Quote:

Quote:

Think of the joy you can give to others with your music.





When I was a young performer, I mistakenly believed the audience came to hear me. In time, I realized they came to relive the memories they attached to the songs. Apparently music is the closest thing to a time machine there will ever be. So, as noted above, playing music does have the effect of giving joy to others. I've noted that on my day job nobody ever applauds or gives a standing ovation when I do something right. Those responses are reserved for the things that particularly please people. And of all the ways you can spend your life, making people happy isn't such a bad way. If you have fun while doing it, all the better. If you get PAID to have fun doing it... man, I want that job!

so... where will you be moving to, John...?
;-)



Pat, you made a most excellent post. One band I joined (after not playing for 50 years) is a volunteer band that plays at a different retirement home/hospital every week. As you said "giving joy to others." In fact our band is called Joyful Noise. My wife's mom (now passed) was in an Alzheimers care facility and we play there once a month (duet with backup) as well as another dementia care facility and a rehab hospital. We are truly amateurs, but those folks really look forward to our visits as does the staff. We also play at church. Our reward is those smiles and finger tapping of some residents including stroke victims. The problem is that, even though there are times that we really would not like to go and play on a particular day, we do it anyway knowing our consciences would bother us if we didn't. BIAB has been a fantastic backup for us to be able to play at those venues. Also someone on this forum suggested Note's disks and fakebooks. We now have 8 fakebooks with Note's disks for 6 of those. All you have to do is give the facilities a call and talk to their activities director(s). Our daughter is a teacher and we also play at her school, but that's a different kind of program. For sound equipment, we plug an mp3 player into a Roland cm-30 cube. For awhile we were just making our own cds and using a boombox. Okay, I'll stop, but my point is that if you want to play in public, this is one way to do it.

Stan

Cornet Curmudgeon