Hmm, i feel like writing more, since i’ve just had some amazing times in the last two months….
In June i got a call from a friend who lives in Paris, asking if i knew anyone who wanted to sublet their room for 6 weeks so she could come out here. I said how about my room? So i spent essentially two months bicycling & camping in northern California, & going to music camps. At Balkan camp, my friends Matt Moran & Adam Good (both awesome musicians in Brooklyn) had brought over two virutosos from Macedonia (the slavic one), Goce & Angele Dimovski. Goce in particular plays amazing clarinet, saxophone, zurla, & basically everything else. & i got to study clarinet & zurla with him for a week. Phew. I’ll try to put up some recordings soon of this man…
Then i had a few days off before going up to another music camp, called Sweet’s Mill. This was a whole other level. It’s almost completely unstructured, & I found myself surrounded by love & appreciation simply for playing music. I got to play a dual-clarinet klezmer set with David Julian Gray (founding member of the Klezmorim, the first klezmer music i ever heard, which inspired me to take up the clarinet, which changed my life entirely). Played balkan Rrom (gypsy) music with my pal Eva, Armenian music with Jim Karagozian & John Chookasian, did an awesome show with Aywah!, & perhaps most significantly, met Georgios Leftheriotis, a beautiful Greek violinist from Kalamata (now from Fresno) & have started playing with him. The rest of the time i was hanging out with my amazing friends Jade & Larry, swimming in the pond (home to biting silverfish; couldn’t catch me!), or curling up on the floor of the coffeehouse with 15 friends. It’s how life should be all the time.
Since it’s how life should be all the time, several of us have started working on putting together a musicians’ & dancers’ living & collaborating collective. We hope to find a place (for 7-8 of us!) by October, hopefully in Berkeley. If you know of a place, please let me know;).
Enough for now. Thanks for listening.