Switching Lanes

And welcome to Hong Kong.  I’m back in blue jeans and jacket and Spanish gorra, the buildings are tall, tall, tall, the energy even more urban than bustling Bangkok and the dim sum a change from pad thai (but equally good). My last night in Thailand, I sat in at a jazz club and should have been nervous because the piano player I briefly replaced had monster chops! But I just played Route 66 as I felt it, both accompanying a good singer and the sax player who was my Orff student and soloing myself and managed to leave the stage without embarrassment. Part of my “keep moving” commitment to seek out a jam session in each new city and so far, have done pretty well in Hobart, Christchurch and Bangkok. 

Now I’m with two teachers I know through Orff workshops who invited me to join them and a violinist to give a concert for children using some of the repertoire on my Boom Chick a Boom CD. We rehearsed today, stitched all the pieces together with a little story about Grandpa’s Farm and dressed in plaid checkered shirts (mine they bought for me), are all set to entertain three-year-olds and their parents with tunes ranging from Kitten on the Keys to The Alley Cat to Who Fed the Chickens, Skinnamarink, One Potato and a Cantonese version of Soup Soup. Tomorrow I begin another two-day workshop with a mixture of beginning and experienced Orff teachers, with a theme of Children’s Games. 

And so the mix of teaching children, playing piano for elders, dipping my toe into the grown-up Jazz Jam world and a lifetime of teaching Orff workshops for adults keeps paying its dividends and reaping its harvest. I joyfully head down the highway switching lanes as needed and sometimes getting off the road all together. Two hour-long concerts just ahead, a ferry to Macau and up bright and early to get some 50 adults back into their child selves, remembering life before the strict rules of always staying in one lane.