blog

Wanted: Enthusiasic Audience!

2011-09-17T04:29:06+00:00

Be a part of the “studio” audience and help me make a live video recording at Studios on the Park on Saturday Sept 24th! Pianist Chris Dawson and I (and likely some additional friends) will present an intimate concert of Swing Era jazz standards. Come early and check out the eclectic art at this super cool venue.

Summer’s not over yet!

2011-09-11T04:21:29+00:00

The kids might be back to school, and the mornings a bit cooler, but summer’s not over just yet, even if this evening’s rain made it seem like it was. So join me on Thursday for a final summer time picnic at Pear Valley Vineyard. Free concert, bring your friends and picnic basket - the last time I played there everyone brought fried chicken and it smelled sooooo good! Save some for me, I’ll see you from 5:30 to the sunset, which will be a little bit after 7.

2 seconds of fame

2011-09-10T04:32:23+00:00

Our little town gets a big city profile in this NBC First Look of Paso Robles. Featuring Hotel Cheval and a quick cameo by your’s truly -can you tell I was 7 months pregnant? Nervous in front of the cameras? ok maybe just a bit….NBC goes to Paso Robles

Sculpterra and the Pony Club this weekend

2011-06-07T17:10:50+00:00

Our little boy is two months old now, and I’m looking forward to reconnecting with all my fans and friends. I’ll be at the Pony Club this Friday and on Saturday we’ll have a little band at Sculpterra Winery. If you haven’t been to Sculpterra you have to come check out their sculpture gardens, they are so amazing and fun! There will be flat bread pizza, fine wines, and of course, plenty of jazz and swing!

It Happened In Monterey

2011-01-21T00:39:48+00:00

I am so looking forward to this year Monterey’s Jazz Bash by the Bay. This festival is special to me, it’s where my husband and I first met. But I’m particularly enthusiastic about this year’s musical lineup, lots of great bands, including the Reynolds Brothers, Rebecca Kilgore (along with Eddie Erickson), boogie woogie pianist Carl Sonny Leyland, and the Le Jazz Hot (aka the Hot Club of San Francisco), the High Sierra Jazz Band, Clint Baker’s New Orleans Jazz Band, Titan Hot 7, and many other great bands. Amist all this musical talent I am honored to be a guest artist!

Jazz Inspired

2010-02-18T21:28:10+00:00

Wow! I don’t know how I missed this, I guess it’s a problem of living out here in the boonies, but I just stumbled onto Judy Carmichael’s most excellent radio show. One of my favorite episode thus far is her interview with pianist Mark Shane. I’ve gotten to hear Mark play a couple times at various west coast festivals, and always really loved his playing. Listen online to this and other past episodes, or download the podcasts.

Introducing for the very first time …

2010-02-13T02:09:38+00:00

I was reading a forum recently were someone was requesting suggestions for of a Dixieland song that would good for a wedding recessional. And wasn’t “The Saints”. We get questions like this a fair amount, so it was fun to see what people came up with:

Tiger Rag
Ostrich Walk
I’ll See You In My Dreams (one of my favorite songs of all time, although I think, much like “All Of Me”, may be more appropriate as an instrumental at a wedding, depending on your sense of humor)
Sweet Georgia Brown
Mahogany Hall Stomp
Love is Just Around the Corner
I’ve Found A New Baby
Avalon
Cakewalkin Babies From Home
Blue Skies
Dinah
Dippermouth Blues
Indiana
Way Down Yonder In New Orleans
Rosetta
Muskrat Ramble
Canal Street Blues
Potato Head Blues
High Society

Of course there are so many, and this list doesn’t even hit on the more common love song jazz standards, such as “It Had To Be You”, “Best Is Yet To Come”, etc.. What other songs would you have suggested?

Finally!

2010-02-12T01:24:26+00:00

Oh yeah - it’s about time this site was up! I’m still tweaking stuff here and there, but please let me know if you see anything amiss, or broken, or, misspelled.

Thanks to Jeremy and the gang at 805 Collective who came up with the original design for the site, well over a year ago, and to Luke at Stateseven Design who did some image wrangling for me.

For the curious and nerdy in the group, this site is driven by Expression Engine.. I did a website a few years ago in EE and thought it was pretty cool, and more recently worked on a site that was using Kohana, a framework that came out of CodeIgniter which itself came out of the EE world. I could have used either of those, and in fact, started the site in each of them, only to have my enthusiasm waver when I realized I didn’t really want to write my own CMS. And while I was awfully tempted to use this as a chance to learn Ruby, in the interest of time decided to stick to what I knew a little bit about and build from there. Plus some cool kids I knew were raving about EE, and got me started on the right path (Thanks, Ben!). There’s a wonderful development community that has gathered around Expression Engine with active forums, free or inexpensive plugins, and lots of blogs with helpful suggestions, tutorials. Kudos especially to EE Insider and Train EE, whose tutorials got me up and running pretty quickly. I’m using the jPlayer music player.