It goes without saying that I have voted Republican since the first Reagan landslide in 1980. (I was a road musician and felt the damage of the Carter regime enough to get me interested in national politics. That first vote was an absentee vote. At the time, my home was in North Carolina and I was in Erie, PA for the vote.)
Today, I live in a tiny slice of Southwest Florida. We were in the news in 2004 and you all know why. I’m trying to forget it.
Okay, for the record, I’m a working musician. I play several instruments and work a single. (Instruments include double tenor steel drums, acoustic guitar, flugelhorn, and flute. Backing tracks were recorded in my own studio.) Oh, yes. I have several CDs out. One is Smooth Jazz without the pans (Bacchus Arelius), one is steel drum Smooth Jazz (Split Pan Soup), one is Christmas Smooth Jazz (Chestnut) and one is Christmas steel drum Smooth Jazz (O Tannenbaum.) For the mods here, I will not be attempting to sell those CDs. I have no web based way to do that. I only sell them on the gigs. I have a second Steel Drum Christmas CD to be released in December. (Just have to put the pan tracks and mix down. Design the cover and we’re good to go.) If anyone here wants to buy a CD, you have to come to Southwest Florida and catch me on one of my gigs.
I’m a father of two wonderful girls, both of which are adults, both of which have jobs and are in relationships.
For the record, I’m also a Science Fiction novelist. My one novel is a Kindle Book, available on Amazon. For the mods here, I will not link to that site (at least not without your permission). It has only been out about a month and isn’t exactly flying off the virtual bookshelves. If anyone here is interested, you’ll have to contact me through Email.
The politics?
Republican voter pretty much. I’ve voted straight Republican since 1980. Consider myself a Conservative. Don’t want this to be too long, but if anyone is interested, I’ll create a separate post with all my positions. Bottom line, I’m voting for Donald Trump in the primaries and in the general. So I’m already drawing fire from establishment Republicans. What else is new?
My taste in music? The daughters and I LOVE the Opera. (So far, at the Sarasota Opera House, we caught Tosca (Puccini) Don Giovanni (Mozart) and Il Trovatore (Verdi). I also play piano, by the way. (During the season in Southwest Florida, I play a lot more sit down grand piano gigs. Lots of trio jazz by myself.) Right now, I’m working on a couple of Chopin pieces and one very stubborn Rachmaninoff piece. (One the composer himself got sick of performing.)
Yes, I like music from the last century. Zappa, The Who, Chicago, Jimmy Buffett, Spyro Gyra, Brubeck, Django Reinhardt. I LOVE Disco music. (I read somewhere that our musical tastes are cemented in our psyche according to the era when we had the most sex. For me, that was the late Seventies.)
Oh, and I turn 61 in a few days. I color my hair so I look like a 61 year old who colors his hair.