Fresh off four Blues of Achilles shows in six days in Kansas and Texas, I came home to Chicago and drove the 15 minutes to the campus of UIC to perform my annual fall Odyssey show there.
I hadn't performed the Odyssey since late July at the NJCL convention and won't again until November. After two years of doing nearly equal numbers of Blues of Achilles and Odyssey shows, 2022 will likely find the ratio tilting to 2 to 1 in favor of my newer Iliad-based piece. My booking pursuits around the Odyssey, after 350 shows, have gotten more specific as I chase notching performances in all 50 states, so I appreciate having this easy and comfortable hometown show every year (and sometimes twice a year now).
My voice was in "road form," which I absolutely love. It's a condition that exists when you've been performing every day or almost every day for a week or so. You can't replicate it with practice because it's as much about mentality and tone as it is anything technical. And it suits the Odyssey very well.
I wrote over the last few Odyssey shows that my relationship to the material and performance seems to be changing and this doesn't surprise me at all. The Homeric text has evolved for me in numerous ways over the 25 or so years during which I've been interacting with it on a deep and regular basis, so why wouldn't my own version? Why wouldn't any story or piece of art with which one interacts over a long period of time?
The best way I know how to characterize it is that I no longer think about what *I* want a performance to be, I think about what the *story* wants to and can be in that room on that day for the those audience members. That sometimes involves me in the sense that I'm limited by how my voice is feeling and how the space allows me to present the songs. But it's an important distinction I think to separate your own intention and ego from something less personal and more audience- and material-centric.
And in a nondescript classroom on an early Wednesday afternoon for about 30 students, I closed my eyes and felt my voice respond well to passages that even on my 348th show after 20 years can still be tricky. I felt the story want to be even a little more cathartic than I usually perform it and I felt like I had the voice to take it there. I felt the room and its tiered seating and shallow cinderblock shell was receptive to a little something extra on the guitar. I've been having a bit of a block executing one of the instrumental passages cleanly, but this time I nailed it twice. As I let the last chord linger, I heard the clock tick in the silence before the applause. It was satisfying and mysterious. I settled back into myself.
It's looking plausible that by the time of this annual UIC show next year, I'll need just three states to hit all 50. I might even have those landmark shows booked by then, the real homestretch of a journey that began in earnest in 2001 but really goes back to when I saw some Greek words in a book in 1995.
Of course, as the Odyssey shows us, journeys can be lengthened on a whim or less... but I'm ready for what this journey I'm on wants to be and will adjust accordingly. I'm sure I'll know what to do and when to do it if I keep closing my eyes and listening for the truth.