In fact, I was doing it again on our latest foray into the rest of the world besides where we live. I was running one early Big Island, Hawaii morning. I love running there. It’s summertime and the actual temperature is pretty warm, but the Trade Winds blow non-stop, making the temperature feel a lot cooler on your skin. A 30-minute run thus feels like it takes about 30 seconds, because the weather feels so pleasant, because there’s so much beauty to look at, so many new and interesting birds and flowers to notice. It’s just nice.   So I’m running this circular path I have found, and thinking self-congratulatorily about how much healthier I was than the average American human of my circumstances.

And comparing myself to my husband, since he’s the closest. My poor husband, loves to travel, but usually gets so stressed that one day of the trip will be spent in bed. I don’t know why this is; I just know it happens on most of the trips we take.  And  I have often thought, I’m distressed to admit, that if he’d just eat the foods I eat, and not eat the ones I don’t, if he’d exercise the same exercises I do, if he’d just do what I tell him to, he’d be so much healthier.

When suddenly…………I remembered our impromptu trip to the emergency room this past February, the second one in the past 2 years. Not to mention that back injury that slowed me down significantly for about 3 months about three years ago. And I remembered turning to him on this occasion and saying, “If I’m so much healthier than you are, how come I’m the one that keeps ending up in the emergency room?”

Well…..another arrogant human bites the dust, I guess. Anything can happen anytime. Someone to whom I expressed my outrage  said, “You have to remember that it’s ‘risk abatement’ not ‘risk avoidance’. I think she’s right. I like to think I’ll remember it in the future, but I probably won’t.

My friend, Sue, and I both took our shows to San Antonio to entertain the librarians and perhaps book a show or two for the summer. There were seven or eight acts there, but some had already made their presentations before we arrived. The first act we saw was a collection of animals: a porcupine, an otter (I think), a snake, and a few others. When they were done leading their animals around for everyone to get a closer look, they were followed by a puppeteer, Bob. His opening statement was: “Never follow an animal act,” but he was still very entertaining. He had a ventriloquist’s dummy he claimed to have owned for 40 years, and he held a pretty funny conversation with it. Then he sang a song with it (It sounds impossible, I know, but he did.) As they sang, the dummy began to lose segments of himself, until all that was left was his mouth. He kept exhorting the puppeteer to “Keep singing!”, which Bob did. I have no doubt that kids will find this hilarious. I found it a little disturbing.

I went up after Bob and his dismembered dummy, and I was followed by a very good, and very funny magician. Quite dynamic.

Sue went on next, and then there was another magician, also quite good. At the end of his set though, he began to discuss prices with the audience. This is normal, Sue tells me. But he offered his show at staggeringly low prices, and all the other presenters commented on it. Perhaps he had his finger on the pulse, and we’re all just slow to catch up. Or he just does his act for the love of it. Didn’t have a chance to ask.

He was last, so now it’s time for the librarians to talk turkey with the presenters. All of the librarians MOB (I’m accurately describing this scene) the animal act. Then they turn to the magicians. Bob complains that one librarian who usually books him told him that she had no money this year. Then she proceeded to book the animal act. Bob is incensed and not terribly discreet about it. (Though he helped me get my equipment back to my car, so I see him as a very kind and deserving fellow indeed!)

From my point of view, the librarians are doing an admirable job, considering their funding has been cut repeatedly for the last decade. I may just find myself donating a show or two to a needy community — my own, perhaps. Even so, it takes time and money to present a show, even for children at the library, so I’m hoping this devaluing of the arts doesn’t continue much longer.

This month, Jim Patton and Sherry Brokus have offered me the honor of being part of their 3CMSS (Third Coast Music Songwriters Showcase) on Thursday, January 21, 2010, at the NeWorlDeli, 4101 Guadalupe, Austin, Texas. This will be the first time I’ve played my own songs in an Austin setting in quite awhile, and I get to do it amongst some of the finest writers in Austin. I want to invite you to witness the event, and I really DO want you to come (You are very important to me, and to the venue), so I have a very SPECIAL OFFER for you. The first 5 people to arrive and ask for me, will receive a signed CD with my NEWEST songs, soon to be released on my new CD which I am in the process of recording, and which I will be showcasing during the evening. Think of it as your sneak preview of an unofficial, pre-CD, pre-release party.

