Upcoming Gigs and Other News

Dear Readers ~

I have been so busy writing, dancing and running that I have neglected my gig calendar. The first three months of 2010 have been full of gigs (mainly with other bands), the San Francisco Salsa Rueda Festival, a half marathon and freelance writing assignments (I write about music, technology and medicine, in English and Spanish).

It's been nice working with other bands, too, as I get to do what I love -- make music on stage -- but without the financial risk that comes with being a bandleader. Last week I was honored to play Yoshi's Oakland for Tito Gonzalez's CD release. And before you wonder why I didn't give you a heads-up, first, I apologize, and second, feel free to follow me on Twitter, or friend or fan me on Facebook -- I'm generally pretty active there and it's easier for this one-woman team to announce things that way.

I recently wrote a piece for MSN.com (not published yet) about women of Brazilian song, in which I interviewed Claudia Villela, Carol Saboya and Bebel Gilberto. That should be published in the next few weeks, but I'll also run longer excerpts from the interviews on my blog after the piece goes live.

Thank you as always for your support, suggestions, ideas and love!

Un abrazo,

Alexa

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GIGS GIGS GIGS GIGS GIGS GIGS

Friday, March 26th, 2010
Andy y Su Orquesta Callao - 8:00pm
Montero's

1106 Solano Avenue
Albany, CA 94706
510-524-1270

Pura salsa pa goZar!

Sunday, March 28th, 2010
Salsa al Aire Libre! - 4:00pm
El Rio

3158 Mission St (@ Cesar Chavez)
San Francisco, CA 94110
(415) 282-3325

Con Andy y Su Orquesta Callao! Outdoor barbecue!

Thursday, May 6th, 2010
Alexa Weber Morales Band - 9:30pm
Cigar Bar

850 Montgomery Street
San Francisco, CA 94133
415-398-0850

With Evelio Roque, Omar Ledezma, Christian Tumalan and Sam Bevan! Cigar Bar & Grill is on Jackson Square at the corner of Montgomery and Pacific.

The Cigar Bar & Grill offers an atmosphere low on pretension and high on relaxation. We offer an excellent selection of cigars, wines and spirits. Inside, relax in our rustic environment, featuring welcoming leather couches, low lighting and wooden tables & chairs. There are indoor and outdoor pool tables. And enjoy an array of art from local talents such as Anastasia Schipani and Mike Wolf.

Sunday, May 23rd, 2010
A Bailar Con Los Boleros! - 1:00pm
River Rock Casino

3250 Highway 128 East
Geyserville, CA 95441
(707) 857-2777

Alexa will be performing with Los Boleros. 21 and older only.

FROM SAN FRANCISCO AND OAKLAND:
Take Highway 101 north to Geyserville.
Take the exit toward CA-128 AND/GEYSERVILLE.
Turn right in CA-128/GEYSERVILLE AVE.
Turn right in CA-128
Look for Dry Creek Rancheria signs to River Rock Casino

Sunday, May 30th, 2010
Apostamos Con Los Boleros! - 9:00pm
River Rock Casino

3250 Highway 128 East
Geyserville, CA 95441
(707) 857-2777

Alexa will be performing with Los Boleros. 21 and older only.

FROM SAN FRANCISCO AND OAKLAND:
Take Highway 101 north to Geyserville.
Take the exit toward CA-128 AND/GEYSERVILLE.
Turn right in CA-128/GEYSERVILLE AVE.
Turn right in CA-128
Look for Dry Creek Rancheria signs to River Rock Casino

Wednesday, June 9th, 2010
Latin for Lunch! - 12:00pm
Oakland City Center

12th and Broadway (center stage in front of Jamba Juice)
Oakland, CA 94607

Salsa, samba, funk and originals with the Alexa Weber Morales Band!

Saturday, June 12th, 2010
Latin Jazz in Tiburon! - 8:00pm
Servino Ristorante

9 Main St
Tiburon, CA 94920

With Alexa Weber Morales quartet.

Sunday, July 11th, 2010
Summer Camp July 11-18 - 8:00pm
Oakland Feather River Camp

5469 Oakland Camp Road
Quincy, CA 95971
510-336-2267

Alexa will be teaching Garage Band week. Voice, performance, percussion and repertoire.

Monday, August 9th, 2010
Summer Camp Dance August 9-15 - 8:00pm
Oakland Feather River Camp

5469 Oakland Camp Road
Quincy, CA 95971
510-336-2267

Alexa will be teaching latin dance (samba, salsa aerobics, beginning rueda)!

The Lady Bits of the Long-Distance Runner

It was mile 16 of a 20-mile preview run of the upcoming Oakland Marathon. We grabbed pretzels and refilled water in front of the Oakland Marriott at Broadway and 10th, the last water stop before we headed around Lake Merritt for the final four miles.

