Before, I wrote my blog from time to time on my web page, whenever I felt like.
Checking on my web page, it was May 2021, when I last wrote something on my blog page!
Not just out of laziness, but I had a bit of this tought in me, “Being a musician, expression should come from my sound, not from the words I write”.
Then, before we even knew, Covid started spreading. I am also an educator not only teaching in the college but also running the Jazz Department (we call it now, “Jazz and American Music Dept” aka “JAM”). As everybody else did, I encountered all sorts of problems and questions: Can we teach music online? What tool do we use for online classes? How do we let students satay focused on the subject online?
Of course on my musician side of jobs, everything was deteriorating.
However, the time passed now that the covid situation has been eased down. The workshop abroad has come back (I was in Taipei doing great workshop in March), and the traveling has about to become part of our life again (I traveled to Boston where I used live for 15 years. It has been several years since I last traveled there).
Then seeing and feeling the things going back to where they used to be, I started noticing a few things…
Why do Jazz gigs need to be held so late at night??
During Covid times, gigs in Japan started very early, sometimes at 5 pm as our government requested that the all the bars and resutaurants be closed at 8 pm. It actually was fairly comfortable and healthy. No need stay up late. I could go home in the ordinary time frame and go to bed like regular people (whatever the definition might be).
Even in the college, online classes had one huge advantage over the in-person classes, especially in the music theory classes: we can record video of all the classes on our finger tips! By reviewing the videos, a lot more students earned a passing grade than pre
Covid time.
So, along with so much disaster Covid forced us to face, there were some gerat things Covid brought to our daily life at the same time.
Most of all, going through so many changes in my work, I realized I was doing a lot of things.
Playing and writing music, teaching music, running the JAM department in the college, administrative work as a professor, also running the organization I created to raise the awareness for the art called, :Artist Green”(for which I will dedicate one my blog later on).
It’s always that when you start loosing something, you realize what you really had, right?
Then came up a thought in me, “Entirely, everything I do is my self expression”.
So, writing a blog has the same value as me creating and playing music, and so does teaching and sorting out a college curriculum, dealing with other oinstitutional issues, running organization like Artist Green.
So, I will write agin, this time as regulary as possible, about what I do, about things that Covid made me realize that they were part of my expression.