Wow, all I can say is: What a trip! I literally slept less than 27 hours in these 6 days, due mostly to sheer excitement. See, these shows in Perm and Moscow were not just ABPT shows, but rather a double billing with Eddie Jobson's latest project U-Z (which for these performances, featured a line-up of Greg Howe, Ric Fierabracci, and Marco Minnemann). I felt honored and humbled to share a stage with musicians of such high caliber - incomparable is all I have to say...
I'm not going to talk much about food in this post, simply because the cuisine we had (sorry to say) was generally abysmal. Don't get me wrong - one can find decent eats in Russia, but I suppose this wasn't on our agenda this time around. We were booked with rehearsals, meetings, press conferences - it was all a giant whirlwind - but one in which it was was an absolute blast to be caught. I'll forgive them for the bland fried cabbage cakes and acrid buckwheat...
View from my Perm hotel room: Aren't the Urals lovely?
On the first night, our (amazingly awesome) promoter Sasha took us to a small Philharmonic hall, where we saw two great Russian musicians perform the music of Handel and Bach. It was a lovely performance, although I must admit we were all jetlagged and kind of nodding off after 30 minutes... Don't worry though - we weren't such rude Americans - we woke up... in what was an entirely hilarious moment. See, there was about a 10 second pause in between movements, and all of a sudden, our ears were graced with the loudest, most obnoxious, inhuman noise we'd ever heard. Yes folks, it was MY stomach, undoubtedly eating itself - hey I really did starve all day! Of course, next came the uncontrollable laughter. Adrian sat forward, chair creaking, and just he looked at me, eyes wide, with his blushing cheeks all puffed out. Eric had to pinch me - and I'm glad he did, before the rather large Russian woman did it first...
Luckily, we escaped shortly after (but not before we met the two musicians backstage... I'm sure as they shook my hand, they thought "Somebody get this barbaric rock musician out of here and feed her face so she stops providing tummy tuba solos to the rest of the audience!")
We ended up at a club owned by one of Sasha's friends, Max...
Series of warm Vodka faces:
Oy...
Little Sasha (other promoter) with Max:
And the next night... (we would just stay in our rooms all day, recovering... and rehearsing... yeah)
... And then the show (the next night). Here's Eric, warming up my bass for me backstage:
While, as you can see, Russia is an endearing place - to party down... but the highlight of the run for me was playing these shows (as it should be!)
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