The week at PMI started out slowly, but we ended up working so hard that time felt like it just flew by. I was very impressed with all the students there who exhibited focus, persistence, and determination, and maintained the high level in all the performances. I had the pleasure and honor of coaching the first movement of the Mendelssohn Octet (one of my favorite pieces of all time), and it was a learning experience for me and the students. It was a technically challenging piece for them, and I’m glad they pulled it off in 5 short days of coachings and rehearsals. I’m already think of the piece for next year… maybe Barber’s Adagio for Strings? This PMI was also special in that most of the clinicians performed alongside the students in the concerts. Thanks to them, I was able to recount all of my youth orchestra moments :) BRAVO to all the PMI students and it was great working with HYS and the coaches once again!

Sunday started off with Randy and I playing in two church services where our good friend Greg works as the music director.  Both services were as different as night and day.  The first one featured a country/rock praise ensemble, which was hilarious in itself because the semi-serious congregational was punctuated by rambunctious, lively jamming from these guys.  The alternating contrasts was so absurdly shocking that I had trouble holding in some giggles.   The second service was more conservative; there was more classical music and a feeling of meditation over the congregation.  Both services ended with a national anthem of some sort to get everyone in the holiday spirit.  Chee-hoo!

We arrived in Providence around 1pm.  For lunch we stumbled upon Not Just Snacks, an Indian restaurant that received pretty good ratings on Yelp.   The food was yummy and cheap, though I think it’s a different style of Indian food.  I had my usual Palak Paneer, which was unusually creamy with stringy spinach, but tasty.

The rest of the afternoon was a blur: shopped at Providence Place, took a nap, watched Star Wars III…. Finally, we set foot to India Point Park for the concert and fireworks.  It was really nice out and not too many people on the lawn yet, so it was good soak up the scenery and chat with some friends in the orchestra.  The orchestra did a nice job and the fireworks were better than I expected.  It was a good day indeed!

The weekend that I managed to stay in Boston was also eventful with super nice weather.  My brother who had just moved to Providence, made his visit for the weekend, and that coincided with a visit from my cousin’s family, the Davis’s.

My cousin Cathy is a budding professional photographer, and has her own business: Cathy Clicks Photography. She does a lot of her artistic work in Maine capturing young love and families, but is also interested in traveling and working with musicians and working professionals on the side.  We had a great photo shoot in the North End, which had really nice backdrops for shots. Her beautiful pictures can be found throughout this site.  I hope you like her style as much as I do, and if you do, don’t hesitate to contact her based on my referral.

I’ve also been really happy with the student recitals at Bradford.  The quality has definitely gone up not only in terms of student performances, but also the organization and expectations of teacher, student and families.  Congrats to all my students who performed and I look forward to the next one!

Things I liked and helped me:

1. flying JetBlue – The seats were so comfortable with personal TV screen and plenty of legroom, clean and simple flight area, respectful and efficient flight crew.  I also love their logo and colors.
2. flying in a day early – I liked doing this at the time because I had a whole day to get in the zone, and I did pretty well.  I had a great isolated room at the end of a hallway in the Holiday Inn hotel (king size bed too!).
3. planning my practice and day as I go – I’m not a spontaneous person, but I can go with the flow.  I plan out what I want to practice by chunks of time with set goals, then take a break by going out for a walk or snacking, then I have a “mock audition” practice and/or “slow and careful” practice.  I alternate these chunks throughout the day.
4. eating right – For me, the act of eating meat gives me energy, so since I was in Buffalo, I made sure to eat a roast beef sandwich for lunch everyday, with granola bars and yogurt for snacks, and a salad for dinner.  Haha, for some reason, I really just wanted to eat well during this audition.  Maybe I should’ve cared more about what I drank too.

Things that can be better/improved/re-thought:

1. drink just water – I made the awful mistake, and realized too late, that I’ve been drinking small amounts of caffeine on my audition day.  It’s an energizing tea that I usually drink everyday, so I never thought twice about it until it was too late and I was well into my Mozart 39 excerpt.  Luckily I didn’t crash and burn, but I was so close.  The scary thing was that it was totally out of my control and that’s not a good feeling.
2. booking a hotel and flight too early – Basically I was out there for one day too long.  Audition was Monday afternoon, so I could’ve flown in that morning, checked into a hotel for 3 hours and practiced, taken the audition and then leave.  But might be too radical.  Next time i’ll just buy a refundable hotel and flight, and stay longer if I have to :)
3. play for more people and get nervous – Definitely need to do more of this!

So it looks like this wasn’t a wasted trip.  I felt lucky that I had smooth trip logistics, audition process, and weather.  Things actually looked like there were working for me.  However, I missed one small piece and it threw me off track.  I felt bad after my audition, but mostly because my body was unfair to me and prevented me from sounding my best.  I’m determined to do everything I can in my control for my next auditions in August.  Wish me luck!

I was so wired and excited on my solitary ride to my hometown… I was practically speeding down the NJ turnpike!  The four-car caravan soon separated (Zaccai drove his car and met up with us at Gina’s), but we found ourselves together again at various rest stops.  Some people had small bladders, some needed coffee, and some had to stay awake!  Before we knew it, we finally reached our destination in the early afternoon: the Hyatt on Capitol Hill.  We got an awesome deal at the hotel because Randy’s cousin Stephanie is the manager.  THANK YOU!!  We only had a couple hours left before soundcheck at Bossa so we all went our separate ways and got ready.  I had to eat, shower, warm-up, and iron all the uniforms in a short time that I practically went crazy.  A reminder for the next tour: bring a uniform roadie!!

