Ciao, Tutti!
This was a big week, and it's not even over yet! I do plan on seeing the Millenial Terretory Orchestra tomorrow night in Prato, and I probably will have a lot to say about that. But my very busy week is officially over now, and I figured I'd use the rest of this leap day to tell everyone what has been going on. Prepare for another long one! I'll try to tell it in chronological order with pictures of Ferrara here and there to make you want to read until the end.
Ferrara Duomo
As it turned out, as soon as I posted the blog last week I got a call for a gig, which I played on Tuesday night, which was in Prato, a town just outside Florence. The bassist picked me up and rode me and the vibes to the venue in the center of town. The gig was with the leader of the other NYU jazz ensemble and a saxophonist, Nick, who I knew from the program.
Now, there was an accident as I was setting up the vibes. Yamaha vibes are different than Musser vibes, the ones I'm used to, and you have to place the top perfectly on top of the bass with the help of a friend to set the instrument in its right place. I didn't do it perfectly enough, and my thumb got pinched in the instrument, creating a giant blister which immediately filled with blood and a ton of pain. I washed it with water and the club owners disinfected it for me and wrapped it in way more gauze than was needed, but even after it, I was still having trouble playing. It still hurt the next day, and it was barely well enough for me to write and take the Italian test on Thursday. It's doing a lot better now, though, so things shouldn't be so bad for midterms next week.
It ended up being sort of like a jam session in a hip club with me and the three others I came with being the house band. We played for a few hours, with some guests coming in here or there, and, unlike the last jam session, these players completely outplayed me. The bassist and the drummer were also very good, and also about my own age, and it was refreshing to be playing with good musicians with open ears, though it was frustrating not to be able to play much at all with the injury. I did my best though, and an Italian tenor player who studied blues in Chicago named Gianluca said I played very well, even though I think he had a great sound, unlike myself. The soprano sax player killed everyone, and it turned out he was a member of one of the most famous jazz bands in Italy, where he plays clarinet. His name was Nico, but I forget his last name. Maybe I should look it up...
We had a great time other than my silly thumb, and I was able to enjoy it by spending most of my time listening to the other musicians and gelling with the rest of the rhythm section, which is better for my musicianship anyway. I returned at 3:00 or so in the morning with 50 Euros in my pocket which I used to get to Ferrara and back, and I set my alarm for 7:30 so I could wake up in time to teach the next day. You see, this was a risky gig to take because of the little sleep I had received after my Barcelona weekend and my usually long Mondays, and I knew I had to teach the next day. Plus I wanted things to go more smoothly than they had the week before. But I figured I could handle it and use all my energy on the kids, which is never too hard for me, and then sleep late the next morning when I don't have class until noon.
Este Castle
Somehow this logic seemed to work, because the class was a great hit. They were studying "Cans and Abilities," so things like sports, talents, etcetera. My idea was to make a fake TV station, channel 3, which we called Griffin TV, and we made a schedule for it all together. I split the class into groups and they each came up one by one to act out a "Can or Ability" and the rest of the class would have to guess what it was. Then we would write that activity in for that group's time slot on the TV schedule. This went too well. I could not find it within myself to quiet them down, no matter how hard I tried, and I had to ask the teacher's help at one point. But they loved the activity and said so. Afterward we sung a song together I wrote:
"Sam likes to dance. He thinks it's fun.
He knows that he's not the only one!
Who else likes to dance?
Stand up with me!
We like to dance. We think it's fun.
We dance all day until the song is done!
What is your name? [The student answers]
What do you like to do?" [The student answers]
Then we'd sing the song again for the next student and what he or she likes to do. One kid said he liked to flamenco dance, which surprised everyone. I asked the class if anyone knew what it was, and no one did, so I had the poor guy come up and demonstrate as we sang for him. He made a fan out of paper and held a scrunchy in his mouth to look like a rose, and it was the funniest cutest thing ever in the history of this planet I kid you not or maybe I do kid a little but it was really cute! I taught them some more of the body after, and the bell rang right after I finished everything I had wanted to do but I didn't have to awkwardly improvise at all. Perfetto! The teacher told me it was a great class, and one of the kids drew a picture of me playing "hochey" in a big stadium. This is going to be a hard one to top for next week.
Oh, and I slept through Italian class. I didn't actually fall asleep, but between not being able to write anything because of my thumb and not being able to pay attention because of all the effort I had already spent and the minuscule amount of sleep I got the week before, it was as if a ghost had been marked "presente." Even so, the events of the day inspired me to buy and make gnocchi for dinner, even though I have no idea how to make gnocchi. Well, I do now! I was very excited about that, too. Potato based, baby!!
Dungeon
I had originally planned to go to Ferrara alone on Saturday, but, serendipitously, my friend Megan wanted to go, and that was certainly fine with me. We ended up having to go Friday (today) because of the show tomorrow, so after my one good Wednesday night of sleep I was already catching an early train all over again.
