Bonjour de Paris ... Chers Amis,
The other day I saw a coffee mug that had the following message printed on it, “Music is the reason I get up in the afternoon”. I had to laugh because the sentiment suits Leslie and I. Sleeping patterns not withstanding, our concerts have really gone up a notch or two of late. I cannot identify why things on stage have felt so good lately and this would surprise you if you’d been around Leslie during her off hours. For the past few weeks she has been fighting to get past a cold that has turned into a deep cough which sounds as if it could become bronchitis. She always amazes me how she can perform under these conditions.
The weekend before we left for Minsk, she sent a sub to sing for her on both nights while she spent that time in bed. Two days later we did a date at Café Laurent in Paris despite Leslie’s condition we had a really great evening. The next morning we left for Minsk, Belarus where as things turned out we would be working with very little sleep. Leslie was trying to conserve as much energy as possible during the flight. Some problems, that were never disclosed (thank you Belavia Airlines), caused us to leave more than ninety minutes late so we had to go directly from the Minsk airport to the auditorium. Once there we would meet the musicians we would work with and have a sound-check/rehearsal for that night’s concert. As often happens due to limitations in translating between different languages, we never really know exactly the details of our concerts when we go on the road. But this was beyond anything that we’ve encountered before. We were expecting to play two nights at the Jazz Club Minsk. Once we arrived we found out there is no Jazz Club Minsk! That first night our concert was at a beautiful auditorium with a wonderful “Estonia” 9’ grand piano, decent sound guys and a wonderful audience. When I first walked on stage to meet the other musicians I noticed a film crew setting up and later learned that our concert would be broadcast live on 7 channels in the country. Normally this would be something that needed to be negotiated in advance of agreeing to do the date but this group of people were clearly not living in that world so we decided to let it slide and learn from our experience to ask more questions in the future. (Before now it never occurred to me that I needed to ask if our concert was going to be broadcast live on TV.) We will get some video out of the deal so there is that! The musicians were pros. Aleksander, the drummer lives in Minsk, Norberts bass, and Raivo saxophone came that day by bus from Riga, Latvia. We had a decent rehearsal, their English language skills were good and most importantly, they did a very good job on both concerts. The first night we started the concert as a trio and added the saxophonist for the second tune and then Leslie joined us. It was a smooth transition which created a nice energy in the room. Right about the time we came back to the stage for the second half, Evgeny, the producer who was also a trombonist, decided that he would join the group and our second half got extended by three songs. That was a huge challenge for Leslie since she had thought she had completed the bulk of her evening in the first half. So now it’s late, we are tired and we haven’t eaten since we “enjoyed” a really bad meal on the plane that afternoon. But okay, we handle it and made it through the set. The audience had been wonderful all night and they give us an enthusiastic ovation. We decided that an encore was in order, so once more on the stage, Leslie is completely spent and I’m running on fumes. At last we are done but instead of leaving, many people in the audience walk on the stage and ask to take photos with Leslie and I. We are very grateful for their interest in us but we are also not used to this kind of thing, after all we are jazz musicians, our normal after concert routine is to see who can be the fastest one out of the door. Finally it is time to check into our hotel which is a Soviet era building but still very comfortable. The hotels bar restaurant have long since closed so our hosts bring us to a hotel meeting room and brought in something to eat. To be honest, I’m not sure what we ate that night, but we ate it. I drank some Belarusian cognac with my meal, Leslie not being a drinker, had only the choice of water to drink with her dinner. The other option was vodka! As he refilled my glass, Raivo kept telling me that the cognac wasn’t for me, it was for my health!
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