music this week

Either two or three things going on this week; I haven't quite decided yet.

Tonight Chris Monti and his trio will be playing at West Side Arts, along with Ed Sheets, Jen Murdza, Melissa Mulligan, and Ryan Fitzsimmons. The show will start at 7:30 pm, and Chris said he expects to go on around 9:30 pm. He's asked me to sit in on one song on accordion, which I will do. There's a $5 cover charge.

Wednesday (?) I might go to the Tazza open mike again, or I might decide to do something else. We shall see. (Is anyone interested in going to this? If so, that would make it a lot more likely that I would go. The free drink offer still holds.) There's no cover.

Thursday Chris and I will be playing at Nick-a-Nees from 9 pm to midnight. Free show! Free peanuts!

quilt photos

A few years ago, my sister and her husband gave me a quilt for Christmas. They had assembled all of the individual squares (the pattern they were using was the log cabin pattern) and they had me decide how to arrange them. Then they sewed it together, quilted it, and gave it to me a while later. It's for a queen-sized bed, so it was quite a bit of work!

My brother-in-law wrote to me today saying that a friend is working on her own log cabin quilt and wanted to see a picture of the one they made, so he wondered if I could take a picture of it and send it to him. I thought that as long as I was doing that I might as well post the pictures here too. Be warned, they are quite large (which is why I am putting them behind a cut).

( pictures )

accordion report

(First, a note about Wednesday: I do plan to go to the Tazza open mike Wednesday evening. I'm not sure if Chris will also be going or not. Anyway:)

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Chris Monti and his band were playing at West Side Arts tonight and Chris asked me if I wanted to sit in on 'St. James Infirmary' on the accordion, so that's where I went tonight.

It turned out that I wasn't the only person sitting in that evening; percussionist Ed DeMille, who I had previously played with in the dance band (aka Third Story Congress) and the hiphop band (behind Mr. Bodega), was also there, which was a treat. They did a few original songs ('Country Boy in the City', 'Top of the Hill', and 'Long in the Tooth' by Chris, plus a song by Nick the bass player), then it was time for me to go on. It was quite fun!

It also woke me up, which was good, because the next song they did was 'King Solomon and Zen Master Nam Cheon', which is a good song to be able to pay attention to, especially when Ed's playing; there's a lot of neat rhythmic stuff going on in that song.

The last time I played accordion at West Side Arts was in January, about three weeks after I had acquired the thing; so afterwards I got a lot of a compliments of the 'you've really improved your accordion playing since the last time you were here!' variety, which I would certainly hope was the case.