Ferrara's a cool place for a couple reasons. The Este family controlled it in the old days, like the Visconti in Milan, though this seemed to be a strange exception for this area of Italy (north-west, sort of close to Venice). It's on my history test next Tuesday for this reason, so it was good to "study" in the actual city. The other thing that was really cool was it has a castle in the middle of town that is surrounded by a moat. In the middle of town! I've played with knights long enough when I was small to know that a moat is a big deal, and here's a moat in the middle of a city! I've been saving these picture for right here:
We went in, over the bridge that would have only been let down for close friends of the Este, or people nowadays who can't swim, and we took a tour of the castle. We found the old art frescoes and beautiful ceiling art that the Este commissioned, and the mirrors strategically propped up around the room made it much easier to look than to crane my neck up the whole time.
After the museum we walked around the amazing dungeons of the 1385 castle. It was really cool to look at now, but I'm sure it didn't look so great to the people who had to see it back in the fifteenth century. The rooms were small enough to make me thankful for a dorm, and they did not let in much light or hope. Makes it hard to take pictures.
Next stop was the top of the tower, which was luckily just in time for the sun to come out and grant us clear skies for a great view of the entire piccolo town of Ferrara.
We left the old castle and visited the old Duomo which was closed because it was under restoration from a recent bombing. The church was juxtaposed to a charming outdoor market and the backdrop of the old castle. Do I sound like a British tourist? Anyway, it was fun to look at and take pictures of, though I thought it was too bad I couldn't go into the church or even the tower.
Ferrara seemed to me to be a strange mix of time periods and genres of location. It had the medieval look of the castle, the Renaissance look of the facade of the duomo, the old-fashioned outdoor market, but at the same time there were a million American chains and odd electronics stores here and there than gave the impression than Ferrara wanted desperately to modernize. Also, in the center of town, where the castle, duomo, and market were, things were happening, and not with tourists, but with real Italians, but on the fringes it was like suburbia, reminding me of Huntington Woods with the abundance of green, the deliberately winding streets rather than the meandering walkways in Florence or the center here in Ferrara. Ferrara seems to me to be in transition, not quite knowing what it wants to be. There were also a large amount of construction projects going on around the town.
Megan and I went wandering in the direction to a point on the map that seemed interesting, which turned out to be this large area belonging to a church, most of which was actually an exquisite graveyard. We explored the family tombs, not the inside, though, and the eerily quiet grave site. Why were there no tourists around such a beautiful building? It gave us the feeling we weren't supposed to be there. Didn't stop my picture taking. We visited the inside of the grand church, too, which was truly old and Gothic, remarkably bare and plain in its construction and yet adorned with wonderful paintings and a breathtaking altar at the front.
Outside we sat on a bench and couldn't do anything when this overly-friendly cat decided to jump in each of our laps, purr, drool, and shed all over us. He/She followed us for a block after we said our Italian goodbyes.
We ended the day by checking out this strange round building we had seen on the way to the center of town, which turned out to be a preschool, which is ironic because of the fountain on the front depicting a man drowning babies. Maybe he's just washing them.
We were both very tired at the end of the day, even though we hadn't been able to find time to rent 2.50 Euro bikes as our mutual friend Liz advised us. We were too tired to ride anyway, and the train back was a time for music, reading, and sleeping rather than any attempt at conversation. It was a great day, and we had spent the exact right amount of time in the city. Once again, I feel the urge to travel the world and see all its wonderful sights, be it a castle with a moat, a city carved up by canals, a city with a red dome for a birthmark, a city with crazy modern architecture, or whatever. A good feeling to be heading to Greece with!
Music Announcements
Last Monday I went to an impromptu rehearsal with a group at Il Trillo, the music school NYU in Florence has a partnership with, who decided they want me to play at the Il Trillo concert on March 6. Il Trillo also wants the NYU ensembles to play, so March 6 might be a big gig day in Florence. The one problem is that's when Mom comes in and I would rather meet her at the train station than play. Chances are I won't have to make that choice and I'll be able to make some compromise, so there's a good chance I'll be playing on March 6, but I'm not sure with who, when, or where. This seems to be a theme with Italian concerts...
No headway back home in California with a summer gig, and I'm about ready to give up, but New York is yielding some fruit, or buds, at least. I'm working on a show at Barbes in Brooklyn, a really cool small club that fits only trios at the largest and only 25 audience members. I saw Ben Monder play there and it was amazing. I'm trying to play with the trio with my drummer friend Jesse Simpson and a bassist he knows from Manhattan School of Music. Keep our fingers crossed! I also might play with that same group back home over the summer, though probably in San Francisco and not the East Bay.
Aside: Because of midterms next week, don't expect much posting until they're over, but by then Mom will be here, so I probably won't post much anyway. If nothing happens on this site until Greece, don't worry, nothing terrible has happened to me!
