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Sunday, January 15: The Red Flower Press completes two years of existence, and the story of this blog begins, oddly enough, with a podcast.

It all starts at the end of 2020 (yes, that year…). I had dedicated practically all of my time to producing QuaranJazz, a weekly podcast of interviews with musicians from around the world. I did not know at the exactly what I wanted with the podcast,at first.

Looking back to that timet, I think that we were all kind of lost. Anyway, Quaranjazz primary goal has always been to offer my fellow musicians the opportunity to talk about their projects, which had been abruptly cut due to the pandemic.

What did musicians do during social isolation? What were your fears and hopes? How did you take your projects forward and maintain contact with your audience? Honestly, I think of QuaranJazz as a musical portrait of that year of fear and loneliness.

Fortunately those days are over, but the podcast episodes remain as a document for posterity and yet another tool for understanding a very particular phase of our recent history. I am very proud of this project, created and developed in very precarious conditions, but with a lot of determination.

The following year vaccines began to be applied and the word quarantine, finally, ceased to be used in everyday life. QuaranJazz had completed its cycle and its mission and it was time to move on to new projects. I confess that until then I had never tried a blog, and it took me a long time to find a format that worked for me, both in the frequency of posts and in terms of content.

Content was quite an issue indeed, because after the tremendously introspective experience of QuaranJazz, I wanted to be able to talk about various things related to music, from reviews to personal stories, passing through career management tips, but the biggest challenge was finding the middle ground between information and reflection.

My intention is that you can go back and reread the texts, regardless of the period in which they were written and find something you can relate to. Like good old friends, we can stop and pick up the conversation at any time and it will always make sense, it will always feel good.

This is also how I feel about singing, and maybe that is the reason why I like so much writing to you every week.

My red flower and I sincerely thank you for the company.

Be seeing you!

G.F.

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Life on Mars? is a 1971 song by David Bowie and I could not help remembering its verse “Oh man, look at those cavemen go”, as I watched the Perseverance rover landing on the Red Planet. It is amazing what an increased brain size (even if it consumes about twenty percent of the body’s energy) and a opposable finger in the palm can do for a species! Come on, don´t you feel a little bit prouder to be part of the human being club, when you see the achievements of knowledge? I cried my eyes out during the live broadcast!

It was deeply moving to see the gender and age (although there´s still room for racial) diversity of the team at NASA and their true commitment to the mission. Talking from my own experience as a singer/songwriter and as a researcher, I know that passion is a key element to both art and science, together with what I call a contract with the human kind. The contract goes far beyond the simple awareness of being part of humanity, let´s say, accidentally by birth, but also the further step in the direction of actively contributing to its legacy. Think about songs, movies, photos, smartphones, glasses, wheelchairs… you got the idea.

I am afraid and ashamed to say that the pandemic made me have serious doubts about that contract. People having parties and going to crowded beaches, refusing to wear a mask or sabotaging the immunization process, emergency funds being misused, the list is long and I am only giving examples of what happens in my own country. How to keep that contract in such a context? How not to become profoundly disappointed with human beings? How to avoid perpetual bitterness? How not to give up? I believe Perseverance is the answer.

Oh man, look at those cavemen go.

Be seeing you!

G.F.