The Incredible 36-Weeks-Pregnant Performance!

Wow, I can't believe I did it! I managed to get through last night's gig without giving birth! Last Wednesday the doctor said I was 3 cm dilated and 50 percent effaced, so I wasn't sure I was still going to be in commission by the time my last date at Jazz at Pearls was scheduled. I had told the band several times to be prepared to play without me. But I got a second wind on Sunday night after my regular gig at Grace Cathedral (note to self: singing energizes me), made it to the rehearsal on Monday, practiced all day Tuesday and spent yesterday preparing for the gig (fancy hairdo to draw audience eyes away from enormous belly, pedicure in case of open-toed shoes, combinatorial math with maternity wear to discover a permutation that fit)--wondering all the while if labor was magically going to start. The official due date is in four weeks, but the doctors say the second child often comes two weeks early. I cannot imagine getting any bigger than I already am!

Pregnancy is an emotional and physical roller coaster. Right now despite little sleep I feel energetic and limber. But each day is different; some days I feel like I can barely walk, and every setback sends me on a crying jag. Not to mention the nesting! If I am ever pregnant again, I will probably not schedule a performance so late in the game. A few weeks ago I was cursing the fact that I still had this to get through. It was hard to switch focus from housecleaning and kitchen remodeling back to music.

Everyone had been joking that this gig was just a publicity stunt--that I was hoping my water would break on stage so I'd be written up in the newspaper. But that did not happen (though on the last song I danced off the stage and all through the club to see if a little shaking might get things started. No such luck.). The gig went great, and we had a good-sized crowd. I love this band so much, they really rock and they're so funny and smart too.

Emilio came to the show, and so did one of my friends from Grace and my singer/writer friend Emily. I asked her if she liked my hairdo, or was it too much? She said, "On stage it's very elegant and subtle. Up close, I should be honest, it's a little bit 'my first prom.'" After the gig Emilio and I went to Denny's and I ordered the fruity pancake breakfast, which hit the spot. This was the first time we'd gone to a Denny's in nearly 15 years. "Let's wait another 15 years before we go back," Emilio said afterwards, laughing.

The babysitter was expensive (I think it's what babysitters cost these days) but worth it. She had Sebastian do his homework and got him to bed on time! All in all it was a perfect 24 hours.

So now I can RELAX and concentrate on final household prep before we pop this baby out! I have gigs in May (including a new project Wayne just called me for, at Fantasy Records in Berkeley, woo hoo!!!), so the earlier I have the baby the more weeks I have to recover before I'm out and about.

A Great Pundit-Lashing by Alisa Valdes Rodriguez

Check out this blog posting by a writer from the Southwest on Lou Dobbs and his recent & foolish anti-immigrant, anti-Latino interview on CNN. Of course, I would never watch CNN or Dobbs in the first place. Though in a case of strange bedfellows, a reader of my old magazine used to send me links to Lou Dobbs's opinions on outsourcing, and I did and do think that outsourcing of professional positions such as programmers, reporters, writers, editors, accountants, R&D teams (but, of course, never executive roles) is an underhanded business tactic and a symptom of laissez-faire capitalism that should be checked.

Jazz at Pearls Tomorrow Night!

We'll be playing my last pregnant gig tomorrow night at San Francisco's finest jazz listening club, Jazz at Pearls. The sound is gorgeous, the ambience is sultry, the tapas menu is excellent, and afterwards you can hang out at any of the fine establishments along Broadway and meet teenagers with fake IDs (I still remember going to the Palladium as a kid, dancing under the black lights and getting hit on by guys not much older than I am now). Wow, that memory makes me love the quiet grandeur of a jazz club all the more!

I'll be singing a few standards this time, in hopes of not jostling the baby loose during the show and also in homage to the history of Pearls. If we can fit them in, I'm thinking of doing Everytime We Say Goodbye and Black Coffee, along with my original swing tune, Play That Song of Love and Rage.

Hope to see folks there!

Inspiration, Introspection and a Goodbye to SD

I just watched a documentary about a classical violinist named Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg. How inspiring! Her incredibly strong character and honest emotion are so powerful when she performs, not to mention her technical prowess. She's had plenty of ups and downs, including a stalker, depression and a suicide attempt. She spoke briefly about her "monster" and how it coolly tells her she'll fall on her face before her performance--though another artist praises her for being so focused that she avoids the negative forces that can suck an artist down.

