Saturna

(part two of an in-depth recap of my trip to the National Mr. X meeting in Denver, March 5-8.)

after eight hours of sleep i felt very well rested and brought myself to the hotel lobby at 9am. we all loaded into two fancy shuttles and headed to The Church for our daytime meeting.

The Church is an old (Catholic it appeared) church that is now a club. it is a beautiful place even during the day. we were all a bit chilled in there but we enjoyed our day. Wulf, who is a part of the core group of the Music Academy, came to talk to us about the history of the academy and about who exactly is perfect academy material.

throughout the course of his talk i swear i heard the word "humble" mentioned more times than i can count. this is way key for me. the most amazing creators are not only mind-blowingly creative, but humble. my best example of that is Larry Heard. he is someone who is passionate, creative, and treats people like they are the amazingly creative ones in the interaction. these are the kinds of people who the academy wants - talented, open-minded, no ego. i already had this vibe from it many years ago and it was nice to see it reinforced and driven home.

i also heard the word "sustainability," applied to this creative culture and the building of it, at least three times an hour in our discussions. very much in line with my thinking as far as organic growth, and having something still around twenty years from now.

we broke for lunch and then learned about a great website they built for us to keep communication going, then broke into smaller regional groups and came up with some ideas on how to build things in our own areas. really amazing some of the things we can do. i am looking forward to putting together some neat things around here, throughout the year.

we ended the meeting and then went to dinner in small groups. after that we had free entry to Club Vinyl. turns out that my friend Becky is the head of the dancers at that club, so i called her to find out exactly what was up with it on Tuesdays. we had been told that it was more top 40 and she confirmed, saying that it was better on the weekends. so i decided to go with a few people to a little place a block from the hotel to hear a neo-soul/nujazz band. wow, am i glad i did. it was like hearing bembe segue & company, live in a little juke joint. turns out every member of the band had applied to RBMA the prior year, and then over half of the people from our crew ended up at the same place after checking out Vinyl. the band's name is Dragonfly. i cannot seem to find any internet media or website on them... but if you are in the area, they play regularly at the Appaloosa Grill on 16th street.

i ended up staying up way too late as a chunk of us went back to my room since it was a suite and we made far too much noise talking for the taste of hotel security. thankfully, even though they brought the Denver cops up to my room, i did not get arrested. you just simply cannot put fifteen creative and passionate people in a room together and not expect it to get loud. this is all very funny because i have never had an encounter with the police unless i was throwing an illegal party somewhere, and that ended ten years ago. my friends back home find this part of the story hilarious. i do, too. it is ok to live a little. and i did not end up in jail, yay!

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 10th, 2007 at 2:00 pm and is filed under Journal, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.