by Christine | Dec 14, 2016 | Welcome Column
If you hang around musicians, and get to know them as people, you have to marvel at the wide variety of backgrounds, lifestyles, proclivities and stories. Are they more varied than non-musicians? No, I don’t think so – people are inherently interesting and...
by Christine | Aug 31, 2010 | Welcome Column
Another beautiful day in California’s Mother Lode, where gold was king one hundred and fifty years ago, where picturesque little mining towns all along Highway Forty-Nine once provisioned an army of men in desperate search of that one big strike, and where today...
by Christine | Jul 22, 2016 | Welcome Column
It’s exam time in the Cayman Islands at the moment. Which is another way of saying I am tired and my students are stressed. There’s an odd sort of feeling on campus at this time of the year. Everyone is a bit punch drunk from a long and busy semester. Everyone,...
by Christine | Oct 13, 2019 | Welcome Column
We all know that exercise is good for our bodies. I ride my bicycle almost every day and I love it. Get the blood pumping and you’re more ready for everything else you do that day. Exercise is good for our minds too, but when it comes to music,...
by Christine | Jan 29, 2015 | Welcome Column
(Editor’s note—Well, we’ve got ourselves a nice little knot of FIFTH days of the month, so we’ll be doing some strolling down memory lane. If you’re going to go exploring the banjo, not many better to take on the trip than Bill Evans, who published this piece right...
by Christine | Nov 26, 2010 | Welcome Column
Like a lot of us, I discovered bluegrass and the banjo in a somewhat non-bluegrass kind of way: I saw Roy Clark playing banjo on “Hee Haw” and said to myself, “I think I could do that!” It’s been an interesting journey since 1970 along the banjo road but one of the...
by Christine | Mar 27, 2020 | Welcome Column
It happened in, around, near, or not too far from Palo Alto, California. To be more accurate, but more generalized, it happened someplace in Santa Clara, County, CA. The year was 1993. It wasn’t a big explosion, just a small one, one of many in the state of California...
by Christine | Apr 4, 2019 | Welcome Column
You can die from too much exposure or you can get arrested and get sent to prison for other types of exposure. As far as I can tell nothing good ever comes from it. Yet band buyers and bookers continue to offer exposure as currency or compensation. You’d think they...
by Christine | Nov 6, 2015 | Welcome Column
“Aging is all a state of mind.If you don’t care, you don’t mind.” (S. Paige)Item 1: Good news to the CBA readers of today’s Friday Welcome Column. I had an email from Mr. Cornish informing me he has narrowed the field of prospective Welcome Column writers from 364 to...
by Christine | Oct 2, 2015 | Welcome Column
Express Lane… Closing SoonToday’s column from Brooks JuddFriday, October 2,2015Item 1: Sheila and I and some friends just got back from the Gallo Theater in Modesto watching the existential/absurdist comic Steven Wright perform. It was a wonderful 90...
