Just wanted to say thanks to everyone who helped make our performance of "Light Connected" at Disney Concert Hall a really special experience last week.  The charity United Friends of the Children hosted a wonderful event celebrating the foster youth of Los Angeles County who are headed to college in the fall.  It was great to help honor some extraordinary kids who are succeeding in life beyond all odds with a piece that reflected their accomplishments.

In composing and performing the piece, I collaborated with Dolce Wang (cello), Brandon Turner (bass), Tino Gregoriou (cajon), Chante Griffin (spoken word poetry), and Morgan Carroll (dance).  The poem accompanying the piece was written by Monica Cure.  It was a great privilege to work with good friends to create and perform a piece for an incredible organization at this outstanding venue.

We plan to record the piece soon and I plan on posting it here in the near future.

Check out my good friend Marshall Roemen completing a site-specific piece at the Ace Hotel in New York. (Also at the Ace Hotel Blog)

Marshall is also completing a work that consists of two 10 ft x 30 ft canvases to be shown at LAX, Terminal 1 in the international arrivals area. I got to preview half of this work at his loft downtown and it's going to be pretty amazing. Look for it this fall when you're coming back from your next jaunt around the globe...or just stop by the arrivals area when you're returning from your stay in room 1108 at the Ace Hotel.

I rolled into town after the Moscow trip, and, as I was driving around running errands and trying to un-jetlag myself, I heard on the radio (KCRW of course) that there was a concert/fundraiser for KCRW at the Vibiana downtown featuring a performance by and interview with Corinne Bailey Rae.  Of course, the concert was that night, and it was sold out....but at the last minute I was able to snag a couple of free tickets courtesy of her immensely cool manager, Bob Miller (thanks again Bob!).  I grabbed my friend Garrett and we headed down to the Vibiana, which, if you haven't been to an event there (and you NEED to!), is a stunning space formerly occupied by the Catholic Archdiocese and now home to all kinds of events from art shows to fashion shows and now (for the first time) concerts.

I'd been listening to Corinne's latest album The Sea--but this performance (with the musicians that played on the album, no less) raised my respect and admiration for her as an artist to a different level.  I'm not sure why it affected me so deeply; maybe it was the beauty and ambiance of the space, maybe it was her level of comfort with the band (they all grew up in the same music scene in the Manchester/Leeds area), maybe it was the fact that the audience was full of KCRW subscribers who value great art and shelled out for a show they really wanted to see, or maybe it was just the fact that I hadn't been in the audience for a show of that caliber and that level of intimacy in awhile.  When Jason Bentley interviewed her in the middle of the set, she skillfully avoided his questions about her dealing with the death of her husband a couple of years ago (basically saying, "it wasn't really therapeutic writing this album")...but she didn't need to mention it.  Her music and performance revealed that she's experienced deeper pain and perhaps more meaningful joy since she first told the girls to turn their records on a few years back.  Without having to tell her story in detail, she made it clear that she's happy, and even still a bit happy-go-lucky, and living out her life creating beauty just like she always has.

To cap off the show, Corinne and the band out a deeply groovin cover of "Que Sera Sera" as an encore that caught us all by extremely pleasant surprise.  I couldn't help but picture Doris Day belting out the song in The Man Who Knew Too Much as almost a cry of hope in search of her kidnapped son (see that movie if you haven't!) and knowing that Corinne seems to have a similar message of hope in the midst of grief and despair for the world they're performing for on this tour.

After the show, there was a sense of normalcy for me--meeting the musicians in the band afterward and having normal touring musician talk about it all being in a days work with all of the necessary British sarcasm intermixed--yet I still left the venue with the sound of the performance still enveloping me and inspiring me to greater performance, composition, and collaboration.

If you haven't seen her show on this tour, find a show and make it happen.  The experience at the Vibiana was definitely one-of-a-kind, but it will be well worth it no matter where you see it.

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In other news I am officially obsessed with the Kogi truck.  If you live in Los Angeles, you know this is the Korean Taco truck that we've all been hearing about for a year or so.  I finally tried it the other day when it was sitting outside the 4100 bar in Silverlake when some friends and I were randomly there.  I took a bite.  And immediately started following it on Twitter.  I won't say it changed my life, but that's only because I don't want to be too dramatic on this site.  And in this case, I'm fine with not being an early adopter, at least I'm in now.  Next time you're going, hit me up and I'll drop everything to meet you there.

The leftovers of communism are everywhere in Moscow, but nowhere more so than in Fallen Monument Park, next to the modern art division of the Tretyakov Gallery.  Statues of now infamous Soviet leaders that used to loom over parks and squares throughout the city were taken down at the collapse of the Soviet Union and discarded in this area next

to the river, only to be turned into a Sculpture Garden later.  It's so interesting to me to see the strong stone-carved faces of leaders that were so greatly feared in the West, now sitting all together in a quiet, insignificant park, with nothing to loom over except for some grass struggling to emerge from the long Russian winter.

On the left: a group of Lenins and Stalins, backed up by some strong Soviet symbolic works.  On the right: Karl Marx.

The Moscow metro was also quite the experience, not only because of its reputation for beautiful stations, but also because of its two suicide bombings earlier that week.  The atmosphere was a bit tense throughout, especially in the station where one of the bombs had killed so many, but the aesthetic of the metro system surely counteracted that sentiment in some way.  Some of the cars even had seats removed so that there could be an "art gallery" on the wall of prints from the city's museums.  Here are some of the stations, one of the bombing sites, and our own artwork inside the train as we made our way home for the last time.

Here are a few more shots from my time in the city--a guy playing some kind of bagpipe instrument on Arbat Street (notice the fur-covered tube attached to the foot-pump!), Red Square at night, enormous empty streets closed off for the midnight Easter Service at Cathedral of Christ the Savior, a cover band we found on our last night (first song was Sex Bomb by Tom Jones!), and a shot of all of us on stage at our show with E. Humperdinck.  My time in Moscow was too short, and I left too soon.  I'm hoping I won't be away long.