My friend and I prepared to cross Broadway. As we waited for the light, two business men with New York accents noticed the small crowd of athletes and asked us how far we were running.

“Twenty miles! It’s a prep for the Oakland marathon in three weeks!” we chirped.

“Twenty miles, that’s incredible!” said one of the men. “How long is the marathon?”

“Twenty-six-point-two,” I said.

“Wow. How -- how does that compare -- how long is the New York Marathon?”

“All marathons are 26.2 miles. That’s what a marathon is,” I said, perhaps smugly.

The man seemed flirtatious. And persistent: “Doesn’t it hurt your body? Are your knees holding up?”

“They’re doing OK,” I said. “Well, hers are, mine not so much,” said my friend.

“But doesn’t it make your uterus drop?”

“Uh, what?”

“Doesn’t it make your uterus drop? Someone was telling me running marathons made her uterus drop.”

While I was searching for a comeback and wondering when the light would change, my friend, mother of a grown child, joked, “I’m not planning to use mine.”

“Why aren’t you planning to use it?”

Time to jaywalk, ticket-happy Oakland police or no.

“Ah … you two are on a business trip, aren’t you? I can just tell,” I cracked, starting against the light. “Let’s get going,” I called to my friend.

We got across the street. “Can you believe those guys? God! Business men!”

“I’m so tired, I can’t even tell if that was offensive,” my friend said.

“Of course it was! Uterus dropping? I should have said, ‘Even worse, it really makes your scrotum sag.’” We were laughing and running.

Another group of women caught up with us at the next crosswalk and I told them about the exchange we’d just had with the business men. They all groaned. “Yeah, it makes your penis shrink!” called out one girl. The group laughed.

“Of course! From all the chafing!” I yelled. “Why don’t I ever think of these things in the moment?!”

Like: Dudes. You're in Oakland, not Las Vegas.


Image credit: Uterus Vase by The Plug & Stéphanie Rollin

Vocal Coach Decries Phenomenon of Over-singing

Vocal Coach Decries Phenomenon of Over-singing, Points to Popular Talent Shows

March 25, 2010 (Nashville) The American music scene seems to be experiencing a phenomenon of painfully loud and meaningless over-singing which could be due in part to hit talent shows like American Idol, according to Renee Grant-Williams, one of the nation’s leading voice experts and coach to some of the music industry’s biggest stars.

Grant-Williams points to this week's painful duet by two former Idol contestants as an example, "By shamelessly over-singing, Demi Lovato and Joe Jonas managed to destroy what might otherwise have been a perfectly decent song. Their performance was over-loud, over-ornamented, mutually over-competitive and ultimately banal."

"The lyrics to Make a Wave written by Scott Krippayne and Jeffrey D. Peabody are very positive and send a very powerful message," says Grant Williams. "However, these two singers obscured the words so badly by over-singing, that I had to look up the lyrics to see what they were actually saying. The very essence of a song is to touch the listener by conveying a message of some kind. That's difficult to do when no one can get a grip on the melody or understand what's being said."

Grant-Williams feels these non-verbal squiggles should be there for one reason only—to emphasize the powerful emotion of the song. "When a singer ornaments, it should be because, at that moment, the singer's emotions are running so high that words will not suffice; the singer is only capable of a visceral response too powerful to put into mere words," she says.

Grant-Williams also says singers she encounters are increasingly belting out songs to the point where words don’t matter. “We seem to be caught up in an epidemic of loud,” says Grant-Williams. "Singing should be more subtle than just slinging a lot of voice around. If you sing with a thundering voice, you sacrifice the honesty, intimacy, and integrity of music. Yet, this style is presented to millions of TV viewers as desirable.”

"You just don’t hear the level of ear-splitting over-singing in Australia and other places like you do here in America," says Grant-Williams, who recently returned from a sold-out teaching-tour of Australia. Observations she made during tours in Europe and South America confirm that this phenomenon is especially prevalent in the United States. "I’m convinced it’s due in part to the tremendous influence in the U. S. of talent shows where over-singing is rewarded.”

“I still think America has the best singers on the planet,” says Grant-Williams. “They just need to bring down the volume and focus on the words and the emotions. I’m determined to do what I can to curb these phenomenon before they get out of hand.”

Grant-Williams has as few simple suggestions to help singers get back to the basics of good singing:
1. A song is a one-way conversation, a singer must be very intimate with the words.
2. Singing should be like speaking with the audience, there's no need to yell.
3. Use consonants and silence to indicate the most important words of the song.
4. Use inflection sparingly as you would use spices, too much will ruin the song.

