Archive | July, 2016

At last night’s show during Family Friendly Friday at the Top Hat Lounge in Missoula, Montana, the Sand Family Band rocked so hard that we were nearly booted us off stage…twice. Toward the end of our first set, as in all our shows, we brought out bags of instruments — drums, shakers, tambourines — for the frenetically dancing families in the audience to use to become our percussion corps for the Indonesian kids’ song, “Gili Gio.” The kids loved the instruments! The grown-ups dining and drinking in other parts of the Top Hat…maybe not as much. The manager kindly told us we were too loud and had to tune down the revelry. ROCK ON SAND FAMILY (strike 1). During the second part of the show, my solo set, I called a few audience members up onto stage and gave them shakers to support me on a tune. The manager returned to kindly say no way Sand Family, keep the kiddos in their place. ROCK ON SAND FAMILY (strike 2). Later the Sand Family committed the greatest sin of all by taking too long to pack up our instruments and move out of the parking spot in the stage load-in zone so the next band could move in, causing no shortage of chagrin. CHAGRIN, I tell you. (Rock on, Sand Family, strike three!)

Note: We met the Dodgy Mountain Men. We don’t want to undermine their carefully crafted persona, but they seemed nice.

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Who are these dashingly good-looking musicians performing and posing in front of the exquisite hand-crafted carousel in Missoula, Montana? Could they possibly be as talented as they are beautiful? I recognize a few of the stars here, especially kindie music superhero, Casey Schaefer of the Missoula- based Whizpops.

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Salt Lake City’s Discovery Gateway is the creme de la creme of children’s museums. There is a 30 foot metal “beehive,” a Story Factory, a Sensory Room, hands-on exploration classes aplenty and, if you’re lucky, you may even find a guy there with a curly brown hair and a guitar who dares you to sing magnificent multilingual songs. Kids in today’s All Around This World rose to that challenge, enjoying classes that were rousing, rambunctious, and, as you can see from the picture below, apparently very yellow.

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The Boulder, Colorado, Jewish Community Center is brand-spankin’ new and beautiful. So are the infants and other almost-as-little kids who joined me today for an after-camp program of international Jewish songs.

I taught today’s raucous Scattered Among the Nations class in an auditorium with a back wall that’s all glass. As I sang Jewish songs from a dozen countries I watched a set of ominous thunderstorm clouds roll in, open up in an instant, drowning the JCC with rivers of rain, then race through, leaving Boulder to bask in the bluest of skies.

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If you’ve never been to Salida, Colorado, by all means, go. Salida is a small, artsy, friendly southern Colorado city that’s surrounded by extraordinary natural beauty — mountains, a river, canyons crying out for tourists to traverse them on zip lines while screaming, “WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!”

My class today in the gym at the Boys and Girls Club of Salida, Colorado, was big and booming and satisfyingly exhausting for all involved.

In the evening Sand Family sorta-cousins Larry and Jody hosted us at a friendly potluck and gave us the pleasure of singing with all their friends.  Other than our three kiddo band members there weren’t kids in the crowd, so after our set I presented an All Around This World program especially for grown-ups. These well-traveled audience members shouted names of countries and I sang songs that originated from all those places. Most asked for music from countries they had visited or wanted to visit, though others, fully within legitimate rules of engagement, tried to stump me by suggesting places they thought to be the trickiest, like Antarctica. Did that work? NO WAY! (Do you seriously think I would throw a grown-up sing-out-everywhere party without knowing a song from Antarctica…?)

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(photos by Erika Steenburg)

The kids at the Alamosa, Colorado, Public Library this morning were so into singing that I added verses, repeated songs and gave everyone free reign to bang along through a big chunk of the set with the instruments I shared. With two dozen kids beating drums with abandon, with all that banging and booming and carrying on, the non-musical among us may have considered what they heard to be cacophony. To musical me, who appreciates not only the cantankerous musicality of the kids’ performance but also revels its liberating spirit…? Okay, yeah. Cacophony.

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The crowd at today’s “Concert for Children!” at the Faith United Methodist Church in Davenport Iowa may not exactly have packed all the pews, but what they lacked in number they more than made up in generosity, grace and undeniably great singing. A drenching rain outside did nothing to dampen our spirit.

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This evening’s backyard concert at Miss Pauline’s in Chicago twisted our minds like Philadelphia pretzels. Miss Pauline was our 12 year-old viola player’s kindergarten teacher and we haven’t seen her for more years than we can possibly count! (Okay, about 7.) She, Aron and their unfathomably adorable children opened the show by showing us up with their heavenly harmonies then joyfully joined us “on stage” for our rousing sing-along Surinamese finale.

Betwixt and between the performances Aron and Pauline treated us and their neighbors to abundant sausage and beer, freeing everyone’s spirit to embrace the bliss of a caring and carefree community. (And only tangentially clogging our arteries.)

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Late into last night at the House of Jablonoski in the Wicker Park neighborhood of Chicago the Sand Family rocked as hard as we possibly could, raging through a mix of All Around This World anthems and Sand Family originals, most of which are about poop, took a break for a few minutes to drink beer — not all of us — and to pet dogs — not all of us — then returned to the stage to rouse any neighbors who had ’til that time found some way to sleep. Fundamental thanks go to good friend Steve Jablonoski. Spending the night with him was a pleasure.

(I might have published this post last night after the show but Steve wouldn’t tell us his wireless password because it was too dirty. That’s extraordinary.)

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Dateline Skokie, Illinois. Location: Junior Gan Day Camp. News: An animated Jay Sand sings songs for Jewish campers in Hebrew, Luganda, Uzbek and Ladino. The yarmulke on his head only falls off twice.

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