April is alive!
Thanks to all who came to our sold-out BOCA MUNDIAL Valentine’s Day show and dinner at Fenix. I love checking back on the livestream — it’s an amazing setup they have there, and the club is gorgeous, like a mini-Yoshi’s. Speaking of Yoshi’s, Pacific Mambo Orchestra will play our CD release concert there on April 29th! Get your tickets before this sells out! We are celebrating our second full album, Live from Stern Grove, which just completed a successful crowd-funding program to help promote it. It represents compositions from many of the band members (including yours truly), stellar performances and a feat of mixing from Christian Tumalan, who is not only the pianist and co-leader along with visionary trumpeter Steffen Kuehn, he’s a crack recording engineer!
Tonight Pacific Mambo is playing Sacramento State for our annual hit at the Student Union Ballroom. I know, it’s always last-minute with me… Feel free to check my website calendar, which is usually up to date. Later this year there will be some exciting festival performances, including in Florida (though we are flying United to get there, oy vey).
Next month, mark your calendar for the Lambert, Hendricks and Ross tribute at SFJAZZ with Bryan Dyer, Juliet Green and myself singing along with Jeff Chambers/bass, Murray Low/piano and Jeff Lewis/drumset. We’ll be at the Joe Henderson Lab for two shows on May 18th!
Also, summer music at Oakland Feather River Camp, July 9-16, is gonna be amazing! It’s only taken 10 years but I finally have succeeded in getting professional musician instructors to understand that this is heaven on earth! This year we have repeat instruction from Ami Molinelli on Brazilian percussion, Brian Moran on guitar, Jonathan Alford on blues piano and myself on voice, ukulele and salsa aerobics (you know you wanna wake up early and shake that booty on the massive deck under clear blue skies)!
So, there’s plenty coming down the pike. I’ve had my hands full running my writing company (World Wind Writing) and music company (you already know about that) as business has picked up steam. I don’t want to give myself too much credit here; as they say, everyone thinks they’re an investing genius in a bull market. But I am riding the wave best I can! Is there a virtual assistant service you use to get stuff done? How about for bookkeeping? Ironically, I find that getting paid from massive corporations tends to be trickier than getting paid for live gigs. I need to post a video soon on one policy change I’ve made that has transformed my writing (journalism and content strategy) business. Is there one thing you did that changed your own self-employment or career journey? If so, what is it? Maybe I’ll write a blog on that if I get some good answers!
