Furia Flamenca members Sylvia and Morgan at the Cherry Blossom Festival Tidal Basin Stage. April 11, 2009 3:51pm

It's 11-something pm on Thursday as I type these words. Yeah I know it's a beautiful night to be out and I was actually considering going to Aroma in Olney, Maryland to checkout the new Thursday night rumba show by guitarists José Oretea and Ramin Rad. But after my school show today (Thursday), I went straight home and jumped into bed. Was tired but don't know why.

By the way, the school show went really well. Not to say that my guitar playing was at its best, cuz it wasn't—haven't been able to practice that much lately, remember (see previous post)? But I just kept in mind that my job was not necessarily to impress the students with amazing guitar skills, but rather to touch them emotionally with my music and educate them about how to appreciate the art of flamenco.

Morgan. April 11, 2009 3:52pm

Allow me to digress for a moment. Just realized that for quite some time now, I've been publishing blogs featuring pics of this and that flamenco event and for the accompanying text, I've been writing about something completely different, usually something personal. Oh well...nearly 500 blog entries later (you're reading #490), the statistics speak for themselves: the blog is consistently the most popular section of my website! So I do have an audience, yay! :-)

Katie. April 11, 2009 3:56pm

Come to think of it, as technically dazzling as flamenco can be (whether it's dancing, guitar playing, singing or palmas), for me, I find it more satisfying to focus on expressing myself through my music knowing that along the way, my audience will be emotionally touched (on some level, hopefully deep).

Bala. April 11, 2009 3:58pm

Kinda reminds me of when I was a music major in college. Between classes, I used to work on my fear of stage fright by practicing outdoors where lots of students passed by. Whenever a student did sit down next to me, I did feel the nervousness but learned how to keep going no matter what. Then of course when a pretty girl sat next to me, I made the mistake of wanting to impress her and instead of expressing myself (as I should have been doing), I focused on dazzling her with technical skill by playing more difficult pieces while in my nervous state. While I was able to pull it off most of the time on a technical level, I didn't feel emotionally satisfied—in plain English: it wasn't as fun. On the other hand, it was still an easy way to meet girls. :-)

Karina. April 11, 2009 4:04pm

OK, so in today's school show, I went in realizing that my guitar technique was kind of lacking, but when it came to accompanying the dancers I kept in mind that one does not have to be a virtuoso to be a flamenco guitarist.

You still have to be good enough on guitar to not have to think about technique and consequently be able to devote most of your attention on tastefully accompanying the dancer or singer. So I did just that. And as a group, I'm proud to say that the dancers and I really made an impact on our audience. In fact, after our lecture/demo the teachers and parents were raving about how it was rare that these students were quiet, attentive and engaged, especially considering the presentation lasted an hour and 15 minutes!

Lillian. April 11, 2009 4:06pm

And yeah, I have to give credit to especially to my colleagues Ziva Cohen and Jaime Coronado. Back in the early 90's, I did school shows with them all the time and some of their presentation skills have rubbed off on me. I'm sure if they were in my audience at today's school show, they'd come up to me afterwards and say, "Hey Miguelito. Those are my lines you're using!" Guilty as charged! :-)

Syliva, Amy, Estela and Daniel. April 11, 2009 4:17pm

Furia Flamenca director Estela Velez and flamenco guitaristTorcuato Zamora. April 11, 2009

So that I'm not completely remiss, let me say a little something about the pics. I have to give credit to Estela Velez and her company Furia Flamenca. You can't tell from the pics, but it was quite cold and windy where this performance took place and they still performed quite admirably! I could barely stand the cold as I took these pics and the same goes for my friend and fellow flamenco guitarist Ayhan Ozdag, who came all the way from Ashburn, Virginia to see the performance.

Anywayz, I got a lot of fun stuff planned for this weekend:
1. Friday night flamenco at Cabanas with dancer Ginette Perea and friends
2. Saturday rehearsal and performance with Arte Flamenco at the Creative Alliance in Baltimore
3. Sunday hanging out with friends on the Georgetown waterfront (temps will be in the upper 80's!!!!)

So I should go to bed, rest up and save my energy. Good night!

Posted by Miguelito at 10:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Flamenco guitarist Guillermo "Tito" Aguilar at the Coprodeli fundraiser. April 9, 2009 7:27pm

It's 10-something pm on Wednesday as I type these words. If you've been keeping up with my twitter updates, you'd have known that I've been spending a lot of daytime hours at bookstores with Wifi access cuz for the past few weeks from 9-5 there's been some repair work going on in my apartment involving lots of noisy tools, dust, water and toxic fumes.

Not exactly an environment conducive to working on the computer, not to mention that I don't have a comfortable place to practice guitar. Grrr....but thank God, I mean Mother Nature, that the weather is gradually warming up now, so in a worst case, I can always resort to practicing outdoors (checkout these pics from March 2004).

