Summer’s end.  I’ve written too much of death these past months.  We must keep moving.  Keep living our dream—attempting to manage the stress, clearly—but mindful of the almost unbelievable great fortune of being able to live as artists in an ever more material and mundane world.

It has been a magnificent summer: hot, lazy days and warm, brilliant nights.  Plenty of gigs but nothing too stressful.  Now it’s time to get back out on the road.  I’m excited to go back out with Mandragora Tango later this month.  We’ll be on the East coast of the US—in Manhattan, New Jersey, DC, Baltimore, Lehigh Valley, upstate NY—playing milongas for tango dancers and aficionados alike, living in a tango-bubble and loving it.  The details of the tour are posted at mandragoratango.com.  I hope to meet readers of this blog, hope to make new friends and reunite with old friends.

Ensemble Espanyol (sic), out of Chicago, has asked me to tour with them in October and I am really psyched about that.  We’ll be on the East coast, also—can’t get enough of a good thing.  This will be flamenco, flamenco, flamenco 24/7:  they are a great bunch of people and very fine artists.

I’ve loaded a couple of recent recordings I’ve done with producer Stefon Taylor and singer/percussionist Rachel “la Mala.”  If you go to my “recordings” page and scroll down to the bottom you’ll find Farruca Trance and Alegria Mozarabe.  I hope you enjoy this, quite different, side of what I do and I welcome your comments.

Please!  No more spam-comments, viagra-cialis adds and otherwise useless stuff that has nothing to do with what I’m trying to do.  I can not possibly moderate all these comments and I apologize to those of you that have had to wade through them.  I’m trying to activate the Akismet plug-in with hopes of weeding out this garbage.  Ever the optimist, I find it discouraging to be some 600 comments behind in moderating even as I search for meaningful content.

One last thing:  let us NOT burn the Koran even as we remember September 11th….