Covid lockdowns in Italy are starting to lessen. People are starting to come out of their homes and you can tell because the usual Naples traffic, complete with crazy driving habits, is back. I saw at least 6 accidents on the road in the past week.  Fortunately, accidents in Naples tend to be less severe than those in the states since many drivers do not have insurance, so they drive carefully. It's definitely a different culture on the road that's for sure!

Recently I got to be an "inspirational speaker" for my old youth orchestra. I got to see my high school orchestra conductor again, it was like 14 years hadn't happened! 

I started this blog in high school (or just before) in an effort to document the journey of a musician in all phases of development and while I haven't been the most faithful blogger, I think this blog certainly gets across much of my musical experiences if anyone cares to dig that far back into the past of someone else's life. 

The band did this video recently, it's a good one. I got to edit, drone pilot, camera woman, schedule and choreograph this. It was fun working with our amazing Italian friends to make this happen. This video was in honor of the Italian Liberation Day where we celebrated the collaboration between US and Italian troops in the fight against the Nazis in WWII.

I'm not actively in a small group at the moment, so I try to keep myself busy with my own independent projects so as to avoid getting too rusty. It's also a great opportunity to learn new skills and you never know when you'll need them. Playing in the band means doing lots of things you might not expect like writing/arranging music, editing sound/recording engineer, or being a videographer and if you didn't have experience beforehand, you learn on the job. These little projects, for me, are a way to get ahead of the curve so that I'm not completely panicked when I have to do something new. Call it professional development.

In this project, I tried three new things: singing, improvisation and audio mixing. None of those things are completely new, but they are the first time I made them public.

In this project, I wrote the music and experimented with the Leizinger bocal, which allows you to hook directly into an amplifier. Try as I might, they still haven't agreed to let me play in the rock band. A bassoonist can wish, right? This is a section from a Tango I am in the process of writing/recording. Definitely going through some writer's block, while I love tango and love dancing it, writing one is proving to be more challenging than I ever expected. I hope this is just because I love the art form and am nervous about producing a product I don't feel is up to the standard of real tango music.

That's all for now. My bassoon is in the shop getting repairs. Special thanks to Fox Products for taking on my bassoon on super short notice and doing a rush job on the repairs. You guys rock.
Peace.