun. It's a nice big theatre and there will be lots of kids performing on violins. They have just added a cello department, and the teacher is me. So Isabelle and I are going to perform to show them how it's done and to recruit some cello students. (We only have three currently at the Academy, and they all just started the cello.)

I have some new students, and two of them are only three years old. This is something else, learning to teach three year olds! I have made some games and I have a big basket of little prizes to get their interest. I think the most important thing is to make it fun for them. And for the parents to keep bringing them.

Also, we got a piano in the Alameda studio. So I will now be teaching piano lessons to little ones too.

On the performance front---I had a big show with a Persian singer last week named Shahrokh. This was a nightmare gig! I contracted the strings. It was all last minute. But they didn't even have a studio booked for rehearsal until the afternoon of the rehearsal. These guys just yelled at everybody through the whole sound check. Unbelievable. They were so rude! They yelled at us for tuning backstage before the show.

We were at the Palace of Fine Arts all day on the day before Thanksgiving, but we all had headaches because the singer was just yelling at the arranger guy...it was bad. We were lost most of the gig. But, actually, I thought the singer was very good. He had an amazing voice and I really liked his music. It was kind of like dancy pop old school with strings in Persian. Now, he just needs to learn how to get along with people and how to have a successful rehearsal!

Friday I am playing with Terrence Brewer here in Alameda. We will play Christmas songs, and some jazz standards and some classical standards. Terrence is a guitarist friend of mine- so it will be guitar and cello duos. Fun!

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Interesting to know.

9:14 PM  

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