Last fall, Joe, one of the members of my Monday night at Sally's group, told me he liked my singing--and even my banjo picking and harmonica playing--and told me he'd like to record me. Joe is a fine jazz guitarist whom we have dragged into the folk/old time camp, along with his classical violinist wife Courtney, under our decadent influence now a funky old time fiddler, and so I told Joe I'd love to be recorded--with him and Courtney joining me, and before we started, we also added two more members of the group, Clark on mandolin and Michael on stand up bass. We got together a couple of Sunday afternoons at Joe and Courtney's place in the city and spent three or four hours each day recording--and eating cheeze and drinking wine.

On a Monday just before Christmas Joe brought copies of a CD he'd engineered from the sessions and gave them to all of the other members of the group--the response was very positive (kind folks), and so I started making copies and giving them to other friends and local family members, and the response is uniformly positive--with the possible exception of a former student of mine, Joshua Redman, whom I met in a Burger King. The disk I handed him was without a jewel case--and up until then, without any notes on the tunes and performers, and so I emailed him a set list and some notes, and he hasn't yet responded. Joe was astonished that I had the gall to give our disk to such an accomplished, famous musician.

Anyway, I revised the note I sent to Josh and slapped it into a word processing document sized to fit in a jewel case, and have given a bunch to a lot more friends and dog park acquaintances, and got a bunch more positive feedback, and decided I'd try to make a bit better packaging and send them to my non-local family and friends.

The old time folk and country songs on the CD are all under copyright (not mine), so I can't sell them, but I'd be happy to give them to anyone who'd like to have one--for packaging and mailing costs. I don't know if it would be legal to sell them with a non-profit organization (the Mudcat) getting all the proceeds--someone can advise me on this. My idea is that if that is legally royalty-free, I'd do it, starting after a couple of weeks, with those who send me their snail mail addresses in that time getting one for the cost of shipping, and after that paying Mudcat shipping plus a few bucks, recipients of the free ones could suggest a reasonable price.

It's a short CD--37 minutes with eight songs, me singing lead vocal on seven or them, and two tunes (to which I contributed little). Anyway, if you want one and are willing to risk a buck or two for packaging and mailing, send me your address at

chazkratz@mac.com

Charles