Un Giorno Perfetto alle Cinque Terre

Ciao, Tutti!

Things are getting a little crazy around these parts as final papers start to come in, people begin to prepare for tests, the final concerts are coming up, and everyone who can't wait to get home gets antsy and people who don't want to leave get sad. After teaching last Wednesday, the teacher and I went over the next two classes I would teach before going back home, and it was more than a little disconcerting to think I would be gone so soon. The idea of spending a year or so here after graduating to teach English is becoming more and more appealing.


View from the Oberau Train Station

Before I talk about the perfect day in Cinque Terre (SHIN-kwe TER-a), I should mention my trip to visit with Shira and Billy, which was interesting since both Shira and I look quite a bit different than last time we saw each other. It looks like the baby will be here in about 5 weeks, according to my expertise in the area, or my calculations after hearing what the due date is. I was glad to have a chance to see where they live because there aren't many people who are going to be able to see the house where little Sophie is going to spend most of her first year. Plus, next time anyone sees Shira from out of town she will be a mother. I certainly felt like I was very lucky to be able to make this visit at this point in time.


View from Shira and Billy's backyard. The light made this picture hard to take.

The best part about the visit was the main reason I went, which was the passover seder. Last year I was in New York for the holiday, and I didn't get to celebrate it at all, though I do only have to blame myself for skipping the seder my friends were having. But it was so nice this year to be spending the passover with family, the way it's meant to be done, or at least the way I'm used to. Passover is an important holiday for me because of my version of the bar mizvah, where I spent a year studying the haggadah (not enough to spell it right, though) and learning how to lead a seder. It was just so nice and homey to be reading the story and singing the prayers once again with family. It was a small affair this year, only 10 once the stragglers showed up, which was probably a good thing for Shira. It was intimate, and we went at our own pace, allowing for the questions, serious or not, to be answered by the 4 Jews at the table. I had a great time, so great, in fact, that I completely forgot to take pictures, much to Aunt Marsha's probable disappointment. That says a lot, saying as I took 125 pictures at Cinque Terre. Taking pictures immediately makes one feel like an outsider documenting an event rather than taking part in it, and I was having too much fun to withdraw from that to get some photos to send back home. However, when I wasn't avoiding writing my paper, I did manage to get some good pictures of the house, plus I got some at the train station.


Another view from the Oberau Train Station

The small town Shira and Billy live in (whose name I don't remember) is very close to the foot of the Alps, which was evident as the mountains seemed to rise up from right in front of me. It was drop dead gorgeous, the whole scenery, the car ride, the train ride, and even the flight. They live in a small farming community which was very relaxing for me to spend the weekend after a semester of hard work, though it didn't help me tackle my paper. However, after a long stay, I can imagine it getting old. Still, I appreciated it quite a bit.


Shira and Billy's house

It hadn't stopped raining when I got back to Florence. the weather here has been very strange, and even the Florentines don't get it. I was really hoping for good weather before I left so I could see the Boboli Gardens in bloom as well as the gardens on campus. But, sure enough, spring arrived with T-shirt weather on Thursday, and, bounding with the temperature-induced energy, I figured I would get up bright and early at 6:30 to take a train to Cinque Terre Parche Nazionale and make up for the two times before I wanted to go but failed to do so.


View of Manarola from the mountains

It was completely worth it. My goodness, the place was so amazingly beautiful.

Cinque Terre literally means "five lands" or "five villages." It is located on the west coast in the middle of Liguria, the region north of Tuscany. It's about a 15 minute drive from Portofino and Santa Margarita, where I had visited about 3 years ago with my high school band. The five villages are spaced out along the coast and there are numerous trails that lead you from one to the other. Just behind the towns are rolling hills which double as a large farming community.


Manarola

Some initial observations: First of all, it was like the trip to Portofino back in the day, but many times more beautiful. The buildings were built in the same colorful style and the trail had the habit of running through random people's back yards. For example, we walked by a party going on in celebration of the Italian Liberation (I went on their version of Independence Day).


Note the crowd surfer. You can't really hear the loud music they were playing just by the photo, though.