OK...so my being "exiled" from my apartment the past few weeks has taken a huge toll on my practice routine. So what to do? Just show up earlier at gigs and squeeze in as much warm-up time as I can. It hasn't been that bad to be honest, but once this repair work is done in my apartment, I'm going to have to double-up on practice time for sure!

Anyhow, let's talk about these pics you see here...

Flamenco dancer Emily Mazzotti performing alegrías. April 9, 2009 7:32pm

First of all, I'm sure you're wondering, "What is Coprodeli?" Sounds Italian doesn't it? Actually it's an acronym for COmmunity PROmotion DEvelopment LIberation.

According to the Coprodeli website,
"Coprodeli USA supports the work of Coprodeli in Peru which aids Peruvian families by providing for fundamental needs, promoting education and job training, and developing strong self-sustaining community programs. Volunteers from the U.S., Europe, Latin America, and from among the disadvantaged people of Peru provide hope and vital services to those in need."

Emily Mazzotti. April 9, 2009 7:33pm

Local flamenco dancer Emily Mazzotti happens to be from Lima, Perú originally, so naturally she, along with guitarist Guillermo "Tito" Aguilar and a guest male dancer, donated their services to raise money for this worthy cause.

The performance took place in the historic mansion of the Josephine Butler Parks Center which overlooks Meridian Hill Park, not too far from Adams-Morgan.

Since I happened to be free that night, I took the liberty of tagging along and take pics of the performance. In a way, you can say I donated my services too, since a LOT of people with an interest in flamenco keep up with my blog. Who knows? Some of those same people may end up making a donation to Coprodeli too!

Aside from the flamenco, the theme of the evening was Perú so there was a Pisco bar (which proved to be very popular!) and some tasty samples of Peruvian delicacies such as ceviche and rocoto.

Anywayz, you've probably seen Emily dance in local tablaos many times, but it's not too often you see Tito playing for flamenco dancers lately. Usually you'll find him performing with his band Gypsy Karavan on Fridays and Saturdays at Las Tapas playing mostly songs by the Gipsy Kings and other selections from the rumba repertoire.

Guillermo "Tito" Aguilar. April 9, 2009 7:34pm

Emily Mazzotti. April 9, 2009 7:34pm

Emily Mazzotti. April 9, 2009 7:35pm

Emily Mazzotti. April 9, 2009 7:39pm

I interviewed Emily a couple of months ago and I'm still, albeit slowly, transcribing the audio recording of that interview. Which means I still have to edit it etc. But I promise an interview will be published on my website very soon! As you can imagine, my to-do list is pretty full right now (not even counting stuff I have to do as a professional performer). But I have a review of a DVD about rumba and a review of Rubem Dantas' latest CD, not to mention the backlog of blog entries about local flamenco events, whew!

Emily Mazzotti and Guillermo "Tito" Aguilar. April 9, 2009 7:53pm

Exterior view of the Josephine Butler Parks Center. April 9, 2009 9:16pm

As for this evening (Wednesday), I was so tempted to go to Café Citrón to say hello to my favorite female bartender Sachi, who works at Citrón's third floor VIP lounge (you do know about it, don't you?), but knowing me, if I went, I'd end up staying until 2:00am and probably oversleep the next day. Not wise considering I have a school show on Thursday early afternoon (with two beautiful and talented flamenco dancers) that I have to be well-rested for to pull it off!

OK it's getting late. I hope you enjoyed these pics. Ciao for now!

PS...come to Cabanas this Friday for my usual flamenco show with dancer Ginette Perea at 8:00pm. It's going to be a warm and beautiful night. So why not enjoy it at the most beautiful spot in Georgetown with a view of the Potomac? See you there!

Posted by Miguelito at 9:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

April 29, 2004 3:32pm

It's 11:30am on Thursday as I type these words. I'm here at my neighborhood Starbucks doing my usual computer-related daily activities: DC Flamenco updates, email, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter etc. And it's about time I published another blog entry, but since I haven't been taking pics lately, I decided to dig one up from the archives.

If you've been following my tweets lately, you know I've been spending my days at Barnes & Noble and Starbucks—y'know, the places where freelancer people like me hang out and do their work. I've been meaning to do this for the longest time, but I wasn't able to before cuz I couldn't afford a laptop, on my struggling musician income, until now with the recent popularity of relatively low-priced netbooks.

But now you're probably asking yourself, "Wait a minute. Is Miguelito a musician or is he one of those generic laptop-toting, cappucino sipping, office-casual-jeans-wearing freelancers that typically inhabit Starbucks during the day?" :-)

Of course I'm a musician (duh) but the hours I spend in the front of the computer is mostly for online social networking for the purpose of promoting myself and the local flamenco scene.

Normally, I'd do this all from the comfort of my apartment, but for the next month or so there's some repair work being done (replacing the water pipes of my building) that involves drilling, hammering, lots of dust and occasional splashes of water which doesn't mix well with computers.

So here I am, yet again, spending the day working on my netbook. On top of that, I normally practice guitar at home, and if it was warm outside I'd just find a nice sunny spot in Georgetown (see photo above) and practice for hours to my heart's content. But, Mother Nature can't seem make up her mind whether to make it warm or cold out, grrr!

