East Rutherford, NJ

I'm sitting here looking out my hotel room window next to the Meadowlands Sports Complex and for the first time in at least a week it is not raining, snowing, miserably cold or some combination of the three. I'm looking down on the Continental Airlines Arena where we'll play tonight, and to the east I can see New York City.

Our bus ride was a short two hours after Tuesday night's Albany concert and the late night talk was of visiting New York city on our day off Wednesday. In reality, yesterday's wind and rain kept the majority of us in the hotel.

We generally stay in rather upscale hotels which means there's good food and nice places to hang out, but I've discovered that the nicer the digs, the less likely they are to have a place to do laundry. Some road warriors just do their laundry in the sink, crank the heat up in their rooms, spread everything out to dry and leave for a few hours. I haven't been brave enough to try that yet. I am aware that I could just put my clothes in the laundry bag in the hotel closet and let housekeeping do it for me. Just for fun I used their numbers to calculate what it would cost, and decided that $180.00+ was just a bit too much.

I went to lunch with Bradley who told me he was also out of clothes so we decided to brave the weather and check out some nearby economy hotels for a coin operated laundry. We weren't sure the hotels would welcome us to their facilities so our plan was to zip past the reception desk and have a look around. We stuck pay dirt on our first try.

We went back to our hotel, gathered about a ton of laundry each, and carried it in through a back door of the second hotel. All the sneaking around made me feel like a criminal but putting warm, clean clothes back on and saving $175.00 dollars eased my conscience.

I'm really looking forward to tonight's show. In all honesty I have to say the Albany show was not our best. There were a couple of technical glitches that threw the musicians off. I felt like we struggled to get it back together. Here's an edited excerpt from an email message I received from a fan who's attended several shows and was at the Albany show as well:

. . .we thought there was something wrong at the Albany show. It was off. Yanni seemed rushed, like he just wanted the show over. The changes in the script were okay, and it seemed he wanted more audience interaction (like in Manchester), but something was different. There appeared (and this only to a some of us who have been to a few shows) a lack of joy in the performance. Walter, Charlie, and you were making a great effort to stay the course, but there was little smiling from the others. Was something wrong? Did someone get bad news? I don't mean to pry, and honestly I know it's none of my business, it was just a feeling we got, especially from [some of the musicians.] . .Yanni sounded short of breath when he spoke, no cold started,I hope . . . The people I spoke to in Albany who were experiencing their first concert were thoroughly enjoying themselves, so it wasn't obvious to everyone.

This was all very astute observation, but there really was no single thing happening that affected the performance. I could show you twenty more emails from people who were blown away by the Albany concert. This tour is a work in progress and I especially look forward to getting email like this. We always judge our individual performances and it is very interesting to read the perspective of people watching the show.

Speaking of email. I'm giving up on my attempt to answer everyone who writes. I just can't keep up anymore so I'm going to focus more on answering your questions in this journal. That doesn't mean I won't write back if you email me, just that I might not be able to because of the sheer volume. There were nearly 10 thousand hits on this site yesterday alone and the number is growing daily. I'm not complaining though, I love it! Here is today's question from a fan in Haiti:

I want to congratulate you on being on tour with Yanni. I think you play really great I was never
introduced to the dulcimer before and I think it's really a great addition to Yanni's music and your own music is beautiful. I want you thank you also for coming out and meeting people after shows and for sharing so much information with us through your site.

I always wanted to know What is it like to play with Yanni. Obviously he is a perfectionist. How hard is it because you guys in the band make it look so easy.

You are correct. Yanni is a perfectionist which can make for very long and sometimes tedious rehearsals. Anyone unwilling to take his music very seriously would have a difficult time surviving the ten hour and longer rehearsals core members of the band endured during the month of January. During that month we had only three days off.

Secondly, since you guys in the band don't use music sheets how do you learn the stuff you just study it from the CDs or Yanni tells you guys what you have to play and you have to remember it and play by heart.

It is actually a combination of both. Yanni sent me a stack of CDs with a note that said learn these cuts. I was unsure as to what that actually meant so I just set about doing what it said. I listened a lot, learned the melodies on my instrument, tried to find out where he might already be using a sound similar to the hammer dulcimer, and made crude charts for each song. I had no idea what I would end up playing.

One of the funnier things that happened due to my indirection was that I learned the introduction to Acroyali/Standing In Motion. It made perfect sense to me because what Yanni is playing is a sampled hammer dulcimer on his keyboard. I thought cool, a solo! I'll never forget the first day he said we were going to work on that song and I launched into the intro. Everyone laughed except Yanni who simply raised one eyebrow and firmly said "No". It didn't take me long to learn that this is one of his signature pieces and he really enjoys playing it.

Lastly regarding your solos guys are they preconceive by Yanni or they are your complete solo works he gives you total control on what you play in solos.

Our solos are up to us. Yanni gives us direction as to the mood, or style he is looking for but the composition is up to us and the content sometimes changes. ¶ 6:19 PM