The worst were the critics: Some called her "distorted," or "affected," or too dramatic and physically distracting; one accused her of obscuring the composer's motive. Then, there was the queen of all insults: A printed review calling her performance "hormonal"! Now, that reminds me of something Gary Mankin, my very wise engineer, told me about how opinions are like a-holes--everyone's got 'em. But still, it's also unvarnished sexism. Ah well. The important thing is that this iconoclast keeps on playing.

Today I read several misguided opinions on what caused the demise of my old magazine. Yes, I should ignore them. I am tempted to set them straight, but to what avail? This is a lesson--to others, an event can appear so different from what actually happened, and even those who participated may not agree on a single truth. The funny thing is, outsiders will infer all sorts of rationales and important trends from what happened, when those 9 men and 4 women who were on the inside of the situation know that, in the moment, it was just a struggle for personal/professional supremacy. And as much as I deplore real war, I feel no need to spend 8 hours a day working on a simulated battlefield. I came, I saw, I learned. Now I'm gone and doing amazing new things. So goodbye, SD/CL. You taught me well. I'm just sorry I couldn't save you from an untimely closure at 22.

Ben Harper on Ambition

From the March/April issue of Performing Songwriter:

"That's a funny thing about living in L.A. and Hollywood. Hollywood loves its accomplished, but it loathes its ambitious, which I find an odd juxtaposition. Don't ever fall victim to that, man. I was equally as ambitious as any songwriter out there. It takes a hunger. It's OK to feel that your voice can have a resonance beyond your immediate life, or your immediate friends, or your immediate peers, or your immediate community. It's OK to feel like you have something to say to the world. Don't let anyody dissuade you from that. Don't let anybody push you off that, because that's yours. You own it, and you can take it to the world in your own way. Large or small, you're always a succes when you're doing what you love."

Geek Link

What if Microsoft redesigned the iPod?

Cute, but my favorite line in it is the "human ear" clarification.

Shall We Teach Dance?

Last night Emilio and I got to have our second night out in less than a week! It was pizza and movie night at kindergarten so parents could go out. We were so starving we settled for yummy express Chinese food and an ice cream (my husband has the most intense case of sympathy pregnancy symptoms I've ever heard of, so he's not only determined to match my weight gain pound for pound but in the last few days has started feeling round ligament pains. I'm not sure men even have round ligaments, but as I've just been having the first twinges of them stretching now he's got them.)

We were in a hurry because we didn't want to miss a dance class I had found on the Web. The studio is right by the freeway, indicated by a sign I've passed by for years. Just like a scene from the Japanese movie "Shall We Dance," we walked up some lonely stairs guided by a buzzing neon arrow and stood bemusedly in the empty hallway. Finally I spied a hand-lettered "ring the bell" note and we were let in to a room filled with ikebana sculptures by a grey-haired Japanese woman. The studio was quite spacious, but we were the only students after another couple finished their hour--I think the school tends to have more private lessons than big classes.

We danced for the two instructors and they were impressed. "We can show you ballroom style as opposed to nightclub," they said, but weren't dogmatic that one was better than the other. I learned a few tricks for spinning and holding my upper body frame stronger with the male teacher, while Emilio later told me his teacher--the woman who'd greeted us--asked him to feel her muscles! We worked separately for a while, and then did an exercise where they laid two bars over our arms so we would keep them level and strong. Emilio and I danced like that until his shoulders were burning. I did feel an improvement in our communication. As the hour was ending, the gentleman asked us if we knew how to dance cumbia and could show him. Emilio's the expert there, so we demonstrated a bit of danzón while the teacher searched for some cumbia music and then did cumbia, with Emilio commenting on Mexico City-style footwork. When we were done, the owner asked if we wanted to teach there.

"You have a really fun spirit," he said to Emilio. "I think you'd be a good teacher." I was bursting with pride! Apparently, the studio gets a lot of calls from people wanting to learn waltz and cumbia for quinceañeras. I don't know if Emilio wants to do it, but teaching dance would be a wonderful outlet for him. He's definitely not a performer like I am, but he is an excellent group leader and coach. We left in great humor, feeling like maybe despite being rusty we weren't such bad dancers after all.

Matter Over Mind!

