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| The Nutshell 87GSXRNUT, a member with a lot to offer, has made his mark here. We believe he merits his own space to share his experience and ideas. This is his space and he makes the rules. |
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09-13-2005, 04:16 PM
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| Ho Dog   Join Date: Dec 2003
Bike: 867-5309
Location: Terror Lake
Posts: 4,404
|  Trying to do our part in SA
Right now in San Antonio we have 5,000 evacuees from New Orleans in four shelters across town. Many of the musicians in our city, especially the jazz and blues crowd has spent a lot of time down in New Orleans, and knows that music is a common thread amongst the people down there. The thought really hit home when a New Orleans guitar player showed up at our jam last Thursday. He hoisted up his SRV Strat and said "at least I made it out with this." Really put things in perspective for a lot of folks, myself included.  The San Antonio Blues Society - http://www.sanantonioblues.com/ house band, the SA Blue Cats, has been recently been donating all tip money and part of their show revenues to the American Red Cross. We also wanted to get a jam togther at one of the shelters to provide some music "relief" to the evacuees living there. From all reports, morale isn't the greatest in the shelters, and we figured ANYTHING we could do to get people's minds off the recent events would be welcomed. Mike Davis, publicity director for SABS spearheaded to see what could be done.  We got permission to do the jam after a LOT of red tape, and talking to the local Red Cross and several city agencies. Saturday we headed out and were able to have some fun ripping up some "old school blues" for the evacuees. Not the usual SRV/Thorogood/ZZ Top fare that is usually played around here, but a lot of obscure stuff that we normally play, plus other songs worked up just for this event. We also had some special guests drop by, Benny Harp and Charlie Cruz.  The event could have been better advertised within the shelter, but lack of communication and resources prevented it. When we showed up, the gate guard didn't even know we were supposed to be there. The people that did come out, hang out, and listen for a couple of hours had a great time.  We are currently trying to get this worked out with our Red Cross liasion to get this as a weekly volunteer jam for other San Antonio area Blues/Jazz bands that want to donate their time and participate. Special thanks to the 49th Finance Battalion (ARNG) from Austin for hooking us up with a generator. The music community down here will continue to do what we can to help out. There was a big fundraiser concert here in SA last saturday, and the SABS is having a HUGE fundraiser this Thursday at Sam's Burger Joint - http://samsburgerjoint.com/ There is also a relief concert at the Frank Erwin Center in Austin Wednesday, September 21 at 7 p.m. The event will be headlined by Willie Nelson. - Nut |
