In early May I finished my second sabbatical semester at Berklee, this time at the campus in Valencia, Spain. I do believe that the temptation to repeat exceptional experiences should often be resisted. But this was not one of those cases. I enjoyed a highly productive four months, learning to comp simply but freely on piano, taking private vocal and guitar lessons, adding to my jazz repertoire, studying the history and harmony of Mediterranean music styles, playing in a free jazz ensemble. There were a few serious come-to-Jesus moments around struggling to master advanced harmony, (a never ending pursuit), holding back with my vocal range, (a common tendency) and bumping up against my own formidable musical and artistic limitations.
Berklee is unforgiving. The standards are high and there is nowhere to hide. During finals week I noticed a list for first year students that should serve as a practical guide to musicians hoping to crack the code:
Know all the scale modes in all keys
Intellectual knowledge — circle of 5ths; functions
Know the chords and arpeggios
Find the root, 3rds and 7ths
7 Major
7 minor Major
Diminished
Augmented
7 — b9, #9, b13, #11
sus 4
Guitar players out there roll up your sleeves and take this to heart because we are not talking only about arpeggios and chords but all the related inversions up and down the strings and the fretboard in four-string voicings. For Berklee students this is simply a first year base camp, a basic palette of colors used in many forms of music. Then the fun begins.
Before leaving Valencia I wanted to make a recording to mark this moment in time. I came across a very cool place called Millenia Estudios in the working class neighborhood of Fuente Sant Lluis which is separated from the port of Valencia by open farm fields of artichokes and onions and vegetables. Millenia led me to some very talented local musicians to form a rhythm section who I had seen playing on a few videos for the Brazilian guitarist singer Thaïs Morell (please look her up) and I hatched a plan.
At Berklee I had struck up friendships with some really nice and talented musicians: a third-year flamenco guitarist named Kris Ramakrishna; an Israeli master’s student, Ido Goldberg, who has a bit of a Mark Knoffler style; and David Mehalko, a Texas violinist with a penchant for Celtic music. I recruited them for the session along with a French saxophonist named Sylvie Leys who I often heard practicing her ass off in a room next to me because we were usually the first two people to arrive at school, especially on the weekends. Kris and I quickly sketched out a flamenco arrangement of John Lennon’s “Working Class Hero,” a song Lennon apparently recorded 100 times before combining two vocal tracks for the final product. I had been studying the ballad “You Don’t Know What Love Is” in both guitar and vocal classes and couldn’t wait to hear Sylvie cut loose on that song. Bouncing around my head was a jazzy bass line for “Poor Wayfaring Stranger” I had arranged on piano. And finally there was an original country song “Felta Girl” I had written before leaving California in October, which seemed like many years ago. I was interested in how the Spanish jazz players would interpret Americana.
Recording at Millenia Studio in early May 2018.
The two days of recording went off pretty much without a hitch, except that I burned my hand making coffee the morning of the session. Also the takes were live so I had to live with the inability to redo any vocal tracks. The players were great, the vibe was joyful, the engineer, Carlos Soler, was soulful and very professional. I was leaving Valencia with a musical souvenir I will share with you all very soon. I hope to get back to Millenia to try it again, despite what I said above about resisting the urge to repeat great experiences. As I have been known to tell my children, “do what I say, not what I do.”
We packed up our apartment on Calle Sueca with more than a twinge of melancholy for the tremendously enjoyable four months we’d spent in Valencia. Our first impressions of the noisy, busy, crowded city had faded into a more personal experience and shimmering memories of daily life there, in the markets, walking the ramblas and the central river park, the many kind people we’d met, the sights and smells of the streets where you still find lots of custom fabricators and can get anything repaired and mended, the wine bodega where I tried to learn about and consume every drop of Spanish vino possible. We stashed our belongings in our friends’ third-story walkup and left for a two-week sojourn in Sicily.
Italy is a beguiling land full of jaw dropping history around every corner, unforgettable meals served on red and white checkered tablecloths, gorgeous wines and olive oils mystifying from half empty bottles and more than a few swindlers eager to pick your pockets. When we arrived in Rome to meet our daughter Willa, who is interning as a chef in the American Academy of Rome’s sustainable food program, we found out the hotel we had booked no longer had a room for us. The bathroom didn’t work, the manager said. This might have been understandable except that it was the second time in two weeks that I had visited Rome only to find that the room I had booked was no longer available because of a problem with the plumbing. It is common practice, we soon learned, for hotels in Rome to overbook rooms, then cancel reservations if they see that prices are rising or customers who are interested in longer stays appear and they have a chance to make more money. Ironically, instead of a great room in a preferred neighborhood, twice I ended up near the Vatican, the first time in a former monastery with a soup kitchen out front and the second time in a hostel seemingly run by sisters. Perhaps God was sending me a message.