Well, ok, so my practice regimen is taking a serious hit right now. I'm hoping and praying that the weather will warm-up really soon. For now I'll have to squeeze in practicing guitar at night and resorting to warming-up my hands right before shows on the nights that I work. In the meantime, since I'm spending a lot of time in bookstores I might as well learn some new stuff.

New stuff? Like what? Well, for years (13 to be precise) I've been maintaining the DC Flamenco website. I know enough HTML, CSS, PERL and Javascript to make a website from scratch (all I need is a text editor like Notepad) but not quite enough to call myself a cutting edge professional web developer. I wish.

Nowadays you can learn so much professional level web developer stuff from books at Barnes & Noble. So that's what I'm doing: playing catch-up, learning the stuff I need to know like PHP, MySQL, AJAX, Flash etc to bring my webdev skills up-to-date. Not that I want to make a career out of it, but I have been taking on a few web design clients here and there over the years to supplement my artist income. However, I still need to learn the latest developments in webdev to keep up with the competition. In the meantime, the money I make designing websites is not bad albeit it is kind of irregular, but hey, that's the freelance lifestyle.

Which brings me to my work as a flamenco guitarist. Am I doing what I love? Yes of course. Is the money following (see title of this blog)? Yes. "Do what you love and the money will follow" has been one of my mantras since I became a music major in college. I mean c'mon, what real musician goes into music for the sole purpose of making money? Ok so you do what you love and the love of doing it will carry you through the hard times as you hone your craft which hopefully will lead you to become good at what you love which means you'll get lots of work, right?

Perhaps that true to a certain extent. But then again, there are lots of extremely talented skilled artists out there who are either starving or have resorted to getting regular dayjobs to get by. I'm so close to going that route myself, but the occasional web design client, thank God, is keeping me in the freelance world.

Remember my office experience last year? Well I did it again this year and I stuck it out for the full length of the office gig this time. The idea of having a regular schedule with a regular income was actually very comforting. OK so the office job didn't have any real meaning to me personally other than to make money and hang out in an office environment with the friend who got me the job. ;-) But in the end, I got a decent size paycheck which helped me to afford this HP Mini 10000 netbook that I'm using right now. (Thank you Jojo!)

So what's the plan Miguelito? They say the economy sucks but I can't use that as a real excuse. While I do make significantly less money than most of the people I know, I can confidently say I have more fun at my job than most people. And I love my job cuz I'm doing what I love. It just doesn't pay that much money. It pays in other ways: fun!

And yeah, as for my other "job," I do love working with computers and the Internet and it is relevant to my career as a musician. All this time spent on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and writing these deeply fascinating thought-provoking occasionally non-flamenco related blogs do lead to actual-paying flamenco gigs for me, really! Not to mention the fact that I promote the DC flamenco community in general (pats himself on the back). But I digress.

The plan is to continue doing my flamenco thing but diversify my income stream with some web design gigs. Who knows what the future will bring? In the meantime I'm having a blast and hopefully I'm inspiring people like you to rediscover your passion and make the time to do what speaks to your heart and maybe make some money doing it, too. ;-)

April 29, 2004 4:41pm

Anywayz, my free WiFi access here at Starbucks tops out at 2 hours and I've got five minutes left. Ciao for now!

Posted by Miguelito at 11:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Dancer Sara Jerez with Jason Vera y Aragón, Miguelito and José Oretea at Café Citrón. March 30, 2009 photo by Jill Hatzai

It's almost 2:00pm on Friday as I type these words. My WiFi access here at Barnes & Noble expires in 20 minutes, so I'll make this quick.

My photographer friend Jill Hatzai sent me the photo you see above (click on it to see the full-size version). I've always pondered the many different ways of promoting the local flamenco scene but one thing that I do very well is make people aware of what's going on. It's really simple: I relentlessly publish pics of anything and everything going on (assuming I can make it to everything!).

But the next step after making the local community aware of what's going on, naturally, is enticing them to come out and enjoy the flamenco performances, IN PERSON. One fan of my website wrote me recently: "Even when I don't go out [to flamenco shows], when I look at your pictures, I feel like I have."

That's a compliment of course and I'll take it—I'm by no means a pro like Jill, but I am a decent photographer. But I'd rather have people come out to my shows rather than choose to stay home and catch up on what happened by checking my blog.

Oh well. It's a never-ending battle. But, not to worry, I won't ever give up. I'll do all I can to get people (especially new ones) to come out to support the flamenco scene.

Having said that, enjoy this pic by Jill. And make sure you view the full-size version. The panoramic view will make you feel like you're right there!

My thanks to Jill for the gorgeous pic. And I hope to see some new faces at my flamenco shows in the coming weeks! As for tonight (Friday), I'll be at Cabanas performing with dancer Ginette Perea and friends. Ciao!

Posted by Miguelito at 1:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)