Music, music, everywhere!

We have been really lucky lately.

First off, we have this wonderful old historic theater in Bellingham, called The Mt. Baker Theater . It originally opened in 1927 and has been refurbished and spiffed up and is a great place for concerts and plays. It seats about 1500 people. There is a large dome that sits above the main theater floor - that is ornately decorated (in fact Christine Lavin once said that she now knew what it was like to be inside a Faberge egg.)

Over the years, we have seen these folks at the Mt. Baker - Joan Baez, George Winston, David Lanz, Ladysmith Black Mambaza, Chinese acrobats, Kodo drummers, Guitar Masters, to name a few.

In April, we saw The Arlo Guthrie Legacy Tour (we saw him a couple of years ago too) - he is a fantastic performer, and you can't get any better than Woody's music, can you?

Last month we were thrilled to get to see Loreena Mckennit . She is probably John's most favorite performer. It was a fantastic concert.

A year or so ago, I started listening to an "on line" radio station called Whisperings Solo Piano Radio. It is generally nice background music to listen to at work or while I'm doing stuff on the internet at home. One day, I noticed that they were going to have a concert here in Bellingham. Imagine that! At the Fire House Performing Arts Center - a recently renovated fire station that, ironically, was built arount the same time as the Mt. Baker Theater. BUT, it only holds about 75 or 80 people - and who would be performing? An old acquaintance from Bellingham, Karen FitzGerald, two performers I knew nothing about, Joe Yamada who used to live in Bellingham but now lives in the Seattle area and Scott Davis who lives in the Bay area. But the huge draw for me was probably my favorite piano artist, David Lanz. You only have to listen to his Grammy winning music to know why.

To make a long story short, the concert totally exceeded any and all expectations we had. Each person's style of playing was similar but different - their stories of how they got to where they were, were interesting and funny. But mostly the intimacy of the concert was what touched us - it was like being in someone's home and having this wonderful piano player sit down and start playing your most favorite music. If I knew how, I'd imbed mp3's of their music on this post so you could hear them - as it is, I linked to all their web sites, so you could at least see and hear all the music that we got to hear over the past few months.

Well, this was a LOT more wordy than I expected it to be - I hope you got to go look at some of the great peace globes from yesterday. Everyone have a great rest of the week!