At the end of January, to my delight, I will be playing at the Heart of Texas House Concert, hosted by my friends, Dan and Diana Ost in Round Rock, Texas at 6 pm on the evening of Saturday, January 30, 2010. This is an intimate concert setting, which begins with a potluck dinner. Dan and Diana will provide the main part of the meal, and guests are requested to bring appetizers, side-dishes and desserts. To acquire an invitation and directions, just contact Dan and Diana at heartoftexashouseconcerts@gmail.com or music@hodgepodge-music.com.

On the horizon are a new Broadway show with Fletcher Clark on March 29th at Sun City, Texas, New York City in May (dates and times TBA), and Salt Lake City at the Magpie House Concert Series on June 12th, and other dates TBA.

Don’t worry. I’ll keep you posted!

Jan

Jan Seides

Performing Songwriter

Austin, TX

http://www.janseides.com

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Booking: 512-436-0-JAN (That’s a zero)

On one occasion, I played at a house concert in Ormond Beach, hosted by Chuck and Pat Spano.  I have also played my Yiddish show at Temple Beth Shalom in Palm Coast, and at Temple Beth El in Ormond Beach. Often, I find myself at the Milltop Cafe in St. Augustine, being hosted by Don Oja-Dunaway, a remarkable songwriter and guitarist who holds court on Sunday evenings. This year (2009) I played at South Tampa House Concerts, and met a lot of really lovely people and had a lot of fun.

The night after the Tampa show, I got to share a stage with one of my very favorite people, Doug Spears.

Doug bills himself as Florida’s Native Troubadour, and writes and plays songs about Floridian history. He has one song, Hemingway’s Hurricane, that details the hurricane that hit in the Florida Keys almost 70 years to the day before Katrina. This was back before hurricanes had names. A lot of World War One vets had been sent to work in the Keys, to get them out of Washington, where they were asking awkward questions about veterans’ benefits. They faced the hurricane unprotected, and most of them died — a fact which aroused the ire of Ernest Hemingway, who was also a WW I veteran. I gathered from the 6 o’clock news and the song, not much has been learned since those days. The song plays when you open his web page. I thought I’d have a video of it for you, but it’s too big, says Wordpress.

That means you’ll just have to go see him for yourself.

Every year I have a little party for all my students sometime in December. Their parents bring goodies, I make Music Teacher Punch (ginger ale and sherbet) and my students are responsible for the music. Before the party, my goal is to teach them MY favorite Christmas carols, MY favorite Chanukah songs, and, if I had any students who celebrated Kwanzaa, I would have them learn MY favorite Kwanzaa songs too (Is there any such thing as a Kwanzaa song?)

There is a plethora of Christmas songs to choose from: Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming, O Come Emmanuel, Oh Holy Night, Gaudete (which I discovered last year after PBS aired a concert by Anuna, a new song called Little Colored Lights, from That Time of the Year, a production of which I was briefly involved in……so many that a list would be endless, not to say unnecessary.

Of Chanukah songs, there are fewer and I’m always on the lookout for new ones. This year, there was a windfall. A song called “Mama’s Latkes” from That Time of the Year, Hannukah in Santa Monica by Tom Lehrer (with whom I am secretly in love), and a big surprise: A Chanukah song written by Orrin Hatch, Senator from Utah. I already knew that Senator Hatch was a decent jazz keyboardist. But I also knew he is a Mormon, so the idea of him writing a Chanukah song came completely out of left field for me. I heard about it one afternoon listening to All Things Considered on NPR. Here it is, for your enjoyment.

