Last night I went up to Bates with a bunch of PortTango friends to see Avantango perform, and this morning TML was lucky enough to have a lesson with Pablo Aslan. He's a fabulous musician, of course, and has that intense love of tango that I'm always searching for and so inspired by. I'm still thinking of what a good match he was for us personality-wise, too. It was a very illuminating 2 hours. It makes me want to audition for Escuela de Tango, something that crosses my mind every so often. Then I remind myself that there are other ways of becoming a better tango violinist than moving to Buenos Aires for 2 years.
He gave me some advice today about keeping arrangements clean and understanding the roles of different players, and that will really help me as I continue to write arrangements for us. The best thing he did for me, though, was to listen intently. It made me focus and take my own playing to a higher level. And when he picked up Liz's bass to demonstrate something by playing with us, WOW. It was so inspiring to play with him. Such focus and intensity.
I'm doing a bad job of explaining why today's lesson was so good for us, and that's good, I think. The explanation will come through our music and our improvements during practice time instead. Yes.