A video crew took some videos of my band rehearsing some Beatles bluegrass arrangements. George Harrison knows how to write a song.
My friend Ian Forber-Pratt is one of the most inspiring people I know and I’m honored to be able to call him my friend. After graduating from Principia College together, I moved to NYC to pursue a career in music, while he moved to his mother land India with the dream of starting the very first foster care program in India…ever.
He has worked tirelessly for the past 4 years and has had to overcome all kinds of resistance to realizing his vision. But now he has established a base for his non-profit in the northern state of Rajasthan and his program is a reality: Foster Care India.
He now sits as India’s representative in the International Foster Care Board of Directors and hopes to see his program gain even more momentum in the following years. India is home to the largest population of children in the world and 31 million children in India are estimated as vulnerable or already orphaned. Clearly, there is a need for foster care and I know that nothing can stop an idea that will bring so much good and needed change to the world.
I am hoping that I can travel back to India sometime and spend some time volunteering for his program. Nothing could be more important than helping realize “every child’s right to family.”
(Ian pictured in last B&W photo)
Let discord of every name and nature be heard no more, and let the harmonious and the true sense of Life and being take possession of human consciousness.
—Mary Baker Eddy
Cease to tread any byway of dependency. Only by radical self-sufficiency and self-reliance does one gain personal freedom. Once free, our ability to help others is expanded.
For me there are only two kinds of music: good and bad, and I consider the music that expresses most the best music.
—Richard Strauss
George Clements
—Sophia
Trying my hands at self production these days…I used pro tools 10 and two neumann mics, a u89 on vocals and a km84 on my acoustic.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
-Theodore Roethke, The Waking
Jerry Bergonzi on Rhythm
Time and rhythm are king! Number one! All notes seem to sound good when they are played with “good time.”
Often jazz educators present improvisation techniques by first teaching which notes to play and then describing how to put these notes to various rhythms. There is a profound difference in taking rhythms and then applying the notes to those particular rhythms.
Rhythms are inexhaustible.
