I’m sitting in the rehearsal room with our percussionist Jenya as we both check our email and such. There’s a rooster crowing in the valley behind us and the sun is casting long morning shadows.

The sky is perfectly clear.

I’m going to load the ensemble into Jenya’s van and we’re going to drive over Coleman Valley Road to the Ocean. This road is my favorite. Instead of following a creek or river to the ocean like most roads, it goes right over the hills. The view as you descend on the Western side is incredible. And along the way there are lots of beautiful spots, especially Coleman Valley. When I was focused on cycling I used to ride over Coleman Valley Road to the ocean on a regular basis. I also helped landscape a property out here 2 summers ago. I hope to buy a little piece of land with a cabin on it out here someday.

Today we will be going through all the material again, this time taking in all the notes and working through sections over and over if we need to.

We’ve decided that we don’t want to rehearse some of the material like “Been in the Storm So Long” and “Take Me to the Water” because we want them to be loose and raw.

Other songs like “Delilah” and “The Gates” call for refinement so we’ll spend a lot of time on those today.

We’ll work through the material til dinner with breaks for lunch and the Coleman Valley Rd. field trip. Then after dinner we are going to perform the material for the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center residents and staff. They are great people and I like being able to do this for them and its good for us to see how the music behaves in front of people.

Off to breakfast.