In the midst of all the collective craziness that has infected our country and our society, sometimes you just have to stop, and count, and take a breath to stay calm. To remember that miracles still exist, and that being alive is still the biggest miracle of all.

So I wrote about it.

Inspired by the folks over at BYOS, a marching percussive arts workshop, I've been playing around for several months with original songwriting that incorporates my earliest musical love, rudimental drumming. And after several different approaches, I finally hit upon this new original song. It's meant to be accompanied only by drumming, ideally on a practice pad so you can hear the lyrics. After trying it with different practice pads -- I have dozens because I collect them, but that's for another time -- I decided to make a quick, rough video with an old Remo pad, the style I first learned to drum with.

I'm pretty pleased wth how this worked out and may do some more of this sort of thing in the future.
Meanwhile, I h\guess I'm making room in my tour bag for sticks and a practice pad so I can take this song on the road in a couple of weeks. (FLORIDAAAAH! I'll see you soon!)

When things get wacky and scary, it's usually best to just stop, count to four, and breathe. It'll be okay.
***   ***   ***

Count To Four - Beth Hamon

When I count to four
I don’t need to say Your name
Because every letter can be found
In the beautiful arithmetic
That rises from the ground

One-two-three-four
Lift me up and show me more
Of Your All-There-Is
Of all the Amazingness
The amazing Nes Gadol

It won’t matter where we came from in the end
We’re all going to the same place as enemies or friends

So we count to four
It doesn’t matter what came before
The Big Bang gave birth
To a million beating hearts
A million souls to fill a broken vessel

We must count to four
Or five or six or even ten
However many breaths it takes
To calm this fiery rage
That threatens to blow up the world once more

It won’t matter where we came from in the end
We’re all going to the same place as enemies or friends

So we count to four
Reach down and touch the floor
Pick up Your broken piece
And see if it will fit with mine
So we can put the world together again

copyright 11-11-2018 Beth Hamon. All rights reserved

Dear friends: I know it's been awhile since I've shared anything here, but I find myself in a difficult place and don't know what to do. So I'll say something here. And if you want to respond, I really hope you will.

Yesterday, while my wife and I were finishing a week-long vacation in Ashland, Oregon, we received news of the synagogue attack in Pittsburgh, PA. 11 adults were killed while attending worship services -- and celebrating a baby naming -- at the synagogue. Four armed guards were also injured. Every Jewish community around the world is now hunkering down to console each other and to figure out next steps as they consider how to strengthen their security and safety, in the wake of rising anti-Semitic violence around the world.

It's something we can no longer deny, anywhere we live.
Everywhere Jews live, they can become a target Just. Like. That.
And if I add this to everything I'm thinking about the state of our country -- our crumbling Democracy, the president's tacit support of every white supremacist action since he took office, and the growing threat aimed at Jewish communities and their members -- I know that the United States is on the verge of what could be another Civil War. I do not exaggerate when I suggest this possibility. With the ease of access to guns and the growth of independent, anti-government militias, with the growing incivility in public speech and behavior,

We live in a time and place where the value of a human life has become diminished, thanks in no small part to the tirades of hatred against immigrants, people of color, and anyone who is not a white, Christian evangelical Protestant. The new toxicity has spilled over into too many facets of society and daily life to be easily reversed and/or healed in a generation.

This will be a long, ugly and deadly battle for our nation's collective soul. And I suspect I will not live long enough to see things turn around. Because the pendulum swings back and forth, and sometimes it takes a very, very long time to come back.

Pirke Avot teaches us that we may not finish the work, but we must do what we can while we're here.
So I am trying to figure out if there's anything I can do with my gifts to help move the pendulum, and to help my people (yes, the Jews. My people) survive this scary and dangerous time and place in our history.

If you have a suggestion, or want to create an opportunity to partner together towards that end -- to write new music, or teach something new, or create something that will be of use for generations going forward -- please let me know. Reach out to me and let's figure it out together.

