Musical Heat and Light When the Days Grow Dark: Pictures from My December 2012 Holiday Concert

Creating light and heat through song for the winter holidays

Ben Flint, Fred Randolph, Lisa B (Lisa Bernstein), and Alan Hall

Great fun at my December 2012 holiday concert at Musically Minded Academy in Oakland, Calif. I love communicating with the audience through fun and meaningful holiday songs from various traditions -- and adding my own spoken-sung originals. 

Our set ranged from "Let It Snow" to "Hine Ma Tov," from "My Favorite Things" to my original "Holiday in Oakland," from Matisyahu's "Miracle" about Chanukah to a magical reimagining of "Night and Day" for the winter solstice.

The band was creative, energized, and in synch with me and each other. I love that feeling! It's like riding an amazing conveyance with an alert crew, who are not only navigating the landscape but bringing it into being. 

Ben Flint always looks strikingly relaxed while powering jazz, soul, folk and rock grooves, harmonic depth, and emotional exploration aplenty on piano.

Fred Randolph on bass and Alan Hall on drums generated  mighty rhythmic underpinnings (even when soft) with just the right balance of energy and empathy.

Stage directions are crucial with improvisation

An attentive crowd shows up even on a Sat. night in December

Fred Randolph and Ben Flint striking a mature gangsta pose

Anna Orias, right, runs Musically Minded Academy

Our set ranged from "Let It Snow" to "Hine Ma Tov," from "My Favorite Things" to my original "Holiday in Oakland," from Matisyahu's "Miracle" about Chanukah to a magical reimagining of "Night and Day" for the winter solstice

"The New War" in current issue of "War, Literature and the Arts"

Here's the new issue of War, Literature and the Arts including one of my poems. I'm really enjoying it, especially the nonfiction. The journal is published by the U.S. Air Force Academy, interestingly.

http://wlajournal.com/24_1/24__index.html

My poem is called "The New War." It was written as an epilogue to my unpublished, recently revised poetry manuscript "Post-War Persephone." The whole poem follows below. Go to the magazine for the evocative work filling the rest of the magazine, many of it by soldiers and veterans. 

L i s a B e r n s t e i n (L i s a B)

The New War

The new war has started.

Photos of caskets

disappear the next day from the newspapers.

The new wounded come home

with nano-reels of film curled

in their cells, inscriptions

for their children,

genetic messages for the living world.

The civilians recall their airtight homes

as one frame appears on the news

and another:

the man with the hood over his head

and wires strung from his extended arms,

the man crouched naked before the dogs…

The new war has started.

The new wounded come home

with hidden inscriptions for their children…

Do you hear the singing far below us, the stirring

in the soft dirt?

I won’t walk again on that darkening ground.

I can still taste the rotten fruit

where the dead keep turning

and the sweet honey I found near it.

Let the fruit fall here in the open light

where we can see it and eat it.

But the veterans will go down again, Persephones,

every winter,

and if they’re lucky, only then.

The new war goes on.

The soldiers send messages, digital snapshots

like bright, strange apples fallen to earth—

the red blood, the randomly arranged bodies.

Sickening fruit—may it fall

into the light

and be seen by the world.

copyright © 2013 Lisa Bernstein

Covered California - New Info on California's Health Exchange Under Affordable Care Act

Covered California! The basics are now online about California's health exchange (or marketplace) for 2014 under the Affordable Care Act. http://www.coveredca.com/

They look good. Premiums and health providers are not settled or provided yet, but the cost calculator's results look promising. This insurance is for folks not covered under a group or employer plan. It will sure make my life easier and lower my costs dramatically as a diabetic. And it will do the same for many others, as preexisting conditions will no longer be a factor. Yay!

Of course, this health insurance option will be crucial for the many artists, musicians, and writers who are self-employed and struggling to pay for health care, not to mention all the others in the same position.

By the way, I was interviewed in my home by a nice young market research team a few months back. I didn't know their client but figured it was some health insurance company. I was surprised when they videotaped some interesting but off-topic jazz collages I had on the wall. Afterward, they confessed they were working on this very website.

Glad to help Obamacare, however unwittingly.

A Surprising Audition

Anyone else have a story about an audition that didn't go the way you'd hoped it would?

I recently decided to test the waters of the indie band scene and spent a few days learning three songs by a mid-40s bandleader who had not yet released any records but had done some gigs in divey to good venues. The sound was (intentionally, I thought) rough but creative, a mixture of what he called jazz, psychedelic lounge, and R&B, and the tunes intriguing musically and periodically inspired lyrically. I had answered his ad for a new singer (the last one had moved away) with links to my press kit and website, and he had invited me to audition.

I reduced the 22-page chart he sent for one tune to 1-1/2 pp. so I could figure out the form. He sent me extensive emails on his band history and hopes, about which I commiserated. I soon noticed, though, that he never made a single comment or reply about my own experiences, which I'd offered in camaraderie, or even about any of my various recordings. He said he really wanted someone to sing most of his (often quirky) tunes note for note. I was game. Then a few days later he wrote that he was also open to someone who was a Sade clone and/or a "beat poetry/gospel" poet, as his band could accommodate all three different leads in one show. That was confusing, but given my cross-genre background as a singer along with my writing and performances as a poet and then as a singer integrating spoken word into tunes, it seemed I could fulfill at least one if not more of these roles to our mutual satisfaction – especially given the original influences he cited, spanning Sarah Vaughn, Chrissie Hynde, and Astrud Gilberto. He had referred to previous singers who were undisciplined or needed help developing or had shifting life goals, so I was pretty sure he’d dig my work ethic and stability. I was excited.

