My tour with Free Fall starts in Graz, Austria on February 29th; typical long and early travel to get there from Terrie Hessels’ place, but arrived in time to get a bit of sleep and still practice the group’s charts, work on some new compositions for the trio. Ingebrigt Haker Flaten, Haavard Wiik, and I haven’t played as a band since our ill fated tour of November 2010, but the music came together quickly during our rehearsal/soundcheck and in about 45 minutes we were prepared to play 2 strong sets to an excellent audience- a great way to begin a new trip together. Thