When Janis Siegel and I took our landlubber Vocal Mania to the virtual playground when the pandemic hit, we didn't know what we were doing, we just knew we had to do something!!! After a year and half of producing this monthly concert series we are reimagining it as we adapt to live, in-person concerts. Some of the things we fell in love with is collaborating with people from all over the world. We made lots of dream come true moments....collaborations were made with Dianne Reeves, Tierney Sutton, Kenny Washington, Raul Midon, Ann Hampton Callaway, Sara Gazarek, Laila Biali, Betty Buckley, Catherine Russell, and the list goes on. I mean, when were we ever gonna do that? So the pandemic certainly provided some lemonade moments in the midst of all we had to endure as a world culture.
As we march along, Vocal Gumbo is rewriting the recipe. Janis and I are beginning to return to touring and so the time it took to produce monthly shows is no longer available to us, so we're moving to a quarterly virtually produced show and strategically placed in person concerts.
We have our first in-person show on October 29th at Birdland Theater which we are very excited about. We will be featuring Theo Bleckmann, Antoinette Montegue and young artist Anaiis Reno. We'll be playing music from some of our collaborations as well as calling tunes we love. Featuring our wonderful trio, John DiMartino, Yoshi Waki and Ross Pederson, it will be a beautiful night of music.