Taken Out to the Ball Game
This is a round-up post of the last couple months and an apologia for not keeping current. Same reason as always: preoccupied with performing. I’ve been doing some open-mic stuff in the area with singer-guitarists Pete Tamburrini and Iris Cohen. We’re promising, tho we need a lot of work. But it’s awesome to be appreciated for my one-stop guitar and clarinet pckg, and I practice pretty hard on both instruments to not disappoint. We play everything from folk and Bluegrass (as everyone calls country guitar) to rock oldies, easy listening (yes) and pop. On the whole I have to say I’m enjoying it.
I’m also doing my “classical” (baroque, really) thing, continuing to play with my own woodwind quintet, the Quints, a couple other wind ensembles and an occasional one-shot, like the trio performance I did a couple weeks ago with two other members of the Quints. It was for the National Committee on Child Poverty, or something like that, at the Roosevelt in NY. It was 8 in the morning, so that was a bitch, but it also included a moment with Yankee outfielder Nick Swisher,
the NCCP’s jock celebrity, which we got by playing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” behind him and a bunch of starfuckers (including us) who were trying to get to him. He cracked up when he realized where the music was coming from and and came back to take pix with us, while function biggies looked on. Only fair, since some of us (me) got up at 5AM to do this for for free.
Scott Hambly sent me a cd of something he, Pete Berg and I did as the Redwood Canyon Ramblers 45 yrs ago at the Cabale, a club in Berkeley. It’s better than I would have guessed, with me singing Ruby way too high, but on key and auguring possibilities for the future, never realized. (The Doc Watson days were yet to come, and when they did I forgot about singing for many yrs. thereafter. Bad idea, but there it is/was.) I will try to figure out how to get this onto the blog. Try this link, http://www.computerhope.com/clouds.mid Redwood’s Last Stand, tho you may have to download it one tune at a time, but it’s not hard. Don’t know if this will work, but I did manage to find a photo. That’s Scott on mandolin, Pete on banjo, and me on what’s left. Best bet is that it’s from 1962. I was back in LA by ’63.
In other news, did I mention in the last post that I finally placed a couple short storie with Prick of the Spindle, a literary review? Felt good, even if it wasn’t quite the Paris Review. If you’re interested you can go to their eponymous website, look for the March 23rd issue and go to Non-Fiction. It should be there. It was last time I looked. One good chunk of fallout from this is that I’m sending out rewrites of things I’ve done in the past to reviews that were the least bit encouraging when I sent stuff to them last fall and winter. It’s got me starting to write again, which can’t be all bad.
In the meantime, I guess that’s it for April/May for Power-Pickers of the ‘Sixties.
