Hello, all and Happy New Year! I haven’t sent out a music newsletter in several years now, what with the lack of music performances since 2018 (hand surgery) and COVID (2020 to present). I thought I’d fill you in on my latest creative projects, music and otherwise. Musically, I’m a about two-thirds through a weekly series I call Saturday's Child in which I am sharing 52 of my original songs via YouTube and social media accounts. Here’s a recent posting, “Simple Rhyming Waltz”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVYxSHv_kt4
The entire series is here:
https://www.youtube.com/user/ukebob/videos
I hope you’ll take a look at them from time to time if you haven’t been following them already. Please subscribe to my YouTube channel and provide some feedback if so moved.
They are also available via my blog “music words music” along with some cartoons shared over the past year or so and other writing. Please subscribe to it if you like the site and/or don’t want to use YouTube or Facebook for some reason:
https://musicmanna.blogspot.com/
I hope our Celtic music band The Irish Newsboys can resume performing as as soon as possible to do so safely. We are awaiting developments, COVID-wise. Our Facebook page is here:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/415543328585545
I continue to play with Blue Eyed Grass, the house band for Save Mount Diablo. We have had several private performances this past summer as I write this and are practicing with our new bass player Dave Schneider. Band mates Ted Clement and John Gallagher and I love having Dave in the band! And BTW, the Save Mount Diablo Web site is a treasure trove of area outdoor information and activities and a worthy cause if you can donate:
https://savemountdiablo.org/
I’m currently leaning toward more writing projects during the coming year, including tanka, a Japanese poetry form now widely practiced around the world. I’ve had a number of poems published in Ribbons, the Tanka Society of America’s quarterly journal, and one in their 20th anniversary annual anthology, Dance into The World, published in 2020. I offer it here as a sample:
another spring
weeds sprout
in office planters
on window ledges
pigeons strut and coo
My previous poetry collection, “Till We Have Faces,” is available as either a Kindle E-Book or a paperback at Amazon.com:
https://tinyurl.com/pjud3kc2
My “as told to” nonfiction adventure story of one man’s experiences in the early marijuana trade, SCORE: Memoirs of A Weed Smuggler,” is also available in either format there:
https://tinyurl.com/awz4waw3
I hope you are all staying safe through the pandemic and that you have not lost loved ones. I pray that with vaccines and a waning of COVID, surges will become as rare as the other diseases we’ve eradicated in the past.
Thanks, have a great rest of the New Year! May we be able to freely enjoy live music again in 2022!
Ukulele Bob Loomis
