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Wine and Jazz Adventures
Mindi Abair sat
down with us one afternoon recently to chat, “At the very end of 2019 my
husband and I kind of had this ah ha moment. We came together and said
we both have dream jobs. I get to go off with my band and travel the
world and to make records. For all of all his life Eric has run really
amazing wineries, so he would go off to Kendall-Jackson or he would run
Mountain Napa (winery). We both had amazing jobs, but we said let’s get
out the whiteboard, the marker and a bottle of wine and see if we are
truly living our best lives. It may sound trite. We wrote down what was
really important to us and what we loved to do. We wanted to be together
and we wanted to share his passion for wine with everyone, with people,
instead of corporations. For me I wanted to expand my world in music to
places outside of the U.S. more and play with different artists, explore
and expand. We came up with a company that was the best of both of us.
Obviously, he is the wine and I’m the Jazz. We don’t have to
be anything we are not, but obviously the combination of wine and Jazz
is pretty spectacular.
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Paul Rappaport - Behind the Curtain
“That is what I was trying to do. This was a very magical time, and I
wanted to share these stories and for the readers to have fun, like I
had fun. I wanted them to have the experience that I had. Somehow, I was
(blessed) with a photographic memory, because as you know from reading
this book, I am talking to Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and David Gilmour
and all of these characters. I wanted it to be that and thankfully
because of this memory I can recall conversations. I can envision where
I had the conversations, what the room looked like, and I know what the
backstage looked like. I have this capability. I wrote it that way,
because I wanted people to experience as close to that (as possible) and
I wanted to make it entertaining in that way, so that you would be right
in the conversation with these people.
Nick Mason from Pink Floyd gave me a very nice quote (about that). He
and David Gilmour are really great people. You don’t expect that kind of
thing, but I reached out and he wrote something very nice. The small
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Electronic Firefly
Electronic Firefly
website
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Ágota Dunai
In the film Fight and Flight,
Ágota Dunai
says, “I played a flight attendant. I had flight attendant experience
before in another film, and they chose me,” Although she had a minor
role in the film she says, “I really hope it made it to the film. I
haven’t seen the film yet. There was one scene when the plane starts to
crash and there is a lot of shaking and someone falls down. Then I go
to the (person) and help him up. I ask if he is okay and ask if he needs
medical help. That was my speaking scene, but in many other scenes I was
packing, sorting and helping with seatbelts. Also, when there were fight
scenes, I was trying to protect the other passengers. There is one scene
when somebody gets cut with a chainsaw and there is fake blood scattered
on me. There are a lot of action scenes. I (also) worked with Josh Hartnett in The Fear
Index. It was nice to work with him again.” With impeccable English, proficient in German and of course her |
Camilla Roman's New RomCom
The film was
inspired by a real-life situation experienced by one of Camilla Roman’s
friends and the mishaps and misunderstandings that can happen on social
media platforms. Camilla Roman
explains, “This is based on a true story and what sort of happened to
one of my friends, the character that I play. When her ex-husband was
going to get married there was a lot of confusion and stuff on Facebook
with invitations. He invited her and her mom and that was a mistake. He
deleted them and deleted whole events and people were what? Is it
canceled? All of that happened and then there is a lot of fiction into
the mix (in the film). After she told me this story, I wrote it down a little bit. I thought maybe I can do this for something later. I took a year of filmmaking. I got into the final year and so I got my Bachelor (degree) in one year. I had to make a film (for my degree). I didn’t know what I was going to write. There were ten people in the class and my teacher said if some of you still don’t know what you are going to write and what your film is going to be about, now is the time to make a decision. You can’t just sit around and hope for an idea to pop into your head, which is exactly what I was doing (she laughs). |
Peter Holsapple - Face of 68
Peter Holsapple says, “I am extremely proud of
the new record. The songs that make up The Face of 68 are largely
songs that were written after the release of Game Day, my last
solo record in 2018. What happened was my friend Carlo Nuccio from
Continental Drifters passed away from cancer in 2022 and I don’t grieve
very cleanly, so I wrote a song. Actually, I wrote a couple of songs,
but the song “Larger Than Life,” that I wrote and cut, felt good. I
thought it had been a few years, maybe the statue of limitations had
been lifted and it would be okay for me to do another record. I had a folder with about fifteen or sixteen
songs and I thought maybe there is something in here. Then I got Don
Dixon (producer) on the case and I wanted to do it different than
Game Day. Game Day was all me and that was fine and I don’t
have to do that again. I wanted to do it with this rhythm section and I
got a crack team, Rob Ladd (drums) and Robert Sledge (bass) and made it
a very tangible record. We could feel it coming out of the speakers, at
least if you play it loud enough, which I do. I suddenly had a
bunch of songs and I had a studio (Overdub Lane) six minutes from my
house. I had a producer in Don Dixon whom I dearly love and have loved
for a million years. I had a great engineer whom I had worked with Jason
Richmond. He had done the engineering for The Paranoid Style stuff, the
band that I play guitar with these days. It all came together and pardon
the pun, but we did it in record time.
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Paula Parducz - Actress
She is cerebral, talented, at home in comedy or
dramatic productions, but leans more to drama as a preference, which we
will explain in a bit and she shared some insight to that side of her
acting while discussing the role she played in the theater production
Beauty, directed by Carna Krsul. “My favorite role is Annabel in Beauty.
I liked it because it allowed me to (get into) a vulnerability that I
really had not explored before, because in a way it touched a part that
I really had not dug into (previously). She (Annabel) stepped out of her own shell. She
is afraid of going out (Annabel is agoraphobic), but she is masking that
by looking young and
pretty. It was very powerful on stage and it was always interesting to
feel the reaction of the people when they could see the mask dropping,”
she says. We wondered about
the dynamic of an actor performing in front of an audience and in the
role of a character who had difficulty with mixing with others and
certainly Annabel would never have performed
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Jesse and Noah Leave Love Alone
We jokingly asked
them about the song “Leave Love Alone,” and if it was a reference to a
relationship that went sideways. Jesse replied,
“That is an older song, so I don’t even remember. I started that song
with Simon Bruce, an Australian singer and songwriter who lived here in
Nashville for a while. We halfway finished it and he and Daniel Tashian
finished it and then it came back to me. Daniel was going to put it out
and then I didn’t hear anything for a while and so I thought I would
just throw it into this mix of songs that we were doing for our next
session. We thought we could do a pretty good job on it. We recorded it,
got it ready to go and he ended up putting his out around the same time
or maybe a couple of weeks before or something like that. He released it
mostly in Australia. I guess it is worldwide, because of streaming. The songs ended up
being so different and with different audiences, so they didn’t really
clash.” Produced by Pino Squillace, engineered by Brandon
Henegar and recorded at the House Of David Studios in Nashville the song
is a Country song, with Rock influences and excellent musicianship.
Those who have followed Jesse and Noah over the years, should not be
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Macartney Reinhardt Says "Hey Girl"
She continues, “We
moved so I could be in the midst of the music scene here. “It was hard,
because I was still in school Then I went to virtual (school) the last
two years of high school. That was the main adjustment. It wasn’t bad
getting adjusted to living in a different state, because we had been
here so much, and we had stayed in hotels for a week every month. That
wasn’t very hard for me. It was harder for me not going to public school
and just sitting at home and doing school. That is when I started
playing out multiple times per week.”
Now Nashville feels like home and as a nod to the city, Macartney
Reinhardt co-wrote the song “Coming Home,”
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Kat Violin On the Prowl
Well, she can
describe her new persona much better than we can, “I am producing my own
music, and it is a combination of Classical music and electronic beats.
For instance, music from Classical composers. It is 2.0 and it is
transported to the electronic music. The (goal) is to perform it live at
festivals or bigger events.
It
is not so easy doing my own music versus covers. I thought it would be
much faster to get reach, but when you make your own music, it is like
you have to convince everybody first. Even the followers you gained over
the years, don’t follow you (when you branch out), because it is yours.
I think it will be a lot of work to make this successful, but I will try
my best. I love the idea, the concept and the character. It is all about
the cat identity, but not like the animal cat, but it is about the
character of the cat and the behavior and the attitude.
