Welcome to another installment of the Fiddle Jam Club Newsletter! 

Topics: Holiday Song Lessons – Babik/BPO – Fiddle Jam Clinics – Howard Alden

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1) Happy Holidays!  Sorry, for the slowness of these newsletters lately.  I backed off a bit and took a break to focus on some more personal stuff the past couple months.  I am so honored for your continued interest in the Fiddle Jamming side of the violin world!  I’m looking forward to launching many new things in the coming new year.  Below is some info about some more recent happenings I thought you might enjoy hearing about.  As usual, please feel free to stay in touch with your comments, questions and feedback.

2) HOLIDAY TUNES have come back out of the vault for the season.  Enjoy and let me know if you have a favorite that you do not yet see, and I’ll be glad to get a lesson together on it for you.

3) ORCHESTRA GIG: Babik’s reunited gig with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra in the end of September was a rousing success!  It is an honor to play such an esteemed hall with a world-class orchestra at your back!  What a thrill to stand in the same spot as the likes of Jascha Heifetz, Itzhak Perlman, YoYoMa,  and even Led Zepplin in this acoustically perfect hall!  It was good to perform one more time with my old friends in front of the hometown crowd too.

I’ll post whatever fan footage I can find here (sorry, no official footage, as it would have taken a boatload of attorneys and money to get every musician in the orchestra to give permission for such things!).  

On the program was: I Can’t Give you Anything But Love, Nuage, and Rhtyhm Futur (FJi All Access Pass members can see the full practice chart of this crazy tune here. Members of our free Fiddle Jam Club can see some of the chart and info about this gig on the Founder’s blog post I made about it here). 

4) FIDDLE JAM CLINICS: I did a month-long string of clinics at the University of Florida here in Gainesville.  I video taped most of it and plan on editing it for your jam-along-at-home pleasure soon.  Participants were some of my young private students.  I love getting relatively inexperienced people together to jam and gently guiding them to creative heights.  It was neat to see and hear their improv-development from session to session, and how they learned from each other.  I said this is what I want to do when I “grow up!”  Ha.

If this sort of thing interests you, I may be interested in trying to “live stream” events like this in the future.  Let me know if you’d like to jam along with a class from the safety of your own home ;~)  Of course… I am also available to come to your town to hold such educational/edu-tainment sessions!  Contact me for details if interested in hosting such an event.

5) I got to do a Gypsy Jazz gig with the well-known guitarist Howard Alden that was pretty cool.  He’s a great player and a good guy.  You can see his wikipedia entry here.

Overall, I’m looking forward to the new year and am getting excited about some new developments I have in mind for the site.  I hope you are still with me!  Stay in touch.  Don’t be shy about sending me your thoughts, questions, and requests.  You can use the form below.

Talk soon!

Fitz

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