In the meantime, please stay safe and hold your loved ones close. Keep living and working and playing and doing and creating, because that is how we can move the pendulum too.

Wishing you all buckets of peace and hope tonight and beyond.

(Below: A new setting of Oseh Shalom, which I wrote with the help of the religious school students and faculty at Congregation of Reform Judaism in Orlando, Florida. We'll sing it together for the first time during my Florida tour later this winter.)

Leading music during the High Holy Days was an amazing, humbling, beautiful experience.
Many thanks to Rabbi Mitch Delcau and Congregation Beth Hatikvah in Bremerton, WA for their warm, welcoming embrace. It was a joy to welcome the New Year with them, and our voices lifted together in song on Yom Kippur filled me with hope for the future.
I look forward to sharing music with CBH again in the near future.

And now, onward:

1. Who wants a Travel Cajon? I'm whipping up a new batch next week and they should be ready to ship by Oct 8th. If you want to buy one, hit me up. Right now I have enough materials for six, maybe seven at most. I'll hope to make another batch before winter sets in but there are no guarantees. So order yours soon.

2. I am home for most of the month of October, working on refining my repertoire and adding in some new songs I've written over the summer, in preparation for my upcoming travels. I'll also be writing out more of my newer songs in manuscript so they can be available for you to use at home.

3. I am also pondering the direction of my fourth recording, as I now have enough good songs to fill an album. To that end, I'll be posting a survey at my Facebook page to ask you what you think is important, and what you'd like to see in my fourth collection. Stay tuned to my Facebook page for details. The survey will be out in early October.

4. Fall and early winter playing out will consist of local open mics in October and early November. At the end of November, I'll head to Florida for a twelve-day tour including stops in Palm Coast, Orlando, West Palm Beach and Boca Raton. I'll post the complete itinerary in late October.

I hope your Fall began beautifully and colorfully (especially if you live far north enough to see the deciduous trees turn and drop their leaves)! If you observed the Jewish High Holy Days, I hope you feel cleansed, refreshed and ready to move forward into a good and sweet year.

Finally -- November 6 is Election Day in the United States. Many important issues at the Municipal and State level will be decided, and a number of seats will be up for grabs in both the US House and Senate.
So please check to make sure you're properly registered, and then cast your vote. (Here in Oregon, the deadline to register in this Fall election is October 16.)
Thanks.

Wishing you all buckets of beauty, hope and joy --Beth

There's a rally tomorrow in downtown Portland. It's being thrown by a bunch of guys who call themselves Patriot Prayer, and their friends who call themselves Proud Boys.
Both groups support white supremacy -- in government, in religion and in society as a whole.
To make their point, they often engage in acts of violence against anyone who doesn't agree with them.
Last time they held an event here, on June 30, people were hurt badly enough to be taken to the hospital.
Several anti-fascist activists were arrested.
It was an ugly, ugly day.

They're all doing it again tomorrow, August 4, at Tom McCall Waterfront Park. The Proud Boys have promised to be armed, which is perfectly legal under Oregon's liberal gun laws. (Oregon is one of the five states with the broadest interpretation of "stand your ground," in the country. by the way.)
They will arrive in busloads from all over the west, including groups from Texas, Washington state and Arizona.

The Unpresidented Brass Band plans to be there, along with a larger group calling itself POPMOB. It will include folks from interfaith alliances, clown protestors and Rose City Antifa. The stated goal is to provide a peaceful alternative, to become the event that draws attention away from the white supremacists.
However, since the Patriot Prayer group wants to provoke violence, I don't see how POPMOB can keep things calm. And apparently, neither do my band mates; a meeting held last night included a discussion of how to prepare for a violent protest (write lawyer's and friends' phone numbers on your arm, carry water and snacks, and wear bandannas to cover your mouth in the event that pepper spray or smoke bombs are employed; and leave your contact lenses at home.)
This doesn't sound like anyone is expecting a peaceful event.

