Trilogy Performance Tonight!

Tonight is the house concert that Debbie, Richard, and I have been preparing for over a year. It has been a lot of work and a lot of fun, and I am glad we've done it. For one thing, I've gotten to know both of these musicians much better and have become very fond of them personally and as musicians. We've had some differences, but we've been able to work them out pretty amicably.

It's been really good for me to take part in this kind of sustained rehearsal; their parts are far more demanding than mine and sometimes I have to wait for them to work out a chord sequence or address a technical problem or tune their instruments again.

But it's time well spent. My musical knowledge has grown a great deal since I've been practicing with them. I know more about chords, more about rhythm, more about tonality, more about the instruments they play, and especially more about what it means to make music in a small group.

The songs we'll be doing tonight include "Stardust", "Skylark", "Heart and Soul", "The Nearness of You", "Two Sleepy People", a medley of "Lazy Bones" and "Bidin' My Time", as well as others in the same general time period and genre. Richard and I sing harmony together on a couple of them and Richard and Debbie do two instrumentals, "Two Kites" and "Soir et Matin". The concert will last about 75 minutes with no intermission.

The audience is made up of folks from the Whidbey congregation and a few extra friends, about 25 people in all, including ourselves. The hosts will provide refreshments before and after.

I don't know whether Trilogy will continue or not. We've talked about offering the same program at Rockhoppers, a local venue, and we may do that. But both Richard and I are dubious about working up anything new because of our additional commitment to Bayview Sound, which has Rockhoppers gigs on Feb. 7 and 28, meaning a lot of rehearsal time between now and then.

So we'll see how things go after tonight. One thing is for sure, our rehearsals together in the kind of intense, concentrated way we've been working for the past two weeks are a thing of the past. We were slowed down by illness and the horrible weather which kept Richard confined on his mountaintop, even with his big 4x4 pickup. So we had to bust our buttons to do the final preparations for tonight. Having that behind us will be a big relief.

I'll try to post pictures if I can remember to take my camera for someone to take some shots. More later.