Joe's Odyssey

I had just wrapped a Saturday afternoon performance of the Odyssey in the lunchroom of Easton High School in Easton, Maryland, a small town an hour southeast of Baltimore across the expansive Bay Bridge. The occasion was the Maryland Junior Classical League Convention. 

The show was over three years in the making: I was booked to play the MDJCL in April of 2020 but… well, you know what happened. 

We (the MDJCL chair and I) were able to reschedule my visit for the 2023 MDJCL and with this performance Maryland…

Three years since the acute beginning of the pandemic and I'm finally starting to fully understand its impact on  my work and career.

I think the pandemic diverted me off a potentially damaging framing of my Homeric pieces, something that developed in 2019 when I started to value and pursue them as commodities more than experiences.

Three years later and I think I am in a much healthier place, a place more true to the gift that Homeric epic has been creatively, personally, and (yes) professionally. And I…

Traveling is a muscle:  If you don’t use it, it atrophies and it takes time to reestablish yourself both practically and emotionally around the challenges of going town to town playing music.

It’s been over three months since my last out-of-town performance (a BOA show in Tulsa) and almost four months since my last Odyssey-related travel to Texas and Connecticut in November, so I experienced some travel muscle atrophy on a brief trip to Philadelphia to perform my Odyssey for Classics Day at Germantown…

I awoke in the dark in my hotel room in Connecticut and immediately checked the weather. When I went to sleep there was snow forecast and I was worried that the backroads on the drive to my morning shows would be a problem.  But all that manifested was some negligible rain and I was easily off on the 20 minute drive to The Woodstock Academy to play the last two shows of my ten in ten days in six states run. 

Years ago the 7:30 am start time for the first show would have bothered me but over 350 plus…

I awoke on Tuesday with my manic Monday travel schedule still echoing in my brain and body… but feeling refreshed after just a few hours of sleep. A hotel breakfast, a shuttle ride back to the airport to pick up a rental car, and I was on my way for the hour drive to Pomfret School, a private mostly boarding high school in northeast Connecticut. 

An English teacher at Pomfret runs a class that spends an entire trimester reading and considering the Odyssey… so basically my dream audience. I played there in…