One of the funnest gigs I recently did was playing the musical saw during one of the breaks at a WNBA game at Madison Square Garden. I had a sports themed day: in the morning I had a recording session in Brooklyn for an album celebrating the centanial of the song ‘Take Me Out...
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The furthest south I’ve ever been in the USA is Charleston, SC. What brought me there was a fantastic show at the Spoleto Festival, which had a part for the musical saw in the score (The score of the show is by Damon Albarn. Most people might be familiar with Damon from his work...
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Every now and then I come across interesting poems about either the musical saw or street musicians. Well, imagine my happiness when I discovered a poem about the musical saw which also mentions street musicians! Ode to a Musical Saw/Dave Bonta No longer walking the straight & narrow, no longer restricted to the harsh...
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I was invited to give a lecture/demonstration about the musical saw at the Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts. My lecture was part of a series about unusual musical instruments (the other instruments in the series were the theremin and the glass armonica). Alexander Calder’s statue ‘Le Guichet’ (The Ticket Window), 1963, sits...
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When I play the saw in public, oftentimes people come forward to tell me about some other saw player that they know or have seen. I perform in Israel frequently and so I came to hear about many saw players there. What surprised me was that even in such a tiny country as Israel,...
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I took a few days off of playing the musical saw in the subway to perform with the Riverside Orchestra conducted by Maestro Jun Nakabayashi. The Maestro and the 52 musicians in the orchestra were all really nice – it was a pleasure working with them. Then I played at the Grand Central Station...
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There is a well-known joke in which the absent-minded maestro violinist Jascha Heifetz was racing up New York’s Seventh Avenue to a rehearsal, when a stranger stopped him. “Pardon me”, he said, “can you tell me how to get to Carnegie Hall?”. “Yes”, answered the maestro breathlessly, “Practice, practice, practice!” Well, I have my...
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I was invited to be a model for an FIT (Fashion Institute of Technology) illustration class. The teacher was Heidi Younger, who wrote the book Sounds of the Under Ground, which features an illustration and a poem about me. The class lasted from 11AM to 2PM. 25 Freshman students sat around the room, with...
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I have done some unusual gigs in my life, like playing the musical saw in the window of a Gap store, or at the horse races of Bellmont, or dressed as a half Anita Ekbert – half clown at the Rainbow Room’s ‘Felini Parade’. I even played the saw dressed as a witch, sitting...
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Last month I organized the Musical Saw Players Festival in New York City. I now discovered a video of the end of the festival, the part where all 19 musical saw players played together, was posted on YouTube. We played ‘Over the Rainbow’ and Schubert’s ‘Ave Maria’. The sound of 19 musical saws playing...
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