Okay, so here’s the set-up: three guys who love bluegrass music. Except they’re not just three guys who love bluegrass, they’re three guys from New Jersey, not the first place you think of when you think of bluegrass. Except they’re not just three guys from New Jersey who love bluegrass, they’re three brothers. Except they’re not just three brothers from New Jersey who love bluegrass, they’re three brothers all under the age of fifteen. And there you have it: Brothers Jonny, Robbie and Tommy Mizzone are “The Sleepy Man Banjo Boys,” a trio of virtuoso bluegrass musicians who in just five minutes will share two songs and in...

Some things are just better when shared. Like a cup of hot chocolate on a cold winter evening. Or a movie, couch, and blanket on a rainy Saturday afternoon. Or music, well, just about anytime. In fact, there are few things that bring people together more quickly or deeply than a shared piece of music. The challenge in this day and age, however, is that so few people feel competent to do more than listen. With a generation of budget cuts stripping our schools of music programs, and with a cultural obsession over pop star performances, most people rarely if ever have the chance to actually make music. Where once we were producers of music,...

You already know I’m partial to flash mobs, so I’ll neither explain nor apologize for today’s post. 🙂 Maybe it’s the turn in the weather here in Minnesota – from warm and sunny to cold (as in 30 degrees colder overnight) and overcast — or maybe it’s being midway through the semester and feeling like I’m falling way behind, or maybe it’s looking at three trips (each one of which I really look forward to) in the next two weeks, but needed a pick-me-upper this morning. And when I stumbled across this video of the Copenhagen Philharmonic playing Grieg’s Peer Gynt in the subway to the surprise and delight of the...

I’ll admit it: I’m a sucker for cultural flashmob events. I know they’re contrived – how else do you get the great footage? – but I still love the way they startle a random group of people and bring them together as a group, a body, joined partly, I’m sure, by curiosity but also, I think, be the sheer beauty of the event. In this case that event is a 100 member orchestra playing Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.” It was sponsored by Banco Sabadell, Spain’s fifth largest bank, this past May to sponsor the 130th anniversary of its founding. Another favorite flashmob was the dance of “Do...