Happy New Year

I'm gonna be out of town until January 3rd, and probably offline the entire time, so the blog will be "dark" till I get back. I wish everyone a joyful and safe New Year's Eve celebration, and a great 2008. See you all back at the next Santa Fe gig in The Lounge at The Palms on Monday, January 7th. Until then, be sure to get out and support our other cats, e.g., Ronnie Foster at The Icehouse (Thursdays), Michito Sanchez and his great Salsero at Southpoint (also Thursdays), Phoenix (NY/NY and Southpoint), and Michael Grimm at various venues.

The blog will soon be a full two years old (as of January 23rd). Interesting to look back to both the January 2006 and January 2007 posts. Making progress. Improvements to come? I'm open to suggestion. For one thing, I'm gonna add routine podcasts in 2008, maybe do stuff like excerpt particularly killer segments of the band's tunes (and tunes by others of note) and do V/O analytical commentaries (in my best baritone FM radio voice, LOL!). Maybe even get some of the cats to come over to my study for interviews. Really just little downloadable "radio" shows.

I have everything I need here; shock-mounted mics and a mixer that I patch straight into GarageBand, a killer app bundled with my iMac. In fact, it comes podcast ready (note, this link runs an embedded QuickTime movie, so you may need the free QuickTime viewer if you don't already have it installed).

Note: my friend Kurt up in Washington said he'd encountered slow blog loading, given all the pics and graphics now commonplace on the blog. One recommendation -- lose that creaking (and chronic security liability) POS Microsoft Internet Explorer browser. It sucks next to browsers such as FireFox or Safari, both of which run on either the Mac or WinDoze OS platforms.

THANKS TO ALL OF YOU FOR SUPPORTING SANTA FE AND ALL THE OTHER FINE PERFORMERS WHO GIVE US SO MUCH!

CODA, random stuff...

Below, our son Nick. He lives on a sailboat in a San Diego marina. He came home for Christmas, and went with me to see both of his grandparents.

Below, what does a world-class 13 year old (ranked 43rd in the nation last year in the USTA Boys 12 & under singles) do on Christmas Day at his aunt Michelle's?

My glorious grandson Keenan, LOL! He's playing middle school basketball now, too. He and I have recently gone out to hoopitup together. He's now within an inch of my height (I'm 5'10"). Gwandaddy's "21" supremacy is not long for this world.

Kid is da bomb.