...have been greatly exaggerated. It has just been a month of [insert all the usual excuses here].
The quintet played a few gigs in March, including a delightful two-night engagement up in Truckee, CA. For those of you who have never been there, Truckee is up in the mountains a few hours east of the Bay area, up near Reno and Tahoe. There was a winter storm warning hovering over us the whole time we were there, and sure enough, the snow started coming down the day after we arrived. It accumulated to the point where we had to buy chains in order to make the trip home safely. Shit! I lived in the cold, cold northeast for the first 26 years of my life, and yet this was the first time I had ever had to drive with chains.
Driving home was fun, though. As we came down the mountain the snow turned into hail, then sleet, then rain, and of course by the time we got to central CA it was sunny and hot. I think we experienced almost every kind of weather that day. Never a dull meteorological moment in California.
The other time-sucker these days is all the advance work (promotional and musical) I'm doing on the group's east coast tour, which is coming up in June. I'm being a little obsessive-compulsive about it, I know. But I'm super-psyched about this tour and I want everything to go perfectly!
My latest scribbling for AAJ:
An extended piece on Grachan Moncur's latest work, and a review of Kaki King's 2004 album, Legs to Make Us Longer.