His band rehearsed 2x/week, which seemed like a lot for what appeared to be a slim repertoire. Oh well, it could be fun. The rehearsal studio turned out to be near one of the worst corners in San Francisco. In the dark, I made it through a nightmarish tableau of darting drug addicts and salespersons and insane shouters and walked down a scary alley, hanging behind a couple of questionable characters ahead of me. I picked my way around a huge backhoe blocking the rest of the street. Beyond it, the door to the rehearsal building was locked. I heard the loud careening clacks of skateboarders just inside the lobby, who then let me in.

The bandleader came down and brought me up into a dark, dusty, large room filled with randomly placed furniture – and pot smoke. I wondered where the band typically played amid the clutter. After his voluble emails, in person he could barely say much. He seemed nice but distant. I chalked that up to shyness. The room was lit mainly by one bright bulb over his head. After our shadowy entrance, I had to shield the bulb's glare with my hand to look at him. I never even completely saw his face.

A super-loud rock band was playing and singing next door – with no sound separation between the two rehearsal rooms. Still, I felt optimistic as he gave me some headphones, placed me in front of a mic with stand, and started finding the first track on his laptop. Oddly, my voice was doubled in the headphones. He said he couldn't hear that, that maybe he was just used to it. Okay. The music and headphones didn't block out the terrible shrieking rock band a few feet away and it was hard to hear myself, but I started singing the first tune with enthusiasm. He immediately began swiping his phone, which he continued the whole time I was singing. I tried to stay in the spirit of the emotional song and thought I did pretty well. For the second tune, which had a number of key changes, he brought up a track with just drums and a faint bassline. In the counterpoint din of the rock band, I asked for something with a chord or two. He found another track for the song, but it was at half-tempo. He went back to playing with his phone while I sang it. Then he suggested we stop, as the whole band would be arriving for rehearsal. I wasn't even going to be able to sing the third song.

I had worked for hours learning the tunes the last few nights and sounded pretty good on my home tape the night before. How did I sound here in the noise and disregard and gloom? Of course I didn't ask. No comment from him beyond "thanks for coming down." I had acted upbeat throughout but was glad to flee. I pressed through the street action, which now seemed like a raucous extension of the rehearsal studio's haze and disarray, fearing for my safety and thinking, You've got to be kidding. When I got over the bridge and to my busy Oakland Trader Joe's, I felt delivered to a place of sanity and light as I wheeled my cart in semi-shock down the reassuring aisles.

I got an email from him the next day saying, "I have extended the range at which I could envision working with you as a singer for this group and have concluded that it would not be a good match." Did that mean that even though he broadened his boundaries, I still wouldn't fit into them? (Had I just been insulted?) Was my sound that night really so different from my tunes online and in my press kit, and what about the poetry/spoken-word elements – or had he even listened to them?

Well, I couldn't have gone back there. But I was still hoping for something from this person whose musical universe I had entered and responded to with empathy and interest – some acknowledgement as a fellow musician. Suddenly, all my many years of rehearsal and recording experiences seemed like trips to a luxury hotel or at least a cozy bed and breakfast in the company of wonderful players, producers, and engineers, who were not only among the best in the Bay Area, but respectful to me and sweethearts to boot. How lucky I had been.

copyright © 2013 Lisa Bernstein

Savoring the Golden Apple

"Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could." -- Louise Erdrich

I fell for fiction-writer Louise Erdrich after reading her wonderful novel “Love Medicine” and have since gobbled up her short stories in The New Yorker. I’m overdue to read another novel by her. I’m not sure where this quote came from; I found it in the Facebook post of a good friend today.

I love the imagery of eating and food Erdrich gives us. After bluntly stating that “life will break you,” she reminds us that the reason we are here is to be swallowed up by life, even to the point of being broken and bruised. Next she calls us to notice that the earth’s bounty also often experiences the same cycle, the same falls, the apples “wasting their sweetness.” We are like that bounty. And as we become witnesses to the apples in both their deliciousness and their sad fates, it makes our own suffering somehow more natural and bearable, even lovelier. We have companions in the sweetness “in heaps” all around us.

Finally there’s another turn: we’re not only like the apples, but we get to taste them – taste each other. So the thought comes full circle – we taste, and we are tasted, and it’s this experience that swallows us up. Life is the grand eater and we are its food; and at the same time, we are grand eaters of life.

As a diabetic I love being told to engage with sweetness – to listen to it, to notice its natural source, to tell myself about it, and to taste as much of it as I can.

Of course the apple means knowledge too, knowledge that is both sacred and inextricably involved with the body. No perversion of the story of the Garden of Eden can erase that. The golden apple shines in the stories of many cultures, promising divine information and immortality. How tantalizing that timelessness is offered in such a savory, physical package, one so transitory as it is devoured.

Diabetes gives me similar tantalizing knowledge – glimpses of the precious gold of the present moment in all its physicality, and of the spirit (that is, me) who chooses to savor that moment, over and over.

Taste the day, and enjoy.

copyright © 2013 Lisa Bernstein

The Power of Being Amused

Your most important spiritual tool is probably not what you think it is... Warning: may involve Charlie Chaplin. See http://lisabintuitive.com/blog/your_most_important_spiritual_tool_its_probably_not_what_you_think/

Mayan Dawn / Winter Solstice

Isn't it fun to be at a moment when so many of us are looking at the world ending and not ending and continuing and re-turning? Exciting! A good correction to the narrow (though scary) "fiscal cliff" frame. Wealth is here for all of us in so many ways would we only lay our collective hands on it. Somehow this makes me envision a sea of French toast and getting one's fingers all sticky with maple syrup!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~