In fact, one day when I was in my twenties, I really did entertain for awhile the notion of joining the underground and working outside the system. I considered whether or not I could actually do any good that way, or just get into trouble. The very next afternoon, some of the aforesaid underground blew up a house in East 11th Street in New York City killing about 5 people as I recall, and I decided I would take the more usual and less deadly route of marching and carrying signs.

And writing songs.

But still….

Today I finished (as much as they ever are) a song called “Behind Closed Doors”, and as I practiced it, I wondered about the effectiveness of a song about a problem. Does it change anyone’s mind? More to the point, does it change anyone’s actions? And here’s my postulation: If one person hears this song, and as a result starts talking…decides to come out in the open….seeks help, then the song has done something important. Maybe not all it could do. Maybe not all I could do. But something.

It remains to be seen whether that’s true. I may never know.

“Yes”, I said, somewhat hesitantly. I’m never sure I should tell a student that, since I can’t teach them to do it.

“That’s weird”, she opined. “But kinda cool.”

In fact, that was the reason I got piano lessons when I was four. The most immediate use of the new  piano that arrived at our house was intended to be lessons for my older sister, and I was supposed to wait and grow interested (read: jealous) as I was presumed to be too young.  Well, the interest and the jealousy occurred in the first five minutes of her first lesson. Of course, all the adults ignored my desires, because that’s what adults did then, and I was summarily dismissed.

I’m not really sure why that happened, as at least a year before that, I’d memorized a song from the radio, and sang it for my mother. I know she knew I had the interest already, because she got very excited and had me demonstrate it for relatives and a couple of neighbors. Perhaps they just assumed I wouldn’t have the proper motor skills for the piano.

Then, one afternoon I was upstairs in my bedroom, probably cleaning it up – that seemed to be an ongoing activity in my childhood – and my mother was downstairs vacuuming.

“Hey, mother!”, I called from upstairs. “I know what note the vacuum cleaner is humming. It’s humming Middle C.”

Sure enough, she checked and that was the correct note. (Would I lie?)

Given that, and the fact that, on a different afternoon shortly after the vacuum cleaner event, I sat at the piano with my sister’s music book open in front of me, and picked out the (very simple, one-note-at-a-time) tune I had just heard her play. It suddenly dawned on me that each of those black dots on the page was one of the notes of the tune. I verified that with my mother, and taught myself to read music — or at least as many notes of it as were in that song and the ones that followed it.

We convinced her teacher to take me on too, and the rest, as they say…..

I point out to my students all the time how few of their classmates are getting private lessons on any instrument, and how fortunate they are to have parents that are willing to provide them. (Thus, they should practice more.) My father was very hard-working, and my mother had a chronic illness that resulted in some serious medical bills. And yet, part of the money was spent on music lessons for myself and my sisters. There are scenarios I can think of where I never would have been exposed to making music, and I probably would have become something else. Possibly a very unhappy something-else.

Needless to say, I feel very blessed and grateful.

Andy currently works as the Chief Recording Engineer of the Butler Music School at the University of Texas and Chief Recording Engineer for the Austin Symphony Orchestra. But in his past is a role as singer and songwriter for the band Wheatstraw, and leader of a jazz band, Minor Miracle , which included Julie Christianson (who later went on to sing with Leonard Cohen) and Carmen Bradford (who went on to sing with Count Basie). Andy has also done some singing for Disney. He transferred his attentions to the recording process in the 1970s, and helped to build some of the major recording studios here in Austin, notably the studio built by Willis Alan Ramsey (best known for the song “Muskrat Love”).  He was  a prime mover in building the music community in Austin and in Texas, involving city and state government in the growing of the music industry, and promoting a music-friendly environment.

Maybe you can tell I’m pretty proud of my association with him.

Also on the panel were CJ Eiriksson, producer/engineer/mixer; Chet Himes, producer/engineer; David Hough, audio director of “Austin City Limits”; Jay Aaron Podolnick, CEO of Villa Muse; and Chris “Frenchie” Smith, producer/engineer. Moderated by producer/musician Craig Hillis, panelists shared stories of how they began their career journey within the Austin music scene.

Panelists and NARAS Texas Chapter Board members