When we were ready to go and managed to get a hold of the valet parking dudes, we set foot into one of the busiest neighborhoods of DC: Georgetown.  Upon entering Bossa, I was at first disappointed due to the size (the stage was tiny!) and lack of seating and tables.  But after everything was set up (sound engineer took HOURS but was pretty nice) and the lights dimmed and people started walking in (my mom and close friends came to support us), the show turned out nicely.

Thank you all who came out to support us and our music!!  This was our first show and it gave us positive momentum to see such a good turn out.  After the show we treated ourselves to some good and cheap Middle Eastern food.  My gyro was yummy!Before we left DC for Philly, we got some shots at the Capitol.  Here is a shot from my car of our W7 caravan…

Next stop: Philadelphia

Our first and only rehearsal on Thursday night was productive.  We all got to meet our new drummer (and “tour saver”) Andrew Atkinson from NYC.  He came to us through Zaccai, who had met him a couple days before.  Get this: the only way Andrew could do the tour was only if Zaccai would help him move out of his apartment (long story…)!  We managed to get through most of the album’s tunes, especially L’ours (or, “lauw-ers”), we all soon realized that Andrew was a spectacular Latin jazz drummer and blended in with the rest of us like smooth butter.  We’re so glad he joined!

The next day, after scrambling to find percussion instruments for the tour (some people can be flaky!), we finally got on the road around noon.  Our first show was to be at OHANA “Luau at the Lake”, a tiki festival held at Lake George, NY.  The drive was a good 4 hours from Boston, but with conversations about art, music, languages, and film production with Jochen, the trip flew by quickly.  Jochen is a longtime Waitiki fan who flew in from Munich.  He wanted to be in touch with the tiki culture in the U.S. and also take this opportunity during our tour to film footage for his upcoming documentary “DVD of Tiki.”  We’re really excited to be a part of that project.  The show went as well as it usually does but we had to deal with the unbearable near-freezing temperatures that night.  Yikes!

Our next stop was to play for a pre-recorded air show for Jersey City’s WFMU radio station (wfmu.org) that was hosted by Gaylord Fields and Glenn Luttman.  Thanks to them for making our live broadcast performance possible.  A BIG challenge occurred right before we got to the studio: Jersey City traffic.  OMG, I will never ever set foot or wheel into that state again.  We sat in our cars for 2 hours for the last 0.3 miles we had left to travel to our destination.  It was ridiculous!

Thanks to our good friend Gina, she let us stay at her house that night and boy, did we need a good night’s rest.  In the morning, we had Tim’s delicious Portuguese coffee and some tasty bagels.  With our full tummies, we soon got on the road towards Washington DC.

(Haha… see that parking ticket there?  Apparently in NJ suburbs, one gets a ticket for parking too close to the crosswalks… Poor Tim and Randy)

CONTINUE TO PART DEUX

I have to say that I really miss playing chamber music after all that has happened this month.  For the past several weekends I’ve been traveling down to New York for rehearsals, bonding, and immersing myself in music and doing intense study of repertoire with my duo partner Lee-Wen.  We’re both very studious and focused but we are also very different learners and players.  This was not our first time playing together (I had played in Lee-Wen’s doctorate recitals at Stony Brook), but this was our first duo recital given to the public and we definitely learned a lot.

Overall the experience was a good one.  It was nice to see friends come out from various places to support us and hear us belt our hearts out (more about that later…).  Since we had to do our own publicity, there were some local people who showed up.  I made sure to put up ads online on various sites and LW physically handed out flyers to buildings surrounding the area.  I’m happy that we made those extra efforts.  I think we had around 30 to 40 people, which made the concert very intimate.  One large factor that didn’t play in our favor (no pun intended) was the acoustics of the theatre.  Since it was recently renovated, it was a nice size hall that seats around 300 people with carpeting and ambient lighting.  The stage was on the smaller size and seemed to be more   appropriate for spoken events or lectures because there was a lot of dry space and no resonance which is preferable for musical performances.  They have a Steinway baby grand but it was very bottom heavy.  In any case, we tried our best to be musical and there were a lot of good things that happened as well as some funny accidents.  Luckily, we caught everything on MD so if there’s anything worth hearing, I’ll post links here and on our new website.

We played for a large group of exotica fans–close to 500– that filled both the ground level and the balcony. They even drank the bar that served WAITIKI cocktails completely dry. I managed to have a couple sips of the Wai Niu right before I played L’ours chinois, which was a bad idea because I literally could not feel my fingers. But the audience still loved it.

Check out other videos of the new All-Star Septet band on YouTube and pictures on my flickr.

I think the tiki gods were definitely smiling down upon us that night. Highlights to remember: Meeting up with everyone at the airport and experiencing the “spillage” curse, acting out the comic book and conjuring up more ideas for future issues, walking AT LEAST 2 miles to a random house party through the mist, cheering for the All-Star Berklee beer pong team (go Abe and Jim!!), learning how to do birdcalls with Lopaka, sitting with the rest of the lefties on one side of a table and scarfing down gumbo, sneaking a candy rat into Jim’s cymbal bag, and hugging my sweety after L’ours.

Downers but still great anyways: Spillage of orgeat (poor Tim!), broken ass’s jaw, Lopaka’s flight cancellation that transformed into a miracle, early morning flights to and from Kansas …grrr!

I LOVE WAITIKI!!! Can’t wait for our next big gig ;)