Second, there were all sorts of tiny paths that didn't look like paths until you saw where they were going. A lot of times I had to double back in order to tell where that path began. These were usually paths that led up to farms or private residences. It was sort of like Venice, but the paths actually went somewhere instead of into the water. It gave new meaning to directions that don't use street names but "the third bush after the ninth tree" or something like that.


This door seems to be in the middle of nowhere, but there's actually a path that makes it important.


I think it's obvious it's a path because of how I took the photo, but it wasn't so evident as I walked by it.

Third, everything was so amazingly green! You can tell by the photos, but it was obvious spring had arrived and the farmers were happy. Combining the unnatural blue of the sea with the verdant green of the hills and trees made for a naturally vibrant hiking day.

The names of the five towns, in order, are Riomaggiore, Manarola (the one I got the best pictures of), Corniglia, Vernazza, and Montarosso. I got to Riomaggiore at about 10 in the morning to begin my hike. I wanted to get through all of the towns, and as a consequence I didn't take many pictures in Riomaggiore. I could have taken some looking back, but the sun was just rising in that direction and it was impossible.


Foot trails map

The path most traveled in the park is trail 2, which is not very strenuous and leads you along the coast so you can smell that wonderful sea air and get a good coastal view of all the towns you're going to. It's also the one built best for large groups of people, but even that wasn't enough to keep from congestion. As many of you know, I walk rather quickly, and this was the trail for families, and families don't usually want to walk in single file. I had originally wanted to do the hiking parts as fast as I could so I could have some time to explore the towns, but, as we will see, I ended up doing something much different.


Manarola

By the time I made it to Manarola I decided to try and take a trail above the rest of the people going on path 2, but I took one that took me about half way to Corniglia, then sent me back to Manarola, so I got to see it twice, which may account for why I was able to get better pictures of it. After the blunder I decided to walk seaside again to get views such as this one:



In Corniglia, on the way to the next trail, I saw a sign that looked like this:



So I looked at my hand held map and made sure the trail would eventually lead to the next town of Vernazza, which it did, so I whimsically went off trail and started the uphill climb, which turned out to be just about entirely uphill. There was an elevation gain of about 2,000 feet in about half an hour of hiking. All in all, the trail was 2.5 km long, so a mile of hiking that went up 2,000 feet. That means more than 2/3rds of the hiking was uphill as opposed to moving straight. Puts the trail at a 60 degree angle. My legs were shaking when I reached the road at the top of the mountain. But the view was amazing and it was totally worth it, though Mom would have hated how handicapped inaccessible it was.It made me worried, since I want to go to Yosemite this summer, but if I had such a hard time on this trail, I don't know if I'm quite ready to go all the way up to Half Dome, which is quite a lot more elevation gain than what I did in Cinque Terre.


Coniglia from above

This hike was the best part of the trip, even if my calves are still sore. It was very cathartic, very introspective, and I could feel my mind clearing. Suddenly I could remember things clearly, things from back in my childhood, and make connections to solve problems that had been forgotten by now (Flip Saunders needs to do this kind of hike). I was all alone in the mountains by the sea. It was an ecstasy, a mental cleansing, and I felt in a better, more optimistic state of mind that I can remember in a long time. I felt I could go back and finish Guest Artist in a sitting, that I could stop stressing about this movie score because I could just sit down and do it, that I don't have to worry about my exams because all I have to do is study for them. I even felt for the first time that I could talk to Mariel without anger, reserve, or fear. I felt like I could tackle all my problems as long as I was on that mountain, like my mind was sharp enough to handle anything set out for it to do. A feeling of "I can do this" about everything. Barack Obama would have been proud. He must do hikes like that all the time. All jokes aside, it was a profound experience for me, perhaps even as far as spiritual. And, of course, it felt like the perfect ending trip for this wonderful semester of mine, a feeling of closing up all the holes left open until this point. It was a truly wonderful feeling.

Part of the consequence of taking the long way around, other than the shaking in my knees, was that I approached the next town, Vernazza, from the back rather from the side, and the path winded down people's back yards, directly through the farming community next to a river. It was so green and full of spring that it was fairly obvious that the farmers were having a good time with the great weather. I liked seeing the little rails with carts on them used to transport things up and down the hills. The whole community seemed to take living on the hills in stride, though with all the uphill climbing they have to do as suggested by the crazy steep stairs, they must be very fit and worn out at a much younger age.



