AWOL -again- blogger back -again- in business!

Greetings to one and all (or could it actually be down to just one - literally - if not zero by now?),

Another unreasonable amount of time between posts, but due to a couple of pretty darn good reasons:
A) my underpowered laptop PC experienced a major crisis. I use the term major crisis because when a PC takes about half an hour to just bring up Internet Explorer, there's something majorly wrong with it. And that's just getting IE to appear. Moving between web sites, or even trying to watch a YouTube Video, is a whole other story. A Toshiba equipped with 512-meg RAM trying to run Windows Vista (which I have quite belatedly discovered is a prodigious memory-eating system) is doomed to epic fail, and my Toshiba did just that, and
B) I continue to not only burn the candle at two ends, I have added a third end so the candle will burn even faster! So now I am a member of Odaiko New England, bass player for Mary Casiello and also bass player for Centralia! By the way, I would like to state that I have no idea how I find the energy to be part of these three ensembles.

But thanks to my computer-savvy friend Jay, I am up and running again with a far more healthy 2 gig of RAM - yay! Jay-san, doumo arigatou gozaimashita. (insert sincerely-thankful bow here)

So much to write about I don't know where to begin, so I might as well start with Odaiko New England. Have been gigging intermittently all year long, with some satisfying shows performed at Newport's Black Ships Festival, Bellows Falls VT, Salem State College, Boston Pride Parade and Boston Pride Festival (playing a 20-minute set on the main stage at Boston's City Hall Plaza), in addition to cool gigs like playing for Medford's Ebisuya Japanese Market/J Magazine (a Japanese-language monthly magazine published in Boston), the North Suburban Y in Woburn, and others. Will post some links to photos and such soon, but for now I just want to post an entry for the first time in forever.

As for gigging with Mary, the shows have been a bit less frequent & for a variety of reasons. But big news is happening within 8 days: she's having a CD Release Party on September 11, Saturday evening, at Precinct Bar in Somerville (right in the middle of Union Square, to be exact)!! I'm pretty stoked to know that my bass playing is on a commercially-available CD, and that it represents my more mature playing style; let's just say that in the 1980's, while barely beginning to learn & develop some musical knowledge & comprehend what a bass player does and can create within and for a song, my playing was...well, let's be diplomatic and say "enthusiastic". That's a nice euphemism, right?

Centralia, my new band, deserves its own entry so I won't go on too much about it. We are a three-piece band: Harry plays guitars of all varieties and sings, Tony is our skillful and rock-steady drummer, and I play a fairly aggressive bass. Harry actually has to encourage me to play more notes; I'm convinced this is because I have played bass for three decades (this month marks the 31st Anniversary of me strapping a bass guitar over my shoulder & plugging it into an amplifier for the first time), but mainly for groups where the bass is strictly as a supportive instrument. In Centralia, I'm support and "lead bass" practically rolled into one.

By the way, for those wondering where we got the name Centralia from, try googling Centralia, PA. We like the imagery, and for the three of us, we possess such a passion for music that we like to think we've got the 'fire inside'. I have to say, if I didn't have a fierce passion for bass and for music, I wouldn't be playing it in two bands simultaneously 31 years after I took my first lesson in La Porte, IN, with Frank, the 'Big Z', in September, 1979. Frank, a thousand thank you's for giving me those early lessons & starting me off on this wonderful path, bridging rhythm and harmony in the coolest instrument ever designed for musicians.