Do WE choose professions or do professions choose US?
My son was a bright-eyed boy like these talented musicians who will be performing at the 4th annual Django Jazz Festival in Baltimore February 23 -25. Music chose him like it chose them, I suspect.
Michael’s Story and Django Videos
My son, Michael, is now famous in his genre. He not only creates original jazz music melding styles and instruments from many cultures, he created the Charm City Django Jazz Festival in Baltimore four years ago with a vision of building community through music with people of all ages and cultures from Europe and Across America. This year he is the curator of DJF-4 with the additional goal of producing a documentary film of this three-day annual event this February funded by KickStarter.
All of this is shown below after a personal note on how I saw music choose Michael.
Michael was never pushed to be anything in particular; he was just exposed to different activities like many kids. Two behaviors stood out from an early age, though.
The first was playing with each Christmas gift quietly and patiently for a long time (20 minutes!) before opening the next one. This was very different compared to his two sisters. The second was his gift of fixing my broken gas lawn mower (which he knew nothing about) by simply tinkering with it.
Looking back, this focus and manual dexterity seemed to define his life at age 13 the instant he strummed the strings on his guitar one Christmas morning. He was like a duck in water. He has never put it down; It and music have been his guiding star through colleges and girlfriends, as I followed him with his guitar and amp to gigs early on up and down the East coast.
His mother used to say, “He will die if he doesn’t create and play music.” I would counter, “He will die if he doesn’t make a decent living.” He now tours all over the world and gives more than he gets. We were both right, and are very proud of him as both a very decent human being and extraordinary musician.
Here is a preview of music and musicians at the fourth Django Jazz Festival to be held February 23 – 25; his 4th successful KickStarter pitch for support is here.
Preview of the February 23 – 25 Django Jazz Festival
Life as it is becoming... 