Truth is, my first instrument was a set of Afro Cuban bongos. Emerge Already! Weekend Wisdom Blog: Tell Your Whole Story...All of it. Heres the thing. Most young artists spend their entire artistic life telling someone elses story. Theyre great stories mind you, the story of Mozart or Beethoven or Lygeti, the history of classical, the importance of Contemporary classical. Many entrepreneurs go around talking only about the tactics of other successful entrepreneurs and some inspirational speakers spend more time rehashing the inspiration of other gurus! Then they get old, look back and while they were surely covering ground they werent leaving any of their own footprints behind. In fact, others could have come along and told those same stories better. But what happens when we mine our own stories for truth, when we look at our own patterns to learn how to succeed and how to fail. What happens when we parse our own tales for inspiration. Thats when we go from merely great to inimitable. You see, in order for you to understand my love of rhythm and all things rhythmic, you need to understand that the first instrument I laid hands on was a set of bongos my dad put in my lap. As a shirtless toddler, probably still in diapers, I banged away on those things with the recorded music of African drumming sensation Olatunji in the background. I hit on those drums until the rhythm became an irreversible part of me. So much so that when I heard classical, I loved the rhythm first, from the syncopation in Mozart to the motor in Prokofiev. But something interesting happened to me musically between grad school and Revolutionary Rhythm, then something pissed me off between Revolutionary Rhythm and Playing with Fire. You see what just happened? Now you wanna know when, where, why, and how? You want me to fill in the gaps, tell you how I got to here from all of that curiously engaging there. Thats called interest, better yet, if you work it right, its called demand. Nobodys demanding for you to rehash someone elses story. Theyre demanding for you to tell them what parts make up the whole that equals you. Soon, Ill be telling my whole story in a new one-woman show called Romejii. But for now please, tell us YOUR story, every inch of it.
Posted on: Sat, 31 May 2014 16:34:29 +0000
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