Breakfast with Jon. Then he went back to his studio to work with Round Mountain, who are finishing up their next album and I went home to work on a new slideshow for my solo performances. It will be ready for the concerts in Europe in October, but I hope to premier it in San Francisco next month.
I want add two new elements. Words and video. The words will be in many different languages, maybe reminiscent of the words on Opium which were spoken in Farsi, Russian, Korean and French. Here are a couple of glimpses:
The video at the top was not formatted correctly and ended up being a little horizontally stretched, but you’ll get the idea. There will be more glimpses to come in the next few weeks. For extra fun you can start both videos…
Pasatiempo, the arts and culture insert published by the New Mexican newspaper every Friday, had a full-page and nice (I am told – I haven’t read it) article on our Lensic concert next week. They used Roshi Joan Halifax’s photo from Kham for the piece, which I think is great.
Did short interviews with local public radio station KSFR at 11:30 and 17:45.
Sadly the other local station (((KBAC cough, cough))) cancelled an interview that was set up for this past Tuesday at the last minute, demanding that we buy advertising time for the benefit in exchange for the interview. For a BENEFIT!! That’s a serious lack of community-sense, I say!
Rode the Mariachi Bullitt, loaded with my guitar and a bag, to Atlas for a workout and then to Jon’s studio for a rehearsal with the quintet. Band sounded great, a very nice step forward from the last tour. Now that everyone knows the music well, we can work on improving the arrangements and that’s what we did.
Rode home in the afternoon and did a phone interview with the Easthampton Press for our concert at the Westhampton PAC in May.
The dates for Autumn in Germany are firm now – all solo:
Oct 03 – München, Germany – Carl Orff Saal
Oct 04 – Leipzig, Germany – Spiegelpalast
Oct 06 – Berlin, Germany – Kleine Arena Tempodrom
Oct 07 – Hamburg, Germany – Stage Club
Oct 08 – Hanover, Germany – Markuskirche
Oct 09 – Köln, Germany – Kulturkirche
Go here to see links to the venues. There will be three to four shows in Italy and Austria before Jon and I roll into Munich.
Current reading: The Janissary Tree by Jason Goodwin. After reading about Inspector Shan in Tibet (here, here, here and here) and Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep in Bangkok (here), I am now reading about the eunuch Yashim Togalu investigating crime in Istanbul in 1836. Lovely, to be entertained while learning something about foreign places. At one point Yashim makes a paste out of walnuts and garlic that he puts on fish. I want to try that with tofu or grilled chicken.
If you have to push helmets for bicyclists… at least do it like this. :-)
Please remember to add friends@ottmarliebert.com to your email-address book as I will be sending out a new password for May this week. Wouldn’t want to lose the password in your spam filter.