Grant-Williams coaches aspiring performers as well as celebrities including Keith Urban, Kenny Chesney, Miley Cyrus, Faith Hill, the Dixie Chicks, Tim McGraw, Christina Aguilera, Linda Ronstadt, Randy Travis, and Huey Lewis. She has been quoted by Cosmopolitan, the Associated Press, Business Week, UPI, Southern Living, the Chicago Tribune, the Boston Globe, and the San Francisco Chronicle. She has appeared on many broadcast outlets including ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, Bravo, USA, MTV, GAC, BBC, PBS, and NPR. Grant-Williams is a former instructor at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music as well as the former director of the Division of Vocal Music at the University of California, Berkeley.

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For more information or to schedule an interview with Renee Grant-Williams, call 615-244-3280 or visit www.myvoicecoach.com

Inspiration from Born to Run

I finished Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen by Christopher McDougall in just a few sittings. I would have finished it faster if I hadn't read the first part aloud to my family, much to their annoyance.

I needed the inspiration, as I'm training for the Oakland Marathon, which is this Sunday. This will be my second marathon. The first was Big Sur in 2004, a hard initial outing -- hilly, windy and winding. My iliotibial band seized up at mile 17 thanks the to cambered road (Highway 1) -- along with hundreds of others, as evidenced by the agonized stretching going on around me.

Though I continued running shorter distances, I've enjoyed triathlon training the last two years and had begun thinking maybe everyone was right: triathlons were better for you than marathons. However, this training experience has been wonderful, long and slow (18 weeks!), and I have remained ache- and injury-free (fingers crossed). My knees protested the increase in distance around 13 miles, but now they seem happy. I have iced them only occasionally after runs, and haven't had to pop any pills.

Born to Run makes the argument that endurance running is not only not bad for your joints, it's what humans were designed to do. It also posits that today's plethora of running injuries are due to over-engineered shoes that encourage heel-striking rather than a forefoot-centered stride. Skeptic that I am, I thought the barefoot runners were nutty, though I did buy the argument that running on grass or beach was good for the muscles in the feet. We had a barefoot guy in last year's tri team, and now I'm embarrassed about my ignorant questions (for some reason I remember wondering if it was for religious reasons).

If you consider it, though, the flat-footed stride of a barefoot runner is more natural than heel-first. I also used to think our super-fast coach's (and her husband's) speedy hamster-wheel steps (similar to the POSE method) were strange. Now I find myself doing the same thing: picking up my heels, focusing on fast foot turnover, and landing flatter. My old way of running was with big, quad-crunching strides and major arm pumping. Now I keep my arms close to my torso.

I don't know how my stride will evolve further, but I have gotten faster in the last seven years -- and especially the last two. So check this out: Maybe I have even more years of speed ahead of me than I thought!

McDougall quotes Dennis Bramble, biology professor at the University of Utah in the shadow of the Wasatch Mountains: "We monitored the results of the 2004 New York City Marathon and compared finishing times by age. What we found is that starting at age nineteen, runners get faster every year until they hit their peak at twenty-seven. After twenty-seven, they start to decline. So here's the question -- how old are you when you're back to running the same speed you did at nineteen?" The answer is not 36, or 45, or 55, but an astonishing 64 years old!

"There's something really weird about us humans; we're not only really good at endurance running, we're really good at it for a remarkably long time. We're a machine built to run -- and the machine never wears out," says Bramble in the book.

"You don't stop running because you get old, the Dipsea Demon always said. You get old because you stop running..." writes McDougall.

Further, as humans evolved, the difference between male and female diminished such that it's far less than in other primates. Human men are only 15% bigger than women, while gorillas are twice as big and chimps one-third. And women have proven, especially lately, that "caring for kids on the fly isn't that hard, as American ultrarunner Kami Semick demonstrates; she likes to run mountain trails around Bend, Oregon, with her four-year-old daughter, Baronie, riding along in a backpack." McDougall also notes that Emily Baer finished 8th overall among men and women in the 2007 Hardrock 100, while stopping to breastfeed her baby at every aid station (OK, that makes my boobs hurt just thinking about it -- but having climbed mountains while nursing I know it can be done). Among the world's last nomads, Congo Pygmies still hunt in mixed-gender groups.

I adore the wild characters and settings McDougall describes in the book, although sometimes his gonzo style makes me question the factual accuracy. I've read a number of adventure journalism books and his, unlike many I've seen, does not come with foot- or end notes. But it works well for the topic. His descriptions of my beloved Western states and Mexico, where he covers the running culture of the Tarahumara Indians, are effective and enticing.

Rather than go on, I'll close with a quote on one of many pages I dog-eared (oops, in my friend's book), where McDougall talks about Jenn, a wacky young party animal who runs 50-mile trails with the joy of a child. I couldn't help thinking of jazz traditionalists as I read this.

