The nice thing about traveling as a musician is that it affords a lot of uninterrupted music study time. At home I tend to listen to music while cooking, eating, cleaning, checking email, or some other activity that takes a part of my attention. On this trip, Andy and I had a ton of TIME in the car to study with our ears: form, chord progressions, grooves, melody, meter, album structure (something we don’t notice with the I-pod on shuffle.) Here are the routes and what we studied along the way:
Red–Grand Rapids, MI to Lincoln, NE (10 hours)
Mike Stern: Who Let the Cat’s Out?
Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg with the Assad Brothers (Stuff recorded at Aspen)
(Carmen played flute along with both of these in the car and did some transcribing from the Mike Stern album which inspired a new tango compoostion called Cumparsita Cats)
Orange– Lincoln, NE to Boise, ID (16 1/2 hours)
Dave Douglas: Freak In
Chick Corea: Past, Present, Future
Last five discs of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov Audio Book
(finally finished this from January; keeping our literary life afloat too!)
World Saxophone Quartet: Tribute to Miles
Yellow– Boise, ID to Uintah Wilderness, UT (7 hours)
Bartok Piano Concerto No. 3 (Andy listened to this three times through in different movement orders while Carmen unintentionally slept…)
Green–Uintah Wilderness, UT to Vega State Park, CO (6 hours)
Tom Waits: Brawlers from Orphans
DJ Andy Spun a Shuffle Mix of CDs: Jason Mraz: Live, Tori Amos: Boys for Pele, Victor Wooten: Live in America, Pat Metheny: Day Trip, Charlie Hunter Quartet, Scofield: Works for Me
Brian Blade: Seasons of Changes
(Kurt Rosenwinkel + views at 10,000 feet = AWESOME)
Blue–Vega State Park, CO to Glenwood Springs to Black Canyon of the Gunnison NP, CO (5 hours)
Dave Holland: Critical Mass
Bob Marley: Catch a Fire
Purple–Black Canyon NP to Great Sand Dunes NP, CO (4 hours)
(Best Mix of the Trip on this Stretch!)
Brad Mehldau: Highway Rider (2010 release! both discs!)
Jimi Hendrix: Axis: Bold as Love
The Mothers of Invention: Weasels Ripped My Flesh
Black–Great Sand Dunes NP to Colorado Springs, CO (3 hours)
Dave Douglas: Keystone Live in Sweden
John Adams: Dharma at Big Sur
Brown–Colorado Springs to Lincoln, NE (8 hours)
Pierre-Laurent Aimard: Ravel and Carter Works
Biagi: Su Orquesta y sus Cantores, Demare: Sus Primeros Exitos, De Caro Sexteto: Todo Corazon, Pablo Ziegler: Quintet for New Tango
(Carmen did a tango transcription and form study session with these for the upcoming tango seminar in July)
Red Hot Chili Peppers: Blood, Sugar, Sex, Magik
Pink–Lincoln, NE to Grand Rapids, MI (10 hours)
Osvaldo Golijov: Oceana
Mahler Symphony No. 5: Bernstein/NY Philharmonic
Yusef Lateef: The Diverse Yusef Lateef/Suite 16
Radiohead: Amnesiac
BT: Emotional Technology (Special request from the driver (Andy) to get us through the 80-90-94-Traffic-Hell, 15mph baby! the ONLY northern route through the Midwest without going 500 miles out of the way!)
Best Radio Finds in the Car
Classical: Leif Ove Andsnes: Rachmaninov Piano Concerto No. 2
LIVE! with the Berlin Philharmonic
88.7 FM Colorado Springs/Pueblo/Manitou Springs
Independent: Cheryl Wheeler: White Cat
from her album Pointing at the Sun
KGNU 88.5 Boulder
Andy and I spent two days in a cabin we rented in central Colorado preparing for our tango gig in Glenwood Springs. After five years of playing tango together we are finally doing our first milonga entirely from memory–something we should have done sooner! If you ever visit Glenwood, don’t miss the hot springs (especially if you have been camping and need a place to clean up before a gig!)
After Glennwood, we bummed around some Colorado wine regions for two days in the Grand Junction/Palisade and Delta areas. Then, last night we stayed in the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, a unique area worth the visit!
Local Colorado produce is still a month out, so here is our dinner recipe with the most local ingredients we could find:
Colorado Quesadillas
Local corn totillas
Raw goat milk ceddar made in Besalt, CO
1 jalepeno
I put the cheese and chili in between the tortillas and melted them on the fire.
We ate them with some homemade pico de gallo!
Andy and I camped at the Flaming Gorge National Recreation Area on our way through Utah yesterday. Our campsite was 30 feet away from a 1300 foot drop off overlooking the red rock canyon walls with the Green River below. Although Ed Abbey would probably want to take down the dam that make this reservoir possible, it is still worth the visit. For dinner we made a flaming salad of camp-fire roasted peppers and potatoes in honor of the place.
Flaming Gorge Salad
2 whole shallots, diced
1 medium tomato, diced
1 head of garlic
1 red peeper, de-seeded and cut in half
1 red chili, cut in half
3 jalapenos, cut in half
2 small red potatoes
1 tablespoon raw cider vinegar
3 tablespoon olive oil
1 teaspoon salt
1. Prepare a fire or oven for roasting the garlic, peppers, and potatoes. De-seed the hot peppers if desired. Prick the potatoes with a fork in a few places.
2. Combine the shallots and tomato in a bowl, meanwhile place the garlic, peppers, and potatoes on the fire.
3. Roast the peppers, potatoes and garlic on each side until blackened and soft, then place in a bowl on top of each other and cover with a plate to let them steam for five minutes.
4. Peel the blackened skin off of the peppers and garlic cloves then dice along with the potatoes and place the rest of the ingredients in the bowl with the shallots and tomato. Toss to coat everything.
We drank some fantastic Idaho Snake River Valley Syrah while the vegetables roasted and then ate the salad with sprouted grain tortillas and a can of wild caught Portuguese mackerel.
And now some words of wisdom from Andy B in the Uintah Wilderness…
“It is so nice to be in the backcountry away from things because I feel like there are no temptations, such as:
no place to spend money
no place to go out
no Martha’s Vineyard
no computer to waste time googling useless things (like what I’m writing here)
no indoor climate control
no beer to drink too much
no pizza around the corner
no wine (like that 05 Bordeaux that looks so good)
I can just focus on my surroundings and my oatmeal isn’t even good enough to want more.”
Last night we played for a lovely tango house party in Hailey, a town three hours north of Boise nestled in the Central Rockies of Idaho. It was another night of playing music, having fun dancing, and enjoying good food and company!
Empanadas! (one batch filled with spinach and one batch with creamed corn!)
Heirloom tomato bruschetta
A stop by the Silver Creek Preserve on our way out, a spring fed stream system that provides some of the best trout fishing in Idaho. Wild rainbow, brown and brook trout have a population density up to 5,000 fish per mile in this stream! (so my dad tells me from his research in the area)