Classic Roman pizzeria scene.
We made it to Sicily, where I hadn’t been since 1987 when I rode a bicycle around the island with a former girlfriend during our Christmas holiday. I was working in Milan on a one year junket with Esprit and we’d taken an overnight ferry from Genoa to Palermo with our vintage 1985 Diamond Back Apex mountain bikes and panniers. I remember dramatic skies over spectacular ruins on the west coast and a somewhat creepy vibe of Sicilian men drooling over Audrey with her blonde hair and bicycle leggings. Also, in a hill town cafe on Christmas day where Madonna was singing “Like a Virgin” on the jukebox and watching fishermen club an octopus in their dinghy in the pale December morning light at the harborside.
This time we met Quincey’s mom Susie and husband Mark and stayed with friends at a villa outside the southeastern city of Siracusa. The villa was a rambling stone building that had been formally used for many centuries to make wine and olive oil from the rocky volcanic soils around that part of the island. Siracusa is a charming city at this time of the year and was once the largest ancient metropolis in the entire Mediterranean region. Its amazingly preserved Greek and Roman ruins have been overlaid by centuries of Arab and Spanish and medieval and gothic and Baroque and Rococo architectural embellishments.
The first day we went to the market down by the sea in the old town with its fish stalls and produce sellers and many open air restaurants. We bought delicate tiny white fish and tuna belly bacon and pumpkin sprouts and shelling peas and fresh pasta and bottles of delicious Etna Rosso vino to make a dinner feast. On our second day we met a beautiful Sicilian tour guide named Alesandra at the entrance to the Roman amphitheater. She had a PhD in archeology and spoke a breathless stream of travelog that braided anthropology and archeology, architecture and botany, linguistics and the history of Italian cuisine. Always at the center of Alesandra’s observations was the notion of transformation, where one era superimposes its needs and values and symbols on top of the next in a never ending dialectical process of tearing down and building up again often in the same place with the same materials but with a different narrative. At one point she poetically described the transformational nature of wine, so essential to Mediterranean cultures for centuries and millennia, with sunlight creating sugars through photosynthesis and in late summer fermentation changing godly nectar into alcohol and carbon dioxide and the magical moment of celebration as day turns to night and Dionysis hands you a divine goblet and a new reality rises like a moon in the mind.
Willa shopping in the Siracusa market.
An outstanding guide opens doors and windows to a foreign world and we were very fortunate to have two days seeing the country from Alesandra’s intellect and senses. She toured us through the hill town of Noto, famously rebuilt in the Rococo style after a tremendous 17th century earthquake leveled most of the old city which we also explored. Transformation was again at work here, this time with tectonic plates as the seismic catalyst. We stopped at the Cafe Sicilia and watched Corrado Assenza from “Chef’s Kitchen Season 4” being interviewed by a film crew. He is gaining global attention for his efforts to save Sicilian almond agriculture from collapse by making numerous products with the island’s uniquely sweet and bitter and delicious dry farmed nuts. We sampled numerous flavors of Cafe Sicilia’s granita, an Italian sorbet, with torn pieces of brioche of which my favorite was a counterintuitive marraige of strawberry and tomato. The almond granita was well worth the trip on its own.
Alesandra far left, my candidate for the world’s best tour guide.
From Siracusa four of us traversed the island to catch a ferry to the Aeolian island of Salina, which was famously featured in the movie “Il Postino,” about Chilean poet Pablo Neruda’s time there. A few paragraphs cannot do our brief visit justice, especially the days we spent touring islands in a small boat with a kind captain and female translator who offered insights into this exquisite world within a world. We stopped the boat for two hour lunches of local food and Sicilian culinary mojo and swimming excursions into the gemlike coves. After the visit to these islands I have made a personal note to get back to writing about the Aeolian scale and the origins of aïoli which are both worthy Mediterranean rabbit holes.
Swimming stop in the Aeolian Islands.
By early June we had picked up our packed up belongings in Valencia and moved to southwestern France where I am writing from and where we’ll be staying for the next two months. We’ve rented a 400 year old house still owned by the same family and rattle around in it like we’re on a movie set. I have taken a pledge to paint a watercolor everyday for 30 days of which I have now completed two extremely humbling weeks and indeed must go to some shrine and light a candle to the Aquarelle gods to please shine some insight to light my way.
