Tour Videos
One of my favorite parts about going on tour with Blast (aside from performing for our fans nightly!) is making music with my best friends! The trombone section in Blast, nicknamed BONE ZONE, are the best people on the planet. Not only do I love playing trombone and performing with these people, we always have so much fun. Whenever we all hang out it is non-stop laughter. The past two tours, 2017 and 2019, we also made some YouTube videos together while on the road. Making these videos was pretty much just an excuse to hang out any play trombone together more, haha. Here are a few videos we made this year while on the road. Enjoy!
We filmed Friend Like Me at one of the workshops we did at Nanyo High School in Nanyo-shi , Yamagata-ken. These workshops are aways a lot of fun and the kids are great. I was honored to have the opportunity to give back to this amazing community. Nanyo has become my home-away-from-home in Japan.
This next video is very special to me. Some of you may know, some of you may not, our long time stage manager, Jay McManigal passed away this summer while we were on tour. Jay was more than just our boss, he was our mentor and our friend. We were extremely saddened by his passing, but knew we still had to perform. The show had to go on, and Jay would have wanted it that way! We made this video, A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square, as a tribute to Jay and sent the video to his family. If you knew Jay, we hope you remember him as you watch this video.
On a much lighter note, March was very fun video to shoot! I love this original tune from Hiromu Yoneso. I also played this song with his band, Stkorn, at a live show earlier this year. Hiro arranged a special trombone ensemble version of this tune just for us. We were also really happy that Kaylie Brooke joined us on cajòn. I’m warning you - this song is super catchy!
UPDATE: One more I’m going to add on here. This video was uploaded to YouTube on Oct. 17th, so a little later than the rest. This an an excerpt from Dvořák's New World Symphony. Tao arranged this little excerpt and we played it together as a warm up throughout the entire tour. We filmed this video at our very last stop of the tour, Fukuoka!