"Her naked delight is unmistakable; it forces a smile to her lips that's so honest and unguarded, you feel she's lost in the grip of artistic inspiration. Maybe she is. Whenever an art form loses its fire, when it gets weakened by intellectual inbreeding and first principles fade into stale tradition, a radical fringe eventually appears to blow it up and rebuild from the rubble. Young Gun ultrarunners were like Lost Generation writers in the '20s, Beat poets in the '50s, and rock musicians in the '60s: they were poor and ignored and free from all expectations and inhibitions. They were body artists, playing with the palette of human endurance."

You needn't run 50 or 100 miles to get that feeling, but that sensation of doing something that everyone around you says is insane, or pointless, or irresponsible -- and the fleeting nirvana when you realize you have just done it? I want some more of that.

My 9-Year-Old's Observation

Yesterday, coming home from school, my son said, "Mommy, day and night are opposites, but not just in the obvious way. If you think about it, in the day, light is everywhere and darkness has a shape, like a shadow. In the night, it's dark everywhere, but light has a shape in the dark, like headlights."

I thought that was brilliant.

If You Cross Me, Watch Out!

If you cross me, watch out!

I will bitch about it to my family endlessly, perhaps for a year or more, while you get shit done. Heck I might even complain bitterly about it to strangers or important business contacts who would have given me work if I hadn't come off as vengeful and unstable.

Yeah, and I might supersize myself. Mess with me and I could put on 20 pounds just to show you who's the victim here.

Watch out, because I'll be watching you. I will cyberstalk you and catalog your every move while my own web presence attracts old flies.

Stab me in the back and I'll never heal. I'll let myself go completely -- teeth, hair, nails, you name it. I'll be Cousin It, here in my hole, watching old sitcoms, wondering what you're doing right now. I know you'll be haunted by my total deterioration.

So don't you do me wrong. I won't forget it.

The Lady Bits of the Long-Distance Runner

It was mile 16 of a 20-mile preview run of the upcoming Oakland Marathon. We grabbed pretzels and refilled water in front of the Oakland Marriott at Broadway and 10th, the last water stop before we headed around Lake Merritt for the final four miles.

My friend and I prepared to cross Broadway. As we waited for the light, two business men with New York accents noticed the small crowd of athletes and asked us how far we were running.

“Twenty miles! It’s a prep for the Oakland marathon in three weeks!” we chirped.

“Twenty miles, that’s incredible!” said one of the men. “How long is the marathon?”

“Twenty-six-point-two,” I said.

“Wow. How -- how does that compare -- how long is the New York Marathon?”

“All marathons are 26.2 miles. That’s what a marathon is,” I said, perhaps smugly.

The man seemed flirtatious. And persistent: “Doesn’t it hurt your body? Are your knees holding up?”

“They’re doing OK,” I said. “Well, hers are, mine not so much,” said my friend.

“But doesn’t it make your uterus drop?”

“Uh, what?”

“Doesn’t it make your uterus drop? Someone was telling me running marathons made her uterus drop.”

While I was searching for a comeback and wondering when the light would change, my friend, mother of a grown child, joked, “I’m not planning to use mine.”

“Why aren’t you planning to use it?”

Time to jaywalk, ticket-happy Oakland police or no.

“Ah … you two are on a business trip, aren’t you? I can just tell,” I cracked, starting against the light. “Let’s get going,” I called to my friend.

We got across the street. “Can you believe those guys? God! Business men!”

“I’m so tired, I can’t even tell if that was offensive,” my friend said.

“Of course it was! Uterus dropping? I should have said, ‘Even worse, it really makes your scrotum sag.’” We were laughing and running.

Another group of women caught up with us at the next crosswalk and I told them about the exchange we’d just had with the business men. They all groaned. “Yeah, it makes your penis shrink!” called out one girl. The group laughed.

“Of course! From all the chafing!” I yelled. “Why don’t I ever think of these things in the moment?!”

Like: Dudes. You're in Oakland, not Las Vegas.


Image credit: Uterus Vase by The Plug & Stéphanie Rollin

Alexa Weber Morales sings I Will Survive, Salsa-Style

Con Andy y Su Orquesta Callao last night @ Roccapulco in San Francisco.

Este arreglo del exito de Gloria Gaynor "I Will Survive" proviene del percusionista/productor Ivan Lino Montes. Se grabo en los 2000 temprano con su Orquesta Kache y ahora se ha vuelto a prominencia con Andy y Su Orquesta Callao.

Top 10 Tough Acts to Follow

10. Strippers

9. Graffiti artists high on fumes

8. Performance artists using bodily fluids to make statements about corporatization of all life forms

7. Sing-songy poets

6. Long-winded rappers wrapped in flags from little-known countries

5. Veterinarians giving talks about estrus in breeding bitches

4. Drunken priests eulogizing the wrong person

3. DJs with advanced hearing loss

2. Fakirs

1. Soulful 19-year-old girl in a micro-mini who sings one song a cappella and nails every note, then whips out a guitar and plays a blisteringly perfect jazz solo


What was the worst act you had to follow? Do share!