Pandit Ravi Shankar and cool instruments

Today I clicked on the Google and learned, for the first time about Pandit Ravi Shankar.

I thought about how this story of a man who played the sitar realtes to me.. and actually it got me thinking about the Chinese dulcimer.

I thought of all the people I know who really know ho who play the Chinese dulcimer well. And that group that was part f Kwong Kow and now is still in the CCBA is good. They do a lot.

And actually Zhang lao shi is incredible, and a lot of his students are incredible and do all sorts of other things in life too, doctors break dancers whatever. But I've never seen the dulcimer in a hip hop breaking video. Why not? I've never seen that type of collaboration.

Then Instead of thinking about other people I thought about myself and how, truth be told, I've been neglecting my dulcimer. I tried to teach it to the kids, but they were too young... but yeah maybe it's time to bring it back out, and my Yuen, and my Gaohu. And I should be playing with it more often.

I'm not nearly as good at these instruments as some of my friends.

I have a few good songs and then I can freestyle.

In fact in Highschool John Danner would always come up to me and say, "Are you going to perform the same song on the dulcimer again? Don't you know any others?"

Actually i had performed a different song but to him they sounded similar, probably because they are both Chinese and okay there are similarities, and yes there is a huge difference between the two songs I played and say, Nam Yi Dong Ji kerng, but the two songs I played are closer together in terms of style.

In any case a lot of people were impressed by my playing even though perhaps I was not a spectacular musician but I could play this instrument that looked different and lo and behold they liked it.

John Danner was a much better musician so that's why he was mad I guess. But really there is no need to get mad at something like that. I see Noah getting mad like that all the time and it baffles me. Instead we could have collaborated and made something greater. That's what friends can do right? At least if they have time, which at Groton.. well I did have time come to think of it. Why didn't I collaborate with others to create something new?

Okay so I didn't in the past...

Well I did once when i went back to perform at Groton but it was a side intro to the Kung Fu we were going to do. I played violin and Alhambra, my friend, played dulcimer. It was pretty cool.


Why don't I do it now though?