The first two people in line for the Saturday Mentoring Luncheon were me and Vivi Chu, a feisty schoolteacher from Minnesota who plays an ancient Chinese instrument called the guzheng, from which the Japanese koto evolved. She recently released a CD of twelve original compositions with one thousand year old Chinese lyrics. “Why do performers care so much how about how they look?” she wondered aloud, “They are only there to make sound.” I thought about it and said, “Some listeners don’t really listen. They only know what they see.”
The mentoring luncheon: nine music biz aspirants and one rotating mentor per table. Maybe twenty tables in the banquet hall? It was vast. We had five mentors in total during our hour and half at the table, including Jai Josefs, Jason Blume, Liz Redwing, and Dan Kimpel. Our mentor in this photo is Ronan Chris Murphy (standing next to me).
After lunch I attended Bobby Borg’s talk “How to Market Your CD and Create a Buzz on a Limited Dollar Budget,” a standing room only event. I discovered that even note-taking has gone digital. It seemed like a good idea until I considered that I would probably make readable notes at home when I watched the class again, so why not just do it the first time?
I got to hang out and play some of my music with Jai Josefs later in the day. Turns out he produced a record of my friend Sophia Songhealer some years back, and he knows film composer, Ron Grant, who co-produced my CD What Living’s All About.
The 2006 Taxi Road Rally came to an end. I bid my new friends a fond farewell, got in my car, and flowed out onto Hollywood Boulevard, becoming one with the glowing Hollywood night.
Alicia Bay Laurel 