Guanajuato Concert August 7th
I’ll be playing again in the beautiful Museo Iconográfico de Don Quixote in Guanajuato, Mexico on Thursday, August 7th at 7:00 pm. The museum is a converted old hacienda near the center of town and it has a great concert space in the sculpture garden with wonderful acoustics. I happy that Armando Lopez Valdivia will join me on stage again. He played with me there 2 years ago and it was a fantastic show. Armando is an early music specialist and has a collection of nearly 200 instruments - and he plays them all! I also have some other non-performing musical adventures planned for the trip so once I get to Mexico I’ll start a blog that you can read here.
Fall 2007 Concert Tour of Mexico, Europe and Africa
I was invited to tour as the guitarist in the band of Koulsy Lamko, an African vocalist currently residing in Mexico City. The tour visited several cities in Mexico, France, Italy, Mali and Burkina Faso. The band was part of “The Caravan Tom Sank” which celebrated the life of Thomas Sankara, the former president of Burkina Faso. Although the tour had a number of logistical problems, it was fascinating to see Africa and to get to know the people a little bit. We had a couple of fantastic opportunities to play with griots in Mali. The griots are a caste of musician/poets that are raised to be artists from childhood and keep their people’s cultural story and wisdom in memory through song and spoken word. I have never played with more natural musicians in all my life. If you’d like to read the blog of the trip, go to the following link:
Mexico, Europe and Africa Blog
Nicaragua Trip Recap
I spent two and a half months in Nicaragua in early 2007. It was an experience that affected me profoundly and I won’t ever forget the things I saw and felt there, nor will I forget the fantastic people - both the kids in the schools and the other volunteers. I worked with an organization called “La Esperanza Granada” (www.la-esperanza-granada.org) that sends volunteers into four schools in poor areas around Granada. They have a variety of health and social work programs too, but their main focus is sending volunteers into the schools to do private tutoring. I worked with a group of first graders, teaching them to read and write in Spanish and to count, add and subtract. I never figured myself to be a good teacher for five and six year olds but I had a great time and the kids seemed to think I was doing OK. I also had the opportunity to teach a few guitar classes at another school and I wish I’d had a little more time for that. I had two opportunities to play on a local radio station and in a little street concert as well. I didn’t plan on doing that much playing there but it wound up being a pretty musical trip after all.
If you’d like to read a blog I kept of the trip (with plenty of photos), go to the following link:
Nicaragua Blog