And so it begs the question: Why go?
Whom does this serve if we know that there are folks coming specifically because they count on things turning violent? What if I don't want to engage in violence? What if I want to leave and things get crazy and I can't leave?

Not everyone is cut out to engage violently, no matter how many fantasies one may have of being the strongman, the hero, in a time of physical danger. A childhood and adolescence filled with being bullied made me shy away from such incidents, rather than seek them out. It has taken me years to get past the inner embarrassment of recognizing that I'm more Walter Mitty than Superman. I am finally beginning to come to terms with it, and to recognize that when things turn violent, I'm of no use to anyone in a crowd. If I can't escape, then all I'll do is curl up into a fetal position and wait for the blows to stop. That sort of response was beaten into me from my earliest grade school days and even self-defense courses couldn't change it (I flunked a self-defense course back in the day. Nothing the instructor did or said could help me, and I was so wigged out from the practice violence with the padded attacker that I went home after the second session and never came back.)

Such self-knowledge can be damning. And in my case, it has been for a long time. But not now.
The stakes are higher. If I went downtown tomorrow, someone at home would be waiting nervously for my return. And if something happened to me, that someone would be positively bereft and brokenhearted. I can't do that to her. And I can't put myself in harm's way. I'm not a fighter. I'm a peacemaker.

And everyone above a certain age knows what Fighting For Peace is like...

Every person has to sort out these things for themselves. As for me, although I would dearly love to play with the band again, this is not the venue I want to do it in, and I'm staying away. I could go to services, but I'd have to go through downtown to get there and I'm frankly not even up for that small risk.
So I'll stay home. I'll pray for a peaceful outcome for my friends downtown, I'll spend loving time with my Sweetie, and I'll go for a bike ride in my neighborhood.

After Shabbat, I'll contact my local and state officials and urge them to find a way to prevent these bigots from coming back for another violent protest in the future.

SHabbat Shalom.

Before I become a touring singer-songwriter, I was a drummer and percussionist for many years.
I marched in high school band, and in the summers with a local drum and bugle corps. I later became a private drum teacher and a drum line instructor for drum corps and several high school bands. In college, I wrote a massive term paper on the history of Ottoman percussion and its influence on modern classical percussion (for you academia freaks, it got published in a peer review journal, which I guess doesn't generally happen with undergraduate papers); and studied the history of military music just for fun.
After a bicycle collision ended my classical percussion career, I switched to guitar and became the musician many of you know me as today.

But over the last twenty years since that bike crash, I've never completely stopped playing drums.
I've always had at least a practice pad and some sticks laying around, which I'd pick up from time to time because the muscle memory felt good, reassuring; and I didn't want to lose it entirely. I continued to keep up my chops when I could. I played for a season with a community concert band (their schedule and the cost of membership made it impossible to stay, but it was fun while it lasted.)
I reached for my sticks and pad more and more and it felt good to just play.
(Video, above: "Modern Syncopation" from the NARD Solo Book, one of the first solos I learned in high school. I still have that book and still like to work out of it from time to time.)

I've never stopped loving marching percussion. In the ensuing years since my crash, I've continued to follow competitive drum corps as a fan and have picked up my sticks and pad more and more, just because it's been a kind of comfort food for my hands and because I love the sound of a marching drumline.

So when friends invited me to join a community band -- "there are no drum charts, just show up and lay down some tasty beats, you'll know a lot of the tunes already" -- I couldn't say no. I had a marching snare drum, I had sticks and I could still play a passable long roll. So last night I joined the Unpresidented Brass Band for a neighborhood block party and greenspace dedication. It was, in short, a blast. And for so small an ensemble, these guys know how to jam. After a few nervous, flubbed notes, I fit right in, and felt very welcomed. I can't wait to play with them again.