I just booked a hostel to Genoa for a couple days next weekend to celebrate May Day, which is a national holiday here. One last great trip in store for me before this whole adventure comes to a close.

Music Announcements

Very exciting news: The NYU in Florence jazz bands got a final surprise gig back in Marche in a town on the sea close to Macerata. This gig is going to be different than our normal club or cafe dates because we will be playing as a preview to their summer jazz festival in which two NYU groups are playing. This means they will give us a theater and 500 or so people to play in front of, as well as enough money for each band to give us a place to stay for the night and enough to pay the leader of the ensemble I'm in, a stellar trumpet player from Rome who takes our ensemble to another level, though we have yet to play with him in concert. This show will be on Saturday, May 3, so if any of you happen to be in Marche and in the city whose name I don't know yet, you might want to come and see the show.

Tomorrow, Monday, April 28, is the Jazz Party at Villa La Pietra where the bands will play for the students and staff at NYU's campus in Florence. The show should be nice, not that different than the one in the theater on May 3rd, though we have a pretty strict time limit. It is our last (sniff!) performance in Florence.

May 6th is the scheduled date for the performance of the film score. I suppose this means I have to finish it. This is the last thing in the school year that is pumping coffee into the butterflies in my stomach. I do have my friend Leo set to conduct it, and I trust him, but I'm most worried about leading a rehearsal because I don't really know how to rehearse this kind of thing. I hope everyone can sight read it. But if all goes well, the show should be like nothing I've ever done before. In a good way. And it has been fun doing this film score, but it's also been just about the hardest thing I've ever done. With hindsight I would have liked more practice with shorter scenes first, since writing 7 minutes of silent film music is pretty tough, but here I am!

Again, the shows for the summer, which will kick ass:

June 28 at the Bluesix Acoustic Room in San Francisco The first ever performance of Guest Artist, as well as a celebration of the year-birthday of my CD, "Summer Victory Dance." I will bring a repertoire of political music I have written as well to anticipate the end of Bush's final term.

August 17 at the Jazz School in Berkeley My last concert as a teenager will feature a different arrangement of Guest Artist as well as performances on many different instruments I have either never played on stage before or haven't for a while. I will take advantage of the electricity that Bluesix doesn't have.

September 25 at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City The Sam Goldsmith 20th birthday celebration concert. I haven't planned far enough ahead to say for certain what the focus of this show is yet.

Every show will feature the Inspiration Sextet.

Macerata

Ciao, Tutti,

A ridiculous amount of stuff happened since the last story I wrote, which was about Siena and Rome, I believe. This includes the teaching lessons I have been giving, which have all been continuing to go tremendously well. The teacher told me that parents were coming during the parent-teacher conferences to say that the kids really like the American who comes in on Wednesdays. That would be me. So, in short, things are going well, the kids are expecting and behaving for me, and the teacher asks to keep some of the homemade games I create. They did say something about the "magic backpack" (zaino magico) that I bring everything in, one day a game I made up, that time before I brought a pot and silverware, once I brought my laptop to watch Space Jam on, once I brought my frame drum, and so on. Things go very well in the classroom, and I'm trying to save some of my souvenirs, like the drawings they make for me or the games I make for them, to put in my scrapbook once this amazing adventure comes to its inevitable ending.


The band: Rob on sax, Greg on guitar, Simone on drums, Piero on bass. Piero and Simone are both Florence natives, which is why the band is called "New York-Italian Connection."

What I want to spend most of my time talking about today was the trip to Macerata for a gig on Sunday. Macerata is a small city outside of Florence, sort of like Prato, and we had the gig all to ourselves, in that the other band wouldn't be there at all so we would play the whole time. It would be a nice an easy gig since I didn't have to pay for a cab to move the vibes since we would be taking Antonio Vanni's (the head of the NYU in Florence Jazz Program) car.

