Joe's Odyssey

My first Odyssey show in almost three months was for a wonderful group of students at the Illinois Junior Classical League convention in the Chicago suburbs on Sunday, February 27, 2022.

It was also the last show before the 20th…

After a whirlwind November that included my European tour and a longer driving trip into the Great Plains for shows in South Dakota and Kansas, the first two weeks of December found me wrapping up my 2021 show slate with…

I have a note in my iPhone that was created on April 5, 2016, and last updated on September 19, 2017.

It's a list of states in which I'd played the Odyssey up to that 2017 date and it's got…

Every show matters.  

Every show is valuable.

Every show is an opportunity to connect with an audience and learn about my material. 

Odyssey shows 333, 334, and 335, were in Greece, The Netherlands, and Italy.

Odyssey show…

I have a confession to make… 

I never really learned all that much about Rome in my course of Classical studies. 

My Latin pretty much always sucked in comparison to my Greek and I have the (unfair) tendency to regard…

Believe it or not, the “anchor gig” of this European Odyssey tour was in Nunspeet, a town of 25,000 located in the Dutch national forest. 

This gig for the 2019 Orality and Literacy conference in Austin got me in front…

Words are inadequate. 

As a musician, as a bard, I understand this. 

I understand that words can only bring you so close to a story or thing or moment. 

Or to a feeling. 

Music, perhaps, can get you closer. 

Or…

If last school year was a time of virtual performances to groups of people each one in their own separate space, this semester has bought about a transition period of performing by Zoom to groups of people in the same…

For all the time I (and many of my co-classical reception folks) spend preaching how classical art and literature portray universal human experiences, a lot of this material and culture is profoundly strange and entirely alien.

Over the last few…

The last in-person on-campus Odyssey show I did BCE (Before Covid Era, naturally) was February 25, 2020, at Northern Illinois University. 

A full 19 months later, almost to the day, I was finally back in a classroom, masked, and…

I went back and read what I wrote about my 2020 NJCL performance and found the following:

"The NJCL Convention next July 2021 is scheduled to be in San Diego and I hope by then we'll be able to travel…

I’ve tried about fifteen different ways to write about my journey to Alaska to perform the Odyssey in Homer. No words seem to capture how emotional it was to be back on the road after sixteen months of Zoom performances…