Only here's the thing. This band has a mission to play not only at warm and fuzzy community events and get-out-the-vote rallies. The Unpresidented Brass band also plays at demonstrations. That's why it was originally founded. And Portland, as some of you know, has a reputation as a hard-lefty protest town. Back in the dark ages when then-Vice President Dan Quayle came to speak at the Benson Hotel, he was greeted by hundreds of protestors, who were so loud in their expressions of displeasure that the police began calling Portland "Little Beirut" -- a nickmane that has stuck.

Now, with the rise of the violent alt-Right and repeated visits to Portland and other liberal West Coast cities by groups like Patriot Prayer and the Proud Boys, the protests have turned threatening, violent and ugly. UBB played at a Patriot Prayer rally in June, acting as a peaceful alternative to the violence between the alt-Right and the radical-left Antifa groups where were there, ostensibly, to beat each other up. And while there were definitely violent scuffles and arrests, a number of folks who had come to protest peacefully said they appreciated the band's presence and its ability to keep things calmer.

I admit that appeals to me. A lot.

On the other hand, I also know that there's risk in attending protests, especially now that the corners are so sharply delinated and the "leaders" of each extreme are given to violence.
There's another Patriot Prayer/Proud Boys rally schedule next weekend in Portland. The band plans to play. I've been told repeatedly that there is absolutely NO pressure on me to join them; every member of the band gets to decide their own safety parameters for themselves and there is NO judgment either way.
I know that my Sweetie would prefer I sit out the next performance, situated as it will be near this rally. But a part of me -- a BIG part of me -- wants to go and make music in the name of waging peace.

Drums were once instruments of war. Intricate signals were developed that were used to sound changes on formation and/or a fighting battalion's position. These signals later became the rudiments -- the "drummer's scales" used to this day by students learning how to play snare drum. I studied these rudiments as a kid, and later learned about their military origins. While I understand that four hundred years ago drums were instruments of war, what if today they can be instruments of peace, joining with other instruments to make a beautiful cacophony of sound that encourages people not to fight, but instead to dance in the streets?

So I'm torn. I'm afraid of the potential for getting hurt, or arrested. But I also want to wage peace with music, and playing with this band has raised my spirits so much that the idea of playing again with them is high on my thinking radar today.
I'll need to decide one way or another very soon.
Meanwhile, I hope you'll enjoy this little bit of sonic happiness from last night's garden party.

(Video, below: courtesy of Andrine De La Rocha.)

When I look back on the three albums I self-produced and crowdfunded, I have to stop sometimes and ask myself, Did I really do all that?
Because, with the exception of a couple of cover songs on the first album, everything else I wrote is original.
It's not all equally good or equally important, but it's all stuff I wrote.
And when I stop and think about that it does two things:
First, it sort of blows my mind.
Second, it reminds me that, no matter what struggles I deal with on any given day, I am truly blessed to be called to do this creative work.

And so my thoughts have recently turned to making another album of original songs.

So, in the interest of thinking out loud, I'm going to share my thought processes with you over the next several posts. Because I think it might be interesting to let you in on what I'm thinking, and how this particular singer-songwriter goes about bringing all the little bits together into an album.

Today's thought: How much should an album cost to make?
In the grand scheme of things, my making another album won't change the world. It won't bring about world peace or restore jobs and homes to everyone who's lost them due to economic greed or war or whatever else. It certainly won't make me rich, or even financially stable.
But making albums is a way for me to get my songs out there, to be heard and shared and absorbed by people. And for some reason I can't quite articulate, that really matters to me.

In the world of Jewish contemporary music, my albums are small potatoes, both in the making and in the selling. My last album,  Sliver In The Sky, took three months of focused rehearsal, two days to record in the studio, and about $4,000 to make. It was just me, singing and playing guitar and laying down a couple of percussion tracks.
By contrast, the last four crowdfunding campaigns of other Jewish artists, raised an average of $10,000 to 20,000 each, for recordings ranging from a four-song EP to a ten-song album. Those albums had producers, paid musicians, and recording and mastering processes that took weeks, not days.

