Bienvenido a California, Part 8

Even though we spent a lot of time in Monterey doing things as a group, I did manage to find time to do things on my own hehe. I managed to continue practicing piano while there, after a brief hiatus during Basic when it wasn't possible. But instead of playing every day, it was usually just once or twice per week. There was a pretty nice rec center on base, where they had some sound proof rooms where you could play music. And though you were only guaranteed 30 minutes at a time, there usually wasn't a crowd there for them, so you could stay in them as long as you wanted. Only once or twice was I ever booted out. I continued practicing while in Monterey, but my interest in it was tapering off, and after leaving I stopped practicing regularly altogether. Here are two Chopin pieces I was practicing at the time (Chopin's Polonaise #1, Opus 26 above, and his Prélude, Opus 45 below.)



One of the fun things I got to do while in Monterey was to learn to play balalaika! This is a funny little Russian instrument, similar to a ukelele I guess, but triangular, used mainly in Russian folk music. It turned out that DLI had its own little Russian folk ensemble, that went around the Monterey Peninsula and performed for the public at various events. We got together on Friday evenings and practiced for an hour or two, but were suppposed to learn our songs on our own during the week...the group practice was just to get us all playing in synch together. So I ended up playing balalaika tunes in my barracks room hehe. Fortunately it's not a very loud instrument. When we performed live, they had these cute little costumes for us to wear. Here's a link to a Russian ensemble performing, though this wasn't us hehe, and we had more people. We had our own dancers too, thankfully, because I was nowhere near coordinated enough to dance like that!

Someone playing the balalaika



In Soviet Russia, even grandmother can be rock star!



While looking around the used-record stores, I also started noticing that they had lots of old Russian pop music. Now this was the 80s, the Soviet Union still existed, and all music was released on the state owned recording label. If you thought europop was bad, imagine government-produced europop! Most of it was pretty dreadful. But there were a few nice songs that managed to get through the censors. I've got a few videos here if you can stomach them hehe. Since the end of communism there, the music has gotten a lot more, hmm what word to use, perhaps interesting hehe. Here's a link to some more modern video. Check out #5 in particluar (about 13 minutes in)...what a fun video! If Kafka had done music videos instead of creepy novels, I imagine they would have turned out something like this!

Something more recent from a Russian band I heard in the 80s