Today is the first day of a pretty busy run, for me, at least.  My Sac State vocal jazz student of five years, Gaw Vang, is giving her senior recital this evening, and the Jazz Singers are singing two tunes on the set.  I'll be conducting Gaw's beautiful original ballad "You Find You."  Tomorrow, I'm spending seven hours on the road and about the same amount of time with my good friend Roger Emerson, who's bringing me up north to work with groups from Mt. Shasta High School and College of the Siskyous. Then, next week is a Monterey clinics week again, followed by immediately heading for Iowa for the Kirkwood Vocal Jazz Festival, where I'll be very busy doing clinics and performing.  CMEA is the following week, and my groups are featured in concert and Julia and I are doing a clinic and performing.  Around that time, we expect our "Vertical Voices: The Music of Maria Schneider" CDs to show up in the mail, and we'll have a bunch of stuff to do related to the CD release, for which we have a Sac State concert on March 16th.  And so on...you can see this stuff on my calendar, but when I put it together in narrative form, it starts to feel daunting, particularly because of what all has to happen in between those events, in the form of music preparation and other to-do list items of import.

I said I was going to do more KMVJ trivia and fun-fact stuff, and I will...just not today.  

Here's a VOTD that's somewhat relevant to recent days:  I just finished a big commission for McQueen High School, and I happen to have found this video that seems to be a class project, made by a McQueen student.  He uses my music as an example to discuss vocal jazz a bit, and I was flattered. :)