There is, I admit, a part of me that would like to experiment with a more thickly-textured recording. But the larger part of me rebels against the idea that music should be so expensive to create, record and distribute.
Let's face it, I chose a genre that's really, really small, I don't sell a ton of recordings, and in the end I give about 1/3 to 1/2 of my recordings away -- to radio stations, small havurot (communities) without much money, and young artists just starting out who need encouragement. I also accept that I live in a post-copyright world and so I don't bother spending money I don't have to join groups like ASCAP or BMI, because how on earth would I benefit from membership in those organizations when my market is so niche-y?
I'm not upset about any of this. In fact, I sort of like that I've managed to get my songs out into the world without mortgaging my life away in the process. But last year at a Jewish conference, when I was given a half a table from which to sell my recordings and other items, another artist came to me, saw what I was charging per CD, and told me I was undercutting everyone else. "The going rate we all sort of agree upon is [X], " I was informed. I took a deep breath, and responded politely that I would not raise my prices, because my CD didn't cost a lot to make and I saw no reason to gouge my fans to make up a difference I had not spent. I later found out that this artist had spent upwards of four times as much to make their latest five-song EP, not even a full-length album. But they made a choice, and so did I.

Do I want to change what I'm doing and make a more elaborately produced album this time around? Mostly NO, but I am also paying attention to the little part of me that says Maybe. Because even if I go with my gut, that little voice might have something to teach me, and that's always worth paying some attention.

I welcome your thoughts. Just drop me a line over at my COMMENTS page. And thanks.

Here's an update for what's in the works from now through December 2018.

In July and August, I'm mostly playing out in Portland, at jams and open mics as my schedule allows, while I turn wrenches a few mornings a week at the nonprofit Bikes4Humanity-PDX. My go-tos include Wednesday nights at EastBurn and Sunday nights at The 1905, both on Portland's east side. Occasionally I may also sit in with the folks at Ladd's Circle for an open old-time/bluegrass jam as weather permits.

All of this takes a back seat, of course, to preparing for the High Holy Days. I'm blessed to serve Congregation Beth Hatikvah in Bremerton, WA as cantorial soloist again this year; I'll be composing some new liturgical settings for them as well.
In October I'm off to Ashland, OR to enjoy the closing weekend of the Shakespeare Festival; while I'm there I'm hoping to also play out a little bit during late night. Stay tuned as I'm working on this right now.

I am THRILLED to report that, as of yesterday, I have now filled ALL the spots on my upcoming Florida Tour!
Beginning in Palm Coast and making my way south via Orlando, West Palm Beach and Boca Raton, I'm bringing my music to Shabbat services, house concerts and a special visit to the first ever Limmud-Boca!
More later, as I continue to fill in dates all the way through to July 2019! Stay tuned, and thanks for supporting Jewish Music Made By Hand!

Working all the time is one of the great dangers of being a freelancer. You think you have to work all the time, or at odd hours of the day and night, because you've been taught that this is the honorable way, the RIGHT way, to earn a living. You've had it drilled into your head and heart that, by eschewing the 9-to-5 path and choosing to work for yourself, you must work twice as hard and three times as long. Consider it part of your penance, society insists, for being independent.
As a seventh-grader, I read a short story called "Junius Maltby," by John Steinbeck. To say it altered my views on the nature of work would be an understatement. Combined with watching my father work eighty hours a week at a job he never really loved, it showed me a different path.
Humans are not meant to work so long and hard all the time. Reeducating myself has been and remains a struggle. Every time I take a moment's leisure -- to nap, to daydream, or to play music for no other reason but pure pleasure -- I must fight the societally imposed guilt that pops up.
So today, I dared to set aside the unrealistic work ethic for a few moments to play music of no great consequence, just because the feel of wood drumsticks playing open, timed diddles on a deliciously resonant practice pad was so marvelous.
May the coming weekend give us all a chance to do something for no other reason than pure pleasure and renewal.
Happy Friday and Shabbat Shalom.