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Electronic Firefly From Spain
Silvia explains
what happened next, “That was not when I met Charlie (Perez-Íñigo now
her husband). I needed an electric cello for the project and another
person recommended that I call him. It was a difficult
time in my life and Charlie became my friend and he helped me in many
aspects of my life. At the time I was living in a small village called
Villarejo (located in La Rioja, Spain) and he started to visit me often. He also
recommended me for a show called “Music Has No Limits,” and that is when
we started to work together. We toured with them, and we started our
relationship. We have been together ever since. It was after we left
“Music Has No Limits,” that we started Electronic Firefly.” In 2023 their
daughter was born and for two performing musicians that has brought its
own challenges, but more on that later.
The two world
class musicians have also expanded their music careers and in addition
to performing sometimes as a duo and other times for solo gigs, they now
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Actor Ruben Yuste
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Lisa Hilton Lucky All Along
Lisa Hilton set
aside an hour of her time and spoke to us from her Malibu home, from
which she can watch the dolphins play and where she composed this, her
30 th album. It has both a missive about finding our way, even through
dark times, through struggles and emerging on the other side intact and
still pursuing our dreams. It also pays homage to women in music, to
those who perform, to those who compose and in some instances to those
who do both. Not just with this album, but with previous
ones, Lisa Hilton has nodded in the direction of Joni Mitchell, Janis
Joplin, Ann Ronell and Lana Del Rey. For Lucky All Along, she
arranged “Snow On the Beach,” written by Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey and
Jack Antonoff.
“It is a gross imbalance (in the lack of representation of women in
music) and I only recognized this about five years ago. That has got to
change. At amazing Opera houses around the world, they are only
presenting one creative point of view and that really has to change. It
really does. It also has to change, not just for Opera or Classical
composers, but at Jazz clubs and on the radio. Women are not getting
paid for their writing. It is not a lot of writing, so it is not a lot
of money, but they are not receiving royalties that men would, for
instance the estate of a Miles Davis compared to a female composer from
that time. It is something that we need to think about. If we want to
watch films or read books by a guy that doesn’t matter, but why would we
only play music and study music and teach music about composers that are
men. It isn’t even a conversation in Jazz, Classical and Opera music. I
am talking about it and I hope there will at least be more awareness
about it. (You can hear exasperation in her voice), but we
haven’t even moved forward to when it is a topic of conversation It seems crazy that the vast majority of music played at Jazz clubs, Classical music performing arts centers and Opera houses is written by men. So, on my albums, I try to include a composition written by a woman,” she says. (editor’s note: It should also be noted that Lisa Hilton also records her own compositions)
That has got to change. It really does. (Because women do not get played
on the radio as much) they are not getting paid for their writing. It is
not a lot of writing, so it is not a lot of money, but they are not
receiving the royalties that men would. For instance, the estate of a
Mies Davis compared to a female composer from that time (would be much
greater).
Why would we only play music and study music and teach music about
composers that are men? It isn’t even a conversation in Jazz, Classical
and Opera music. I am talking about it and I hope there will at least be
more awareness about it. (You can hear exasperation in her voice),
but we haven’t even moved forward to when it is a topic of
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Noah Vonne - Heart Of It
Most of her
childhood and teenage years were spent growing up in New Braunfels
nestled between Austin Texas and San Antonio, in a family with five
older sisters. All of them were softball players, almost enough to form
their own team. When asked if she
was spoiled, being the baby of the family, she says while laughing, “ It
is true. All of my sisters would say one thousand percent. In comparison
to some of my friends, maybe not so, because my parents were pretty
strict for the most part. Compared to my sisters I was very spoiled.”
She
was the trailblazer in her family as far as someone having artistic
leanings and says, “What I was going after was very different.”
A familiar story for many great singers, Noah Vonne’s journey began as a
child singing in a large church in San Antonio, the Community Bible
Church with by her estimates 2,000 people attending for services.
It was beautiful and the music program was really, really strong. One of
the choir leaders was also my voice lessons and piano teacher in senior
high school.
We drove from New Braunfels to San Antonio. It wasn’t too bad, because
New Braunfels is wedged between Austin and San Antonio and just barely
closer to San Antonio. It was like a thirty-minute drive. In Texas time
that is not much.”