Here's a little psychological victory: Yesterday I spoke in the morning to my fellow layoffee/former copyeditor Laurie about life (and a little about the now defunct magazine), and in the evening Tami/former managing editor called and I got a more intense dose of information about the happenings at my old workplace. I told her I was getting better and better at forgetting about it all and putting it behind me, although, I said, "This conversation might set me back tonight." But no, I slept soundly! No thoughts or nightmares at all! Yay!

Single Tune Sales: Threat or Boon?

From today's New York Times:

"Tony Brummel, the owner of the independent rock label Victory Records, says he is not interested in selling individual songs from his albums, though he may give them away to build buzz. The label this week captured the No. 3 spot on the chart with the new album from the emo-rock band Hawthorne Heights. The band's CD sold about 114,000 copies — a solid figure for an independent rock band, but somewhat less than expected given the label's shipments of roughly 800,000 copies. A rock album, Mr. Brummel said, 'is a work of art.'

'If you're buying a Picasso,' he continued, 'you can't just buy the upper right-hand corner.'"

I like the quote, but the analogy is flawed--a song is in fact a standalone work of art, though it may combine with others to ideally form a cohesive whole. Even movements of symphonies work as separate pieces.

The article discusses how the song "So Sick" has been a smash R&B hit for singer Ne-Yo, but the label did not release it as a digital download until after his CD "In My Own Words," was available for sale. Perhaps as a result of pent-up demand, he sold 301,000 copies of the album and 120,000 copies of the digital single in its first week, according to Nielsen SoundScan. This result is almost exactly opposite what happened to another radio hit-maker, Chris Brown, who released his song "Run It!" online three months before the CD was out. The online song sold 300,000 copies, and the album sold 154,000 copies in its first week.

The big labels are really struggling over what to do about online vs. CD sales. It's an interesting conundrum. I really like CD packaging--and having put one together, I respect all the work that can and should go into doing it right. But let's be honest--was the crappy plastic jewel case an improvement over the big LP sleeve? Clearly not. Come to think of it, while vinyl (which I can honestly say was before my time, at least as a teen consumer) was big, it was skinny. I'm not convinced that cardboard CD packaging is much better, since I'd rather do the most industry-standard and economical approach, which for radio play means the jewel case. But a musical album can be a thing of beauty. I'm really curious as to what will be next in terms of physical album development. If it gets any smaller, say minidisc size or less, there's not a lot of point to including art with it (though packaging CDs with magazines, books, coloring books, posters, DVDs or devices is one approach being taken to increase the perceived value of the album).

Victrola phonographs revolutionized the music recording business in 1906--will the medium last more than 100 years or will it be replaced by new forms of subscription radio and digital music?

Leave Those Moms Alone

A recent article in the New York Times epitomizes what annoys me about being a "working mother" (no one ever talks about being a "working father"): The microscopic media attention to what a woman's role should be in society.

In "Stretched to Limit, Women Stall March to Work," author Eduardo Porter posits that, as fewer mothers are joining the workforce, "...social scientists are engaged in a heated debate over whether the gender revolution at work may be over. Is this shift evidence for the popular notion that many mothers are again deciding that they prefer to stay at home and take care of their children?"

Ack! Are we still at this debate? Why can't we just provide equal rights and equal support for everyone, be they men or women or minorities or disabled people or any "protected category" (as a boss, I took many a class on not discriminating against protected categories of people)? Why can't we let everyone make their own choices about how to support themselves and realize their ambitions?

Porter interviews several women who complain about how hard the balancing act is. A 37-year-old former high-tech executive "pines to go back to work, but has not figured out how to mesh work with caring for her three daughters. 'Most of us thought we would work and have kids, at least that was what we were brought up thinking we would do — no problem,' Ms. Watson-Short said. 'But really we were kind of duped. None of us realized how hard it is.'"

Yes, it's extremely hard. I'm the first to agree. But how sympathetic must one be for these upper-middle-class professionals who struggle to manage their high-paying jobs, ginormous vehicles and safe suburban homes packed with luxury appurtenances? The myth of the stay-at-home mom has been perpetuated as a gold standard we should all aspire to, when in fact such an arrangement only became possible with the invention of labor-saving appliances and the increase in the standard of living in the last century. Most women have never had the option to simply dedicate all their time to their children, ferrying them to and from various character- and skill-building activities every day. Our children must see us working and doing the things we love, whether it's baking bread or synthesizing rocket fuel--how else will they learn dedication and discipline?

