Trombones, sculpture & the great outdoors

During our stay in New York we made a couple of visits to Minowaska state park. its a beautiful mixed woodland with a number of ridges and valleys with amazing rocky outcrops. Our first visit started well with sightings of waxwings in the carpark. After a long time wondering the rather boring fire tracks we finally found a nice mountain path. The vegetaion was amazingly lush and the trail was steep and rocky, we finally felt we were in something approaching the wild.

Ten minutes in fi stopped dead and whispered something to to me with a hushed urgency, oh god I thought, she must have seen a bloody bear on the path. Adrenaline pumping i edged forward next to her, hurriedly she pointed forward and there it was staring at both of us, a tiny shrew. It froze with fear as we loomed over it before it legged it towards us and ran right under my shoe. further down the path we saw a brown ?? darting up and down the tree in front of us.  At the top of the path we reached the top of the mountain ridge and we had great views of the whole park. Here we rejoined the fire track which was undergoing maintanence, uphead was a steam roller flattenening out the gravel - at which point ralph did a "hilarious"mime of falling under it. Behind the steam roller we found a large black spider (we did have pic but as i mentionned previously we accidentally wiped our pictures) which miraculously managed to survive the several tonnes of weight - or either never went under it or died later from internal injuries.

That evening we were treated to our first american cultural event - jazz! performing were Roswell Rudd a jazz trombonist (that is not a euphamism), he is a jazz bad ass check him out on google. He played together with an awesome cuban guitarist named David Ochenda. They were obviously amazingly skilled musicians though it felt to us that the session was aimed firmly at the numerous middle aged jazz geeks in the room (think older more well heeled comic book fans) with references we didnt understand about dizzy gillespie (rascals great uncle i think) or someone with a j instead of a middle name and remarks about tempo. Also much to fionas delight ninety percent of them had beards and were wearing the same zip off trouser to shorts\walking shoe combo that i was sporting! a jazz rendition of stairway to heaven was our firm favourite of the set. Although we were somewhat disappointed by the lack of the johnny briggs theme.

I forgot to say that the show began with a q and a session and roswell talked a bit about a gov funded music enthno-musiclogy project with adam ludlow he was inolved in the 60`s. It sounded both crazy and amazing, basically roswell and others listened to thousands of tapes of folk music from all over the world and attempted to score them on a scale that allowed them to be compared to one another - he must have heard some truly amazing stuff during that time.

Throught the performance there was a photographer in the front row who just before taking each shot did a weird swooping movement in time to the music. We really couldnt work out what he was up to but it was making us snigger a lot, it was  was at least twice as entertaining as the lady doing jazz art, moving her pen to the beat of the music. When it finished we asked Linda whether she knew what the photograher was up to. Being a journalist she wasnt shy about asking, but instead of saying  something like "interesting style can i have a look at the results" she went up to him and said "HEY WHATS WITH ALL THE SWOOPING?" it was absolute genius. Apparently its his style - he gave us a flyer for his show that was composed entirely of blurred pictures of different bands.

After the show we went to dinner with the jazz musicians as linda is good friends with verna gillis, Roswell`s partner. They invited us over the next day to see their house and sculpture park. The house and surrounding studios were totally crammed with amazing stuff - hundreds of books, fantastic vintage clothes and all sorts of trinkets and artwork. There was even a cool little music room with instruments from all over the world. Verna  travelled the world in the 70s with a big reel to reel tape recorder and produced records of world music including yousson d`or,  the wall was covered in her album covers and gold discs. Vernas late husband was a sculpter and all the grounds are filled with sculptures it was a really cool place- plus we saw our first hairy wood pecker there and a ruby throated hummingbird came to the bird feeder!