As for the first time that she recalls singing in front of other people,
“When I was really, really little I remember singing “King of the Road,”
by Roger Miller at karaoke with my dad when I was five or six. You know
that song. It is a classic. It is one of the best. I sang peppermints
instead of cigarettes, because my parents didn’t want me to sing the
cigarettes part.
Fast forward
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Raised On TV
The album opens
with “Just Wanted To Tell You,” from whose lines the album takes its
title, a song that will have you dancing from the first few beats. The
brothers Rogers and Greenwood are joined on electric bass by Blaine
Billingsley. “(The song) is
about my wife. The lyrics, particularly the chorus is a love letter to
my wife. It is a sentiment that is good to get across and to say. It is
not strictly on one narrow path the whole time. I wrote the verses,
while we were on the road. I think we were pulled over at a coffee shop
or something and we were taking a minute. I had the chorus about my
wife, and I liked that. I wanted to say that, and it was truthful. The
verses I was still trying to figure out and the words just came. The
verses have a story behind them, but the chorus is about my wife,” says
Keaton Rogers, providing us with some insight about the song. Historically
bands from California, going back to the 1950s, has had a distinct
flavor and we talked about that, before digging deeper into the sound of
Raised On TV, “I would say it still does (have a distinct California
sound), maybe not as much as it once did, if you go back to the Beach
Boys and Surf Rock and The Ventures or the Laurel Canyon scene in the
seventies. I think those times were more distinctly Californian, but I
think if you fast forward to the ‘90s and the early 2000s there was a
lot of Punk music and Rock Punk that was coming out of California. Green
Day was one of the bigger bands. They had a California Punk sound that
still kind of carries on. I would say there is still a California sound,
but it can be hard to put your finger on it sometimes. It is definitely
a thing, and it is definitely real,” he says. He then muses if Raised On TV’s music has a California flavor, “Yes. I
would say in some ways it does. I don’t strive for that, but I feel in
some ways it is unavoidable. I have been told the way I play my guitar
and that our (sound) has a California beachy sound for some of our
stuff, not all of our music. Maybe a psychedelic sound in some ways that
reminds people of California. I don’t know exactly why that is.
Obviously, I grew up here and I am from here, so maybe there is this
thing in our upbringing and our nature that comes out in the art that we
make that we don’t fully understand, but it is there.”
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Audray
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Grace Pettis - Being Personal
Talking about the song, “I Take Care Of Me Now,” she says,
“It is completely autobiographical. It is one of those first
songs that I wrote after I left my marriage of eleven years and a
relationship of fourteen years. It was something I really didn’t believe
yet, because I had been in that relationship since I was a teenager and
I couldn’t really conceive of what it would be like to take care of
myself and be alone in the world, because I had been part of a couple
for so long. I remembered thinking that I was going to be okay, and I
could put myself first and take care of myself. I wrote it as a mantra
that I could grow into.
It was like when you are a kid, and your parents buy shoes that are a
little too big for you and you grow into them. It is a song that I wrote
for myself. It is my anti-codependency (song).
The words are emotive and at times poignant, “I take care of me now /
Since I made up my mind / I’m gonna be just fine / Every day gets better
and / I got bruises, but the good news is / I take care of me now…” They
are words that describe the scars that may still remain from a
relationship that has ended, but learning to love yourself, which is of
more importance.
Grace Pettis elaborates, “You don’t come out of something like that
unscathed. Where there has been love and betrayal there are going to be
scars. I don’t need to make them go away for me to love myself. In fact,
they are a part of what helped me to become the person who I am. I think
it is acceptance of your own story and learning to fully embrace the
person that you are.”
The
song “Rain,” chronicles a heart breaking, both through the words and
tone of the vocals. There is the packing up of suitcases to fly across
the Atlantic Ocean, to Limerick a city in Ireland. It is the raw
beginning of a new journey in life, but first there needs to be healing.
“I wrote “Rain,” in November of 2021 and it was maybe a week into having
packed up a couple of suitcases and going to Ireland to move in with my
mom, because I was ending my marriage. I went with a really good friend
of mine Natalie, who is also a singer and songwriter. We were in
Nashville, a night or two before the flight. We had dinner with a really
nice guy, a friend of hers and he is kind of a big deal in the
publishing industry. He was really helpful and sweet. He bought us
dinner and gave us a lot of great tips and advice on how to write
commercially
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