Children must come first, no question. But the "have it all" syndrome afflicts too many Americans. We can have it all, just not all at once! Having just one child is an enormous, life-altering change--but multiple births are increasingly common. So are children less than two years apart. Now, with my children set to be five years apart, I do see the advantages of closer spacing (namely, momentum!), but I am thrilled to have those five years of knowledge as a parent under my belt, not to mention a son in school and out of diapers.

If women feel they're being duped, they need to go back to their mothers and grandmothers and listen to how they did it. In my family, for instance, the women have always been ambitious professionals as well as dedicated mothers. They weathered deaths, divorces, depression and disease. But they persevered, and their example of charisma and lifelong success is one I aspire to for myself. No one ever told them it would be easy; indeed, they often heard it was impossible. Yet my mother and grandmothers have had it all--with nothing handed to them other than perhaps a modicum of education.

Women need equal rights and discrimination protection--and then we need to have our choices left alone.

Wow, a Critic's Pick!

KCSM's musical director gave me a wonderful plug (and played my song But I'm Weak) last week on his radio show, and he also wrote this great "critic's choice" piece in the East Bay Express! I'm very honored to have Chuy's support! See below:

"ENTHRALLING LATIN JAZZ: Since releasing her aptly titled debut album Jazzmérica, exultant vocalist Alexa Weber Morales has bounced around town as a solo artist and in collaboration with the newly formed Bay Area Latin Jazz Orchestra. A genre-bounding performer who sings in four languages, she's especially well-versed in jazz and Latin music, delivering consistent soul-stirring performances. Thursday night, she performs at Berkeley's La Peña Cultural Center with an all-star cast of resident musicians that will leave you entertained and enthralled."
--Jesse "Chuy" Varela, East Bay Express, March 1, 2006

IKEA-Fueled Insanity

I'm in a funk right now. Finally got some good post-gig rest, but I've been on my knees (with knee pads on) screwing together these IKEA cabinets for my kitchen the past two days. Yesterday I was also doing a lot of heavy lifting, getting the cabinet boxes up from the basement to assemble them in the living room. It's a pretty amazing system they have for snapping all these parts together, much like a kid's puzzle. Friday I kept saying "How did they think of that?"--the no-screw hinges that affix to the door with a compression spring really blew me away. The cabinet bodies are made of particle board and the doors are medium-density fiberboard, which is a lot heavier and (I hope) stronger. It all comes with a 10-year guarantee, and it was incredibly cheap, which is our budget these days. I guess I'm about halfway through with the assembly. I can't do the installation myself, as that's a two-person job.

My hands hurt, my knees hurt, my lower back hurts, and there are dishes piled high in the bathtub since we ripped out the kitchen sink. I have no idea what the ETA for installing the 15-years-overdue dishwasher is. Right now apparently watching the movie Shrek for the 7th time takes priority. Well, to be fair, he'll have to do a bit more plumbing too as the water pipes currently come up through the floor and would be better moved to come through the wall studs and then angle through the back of the cabinet, leaving space for a sliding trash bin or something. Oh, and he has to angle a vent out the wall, and install a T for the diswasher to drain into. I suppose it's all coming together, but I really don't want this to be like most of our home improvement projects that remain 80 percent complete indefinitely.

I stole one of Sebastian's toy tubs to use as a dishwashing bucket. I feel a bit overwhelmed. I also need to learn a new song for my church gig tonight, and I don't feel much like doing it. Perhaps if I take the dogs for a walk in the hills my outlook will improve, except it's blustery out...

Scale Reminder Tool

Here's a little program for finding four important scales for improvisation or reharmonization of any chord. When I have time I'll have to study this more--for now I just want to remind myself it's there.

La Peña Tomorrow Night!

Get more information and tickets here!

Two New Ekomi Recordings Up

As promised, here are two MP3s from my recording session at Ekomi (Echo-Me), a company that provides a cool tool for auditions (they offer it in conjunction with The New School), practicing and composition. With their player, you can do "music minus one" and eliminate any part. These two songs, done in a fairly straightforward style with a stellar rhythm section (Murray Low on piano, David Belove on bass and Paul Van Wageningen on drums), are part of their Jazz Valentines package.

Everytime We Say Goodbye (Cole Porter)
Agua de Beber (Antonio Carlos Jobim)