A Year of COVID - A Musical Retrospective

I wanted to share with you a video playlist of my musical collaborations from this turbulent COVID year: A COVID Music Retrospective.

But first - a little backstory.

My birthday is March 13, which coincidentally was the last day before lockdown in my town of Teaneck, NJ in 2020.

That day I had a small jam session at my house and by the time people were leaving, I was getting notice that my town was going into quarantine.

I was supposed to be playing a wedding gig in 2 days, but called the contractor and told him I couldn't do it.

A year later and I just celebrated my birthday in Puerto Rico while hiding out here for the winter.

This ordinarily wouldn't have been possible, but given that there are no gigs to play and everything is online, we decided we could at least go to a beautiful place where we could be outside.

When the pandemic started, I decided to offer some free workshops on improvisation using my new books, String Jams, to try boost some morale.

People signed up so fast I had to add more.

I was so happy that people were genuinely interested in the topic and that I had an outlet to focus on other than the doom and gloom of the virus.

Then my wife suggested that I collaborate with some of my Vietnamese musician friends (we lived in Vietnam from 2018 - 2019).

That spawned a number of collaborations with Vietnamese, Scottish, Puerto Rican, and American artists that I'm really proud of.

For me, the music has a wide variety of feelings and moods: joy, sorrow, contemplation, anger.

What do you hear?

Not to get all sappy, but music has always given me a sense of purpose, and boy did I need it after such a difficult year.

I hope these videos inspire you to write your own music and do your own collaborations.

COVID sucks, but it did help me create some cool music, so I guess that's looking at the bright side?

Let's hope things continue to get better.