The point was to celebrate solstice – renamed “soul”stice because we had Oregon’s “legendary soul diva” here, Linda Hornbuckle. Her band played all night to a very appreciative crowd. Linda and Janice were kind enough to let me interview them.
The day ended up being perfect – no wind, the temp stayed consistently warm, no rain.The caterer, Dave Dalton, set up bistro tables all around the pool, along with a buffet lineup of continuous food.He put a bar and dessert room up in the tractor house to encourage guests to move around the property.
We set up mowed trails through the meadow and up through the pasture for romantic walks and views of the sunset.Many people took advantage of them.
We had 160 guests, with overflows of people parking along the road and throughout the mowed parking lots.
There were smiles on every face, there was not a single person who wasn’t as thrilled to be here as we were to host.
Comments heard:
This is a great thing you do for the community to bring people together like this
I saw someone I hadn’t seen in a long time!
I love the way the structures fit into the land and don’t impose themselves on it.
The water feature looks like it has always been here
It’s so nice to see all the flowers blooming!
What is THAT amazing plant? (about the allium schubertii)
The band played from 8-11 without a single stop – Linda Hornbuckle and Janice Scoggins are tireless.They sang and played through the band’s breaks and sang happy birthday to the children and Rudy Barton, who celebrated his birthday Friday.
People arrived starting at 6:30 and stayed until 1:30 a.m. hanging around the fireplace, talking and enjoying the space, food and drink.
The thing about my personal feelings with regard to the party is this: I felt like I was floating, literally floating the whole evening – perhaps floating on a sea of love, everyone was so happy, I was totally elated and completely uplifted.I thought at one point that it was the happiest day of my life, I had so very much fun talking with all our friends and introducing people to each other.The joy in my heart was so full, it was amazing!
Vocalist Heidi Krenn is small and thin, and immediately strikes me as a frail waif—I want to protect her. But look a little closer and the depth of experience in her grey eyes emerges. A native of Vienna, Heidi lives in Shanghai, a town with a completely different kind of culture that she says can sometimes be harsh toward the naïve.
However, she works full time as an artist, a rare gift sparing one from a life as a waitress. She returns occasionally to the West to record, visit, and tour. At just 26, Heidi may not yet be a seasoned jazz veteran, but it is also clear that this is not a girl who needs protecting.
Heidi made a deliberate choice to live in Shanghai, a vibrant city whose citizens are abuzz with newfound wealth and developing international identities. Nowhere else has she been able to earn a living wage solely as a singer, despite years of training, a BFA from Austria, and a Fulbright in NYC. And while she enjoys not having to work as a waitress or in retail to make ends meet, she does sometimes tire of the commercialized culture in which she must perform there. To Heidi, folks in Shanghai go out on the town to be seen, not to enjoy music.
The opportunity to record at Westwind provided a welcome artistic interlude for Heidi, and she took full advantage. During a marathon four-day session at the studio in April 2008, she collaborated with producer Alan Jones on percussion and guitar, accompanied by pianists Steve Christofferson and Dan Gaynor to record two full albums. The first is a series of jazz standards and the second features the music of composer Andrea Niemiec. Heidi had planned on staying with Jones, but the 15-hour days left her so exhausted she asked to overnight right here at the studio. She stayed in our little guest apartment that we’ve converted into an office, but where we keep two ottomans that convert into beds just in case.
Heidi slept soundly as soon as she was released from singing around midnight each day, until the very last minute when Jones would return at 10 a.m. to drag her back into the studio. In my opinion, some of Heidi’s best tracks were captured early in the morning when she was still exhausted and fragile with sleep, perhaps before she was able to put her emotional armor on for the day.
She alternated her time between our upstairs piano room where she and the musicians would work on the bulk of the arrangements, and the downstairs recording studio. During much of the recording we isolated Heidi downstairs from the piano, guitar and drums in order to separate the tracks for easier editing. Choosing her microphone was another challenge: Heidi has a huge, clear voice with a rich and emotionally deep lower register and an upper register that is rather bright. After the fourth microphone, we succeeded in capturing her upper register equally well for a fine-tuned and balanced recording with a deep ribbon mic.
