Upcoming D.A.I.R. Show

If you're not already aware, I used to play the music of Philip Glass live fairly often. In fact, since the Fall of 2002, I've played Glass' music live over 30 times. Granted, most of these performances were in glorified college-ensemble settings at best (including the shows in China and NYC), but they still count as public performances nonetheless. This said, despite a few half-hearted near-attemps at doing so in recent years, I haven't performed Glass' music live since March 2006, and even that performance was relatively isolated in time from the bulk of the other performances I had done in years past.

Well, as you can probably imagine with a setup like this, this is all about to change. As it turns out, one of my fellow trip-mates from the China trip, Nicole Mermans, now runs an aerial studio here in Atlanta called the D.A.I.R. Project, and after finally reconnecting with her after all these years, she informed me that their upcoming concert will feature a couple Glass tracks on piano. Naturally, it didn't take long for us to realize that perhaps I could come in and play them live, despite the fact that I would only have a couple weeks to prepare (which really isn't needed considering my experience with the music and its intermediate difficulty).

So, we had our first quasi-rehearsal yesterday, and we'll have a couple more between now and the three weekend shows beginning on Friday the 6th of March. While I'm not getting paid for this gig, it's still a great opportunity: I get to play Glass' music again, I get to do something active in the art community, and hopefully I'll make some new friends. And although this whole thing is going to make my next couple of weeks even more hectic than they already are with my trip to Bloomington/Cincinnati tomorrow (more on that later), I'm really looking forward to it all.