Actually, just about none of that was true, yet that's what I thought was going on until Saturday night (ah, don't you love Italian organization?). In actuality, Macerata is about 3 and a half hours of driving outside of Florence, about the distance of Rome, and nearly on the Adriatic coast, close to the city of Ancona. We were to meet the other band there and, after our set, we would have a jam session and stay the night, leaving early the next morning to see which classes we could make it in time for. We were set to leave at 11:00 to cross the beautiful Appenini mountains which meander down the center of Italy. The gig was to pay incredibly well, even paying for a farmhouse for us to spend the night in.

So I was just about completely wrong. But these things happen.

It's all still a blur in my mind, everything that happened, and I'm still exhausted from it. I didn't sleep well the night before and I slept only 3 hours on Sunday night, so I'm a little worn out, but all in all it was a blast. The gig was actually in a smaller town 20 minutes or so outside of Macerata whose name I don't remember, but we did stop in Macerata for half an hour of exploration, though the exploration only took fifteen minutes. The town was small. There was a nice outdoor market, though, and I bought a big dice (dado) with hinges and five little dice inside, perfect for playing Yahtzee. I figured there would be no Macerata playing cards since there was really nothing to take a picture of, but I did want something to commemorate the moment. The countryside was the real beauty out there, nothing but dazzlingly green farmland with a backdrop of the Appeninis. There were a few snow-capped peaks, and I got that urge I had in Crete to just drive towards the mountains with no real plan, just to get closer. Antonio really needed to clean hi car, which is my excuse for not getting any pictures from the road. Mi dispiace (I'm sorry).


The Market

So this was basically the best gig we have played all year, which makes the trip gratifying. There is a nice feeling when everything clicks, the kind of feeling that makes it understandable why I never need to drink coffee. It was energetic in the small cafe we played in, and there was no room even to move in the audience; one would need to plan far in advance if he needed to make a trip to the bathroom. Something clicked, and we played our two sets and killed it. There's not much more to say than that. We were brought in from 3 and a half hours away and we gave them the best we could give. Everyone in the room was happy. This usually doesn't happen in real life! But the power of music is so great... it brought meaning to the phrase "contagious energy." I can't do it justice with words. You would have needed to be there to understand.

This is the place we played:



They turned it right-side up when we got there for the sound check.

Now, besides us playing great and having a wonderful time, there were a couple of special things about this concert. First of all, one of Antonio's great friends, Samuel, who had the connections to get us this gig, was celebrating his 28th birthday. He sat in on some rock tunes on drums. Playing is not his specialty, the business end is, but we all had a great time playing Led Zeppelin tunes. Antonio came up and sang "Dazed and Confused" during this part of the jam session and I played piano, and it still puts a smile on my face to think of everyone in the room knowing everyone else and everyone just letting go and doing what's fun rather than what makes sense because fun is what makes sense. This is what it looked like when Antonio was singing:



The other interesting thing was that the best drummer in Italy, according to Antonio, was in the house and joined the jam session. Now, having said that, I completely forget the poor guy's name. My mind wasn't in a great place, but I do seem to have a good memory of Machiavelli's "The Prince," the reading I brought with me and did in the car when the road wasn't to windy. Anyway, Italians have a habit of exaggerating things, though he was quite a good drummer with a keen ear for making a piece move forward and bringing the best out of the soloist. I only heard him for one piece since I had to load up the vibes which had broken a string. Here is a picture of the three Italians who had the most impact on this show:


From left to right: Antonio Vanni, the director of the NYU in Florence Jazz Program; Best-Drummer-In-Italy-Whose-Name-I-Forget; Samuel, now 28 years old.

We started playing at 7 and didn't stop until 12:30, though the actual set was over many hours before that and I had to pack up the vibes (Rob suggested brilliantly that I put my shoelace in the place of the broken string, which worked until our set was over). The other band brought their horns and joined the jam, as did a flamboyant and talented young Italian saxophone multi-instrumentalist. It was a ridiculous amount of music in that hot and crowded room. Actually, everything about this gig was ridiculous. This is what the jam session looked like:



The ridiculosity was not over yet, though, since then we had to find our way to our casa colonica in the middle of the farmland in the middle of the night with an entirely drunk group of drivers (people were disappointed that I hadn't taken advantage of the free drinks they were offering besides fresh water. I'm not saying this just because I want to impress you, family of mine, but because it's true). Anyone who knows the definition of "casa colonica" must think I'm insane, but I do not joke at all. We were actually provided with a 10-room farmhouse all to ourselves, about the size of the house the family will be staying in when we go to the beach this summer. We followed Samuel to this place in the middle of nowhere to the point where we thought we were completely lost, but then there we were and at 1:30 we had plans to leave at 9:00 the next morning, giving us time for our classes and everyone else time to get to the polls for the Italian election. I got a room to myself and went to bed at 3:00.

This is what the house looked like in the morning when we could see:


(Actually, "casa colonica" means farmhouse, which was behind the house we stayed in)

And this is the view of the countryside that came with the house:



So, as to all things, there were some downsides, and one of them is me trying to stay awake right now as I write this. I got to bed at 3:00 for a combination of reasons including figuring out the shower, making the bed, getting ready, finishing a piece I had started writing in the car on the way, etc. I did not wake up at 8:30 like everyone else. I was up bright and early at 6:00 because it was already light out and quite cold. I needed my overcoat on top of my blanket to keep warm. An hour later when it was obvious I wasn't going to go back to sleep, I simply got ready to go and finished "The Prince." This would not have been that big of a deal had it not been for two big factors: 1) The night before I hadn't slept well either because I woke up in the middle of the night with a song idea. Worth it, but that makes two nights in a row without much sleep. I tried to sleep on the ride back, but the road was too curvy and my stomach started to hurt, so I just closed my eyes and listened to headphones. I got about 20 minutes of sleep once the road straitened out. 2) There was also not much food. The one shortcoming of the gig was that we didn't get to have dinner. They fed us all sorts of appetizers, which were very good but not filling at all. Lunch passed as we were in the mountains (both Sunday on Monday), though on Sunday we stopped to get small panini, which were delicious but about 6 times too small. So basically in between Saturday night at 9:00 pm and Monday at 4:00 pm all I had to eat was:

1) Bowl of cereal
2) Small but delicious panino
3) Assorted appetizers
4) A piece of chocolate with coffee in the center (no, not mocha, but real coffee!)

By the time I actually had something to eat I had forgotten how to eat it.

In addition to being exhausted and hungry, I had also forgotten to pack my toothbrush, so my mouth tasted horrible. But even when you combine all this, I've felt worse before, and because the gig was so much fun it was worth it. This whole exhaustion and physical wear and tear just adds to the story for me, though I'm still recovering, as you can see. I did have early classes today, and no time to get rest afterward because of class registration. But I took a nap after that and now I feel a little better. No teaching tomorrow, so I get to sleep in, and I think tomorrow will be good. It better. I have a big paper to get serious work done on and a film score to write.

This is a good segue into the Music Announcements

Good news on Guest Artist: I no longer have to count how many mysteries I have to solve about the piece, but only hoe many things to write. That number is 2. And I already know what those 2 things are going to sound like. The thing is finally nearing completion!

Here are the shows where this piece of music is going to be played. A more complete description can be found on the last post.

1) June 28: Inspiration's Anniversary at the Bluesix Acoustic Room in San Francisco
2) August 17: My last concert as a teenage band leader at the Jazz School in Berkeley
3) September 25: 20th Birthday celebration at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City

The only new announcement I can think of at the moment is that at the gig in Macerata-sort-of someone asked if we could play a show at a jazz festival on April 25, bringing the concert count for that weekend to 2. It seems pretty cool, though I don't know much about it. You have to ask Rob, the band's spokesman because he can speak the best Italian.

And, once again, if you think all the concerts with Guest Artist will be the same, you could not be more wrong. I've got so many ideas for projects in my head right now that it will be an easy thing to give each concert, each with its own meaningful date, a different and meaningful existence.

I will be in Germany next weekend to celebrate passover with Shira and Billy. Let me know if I left anything off the blog that I should post before I go, or if there's anything I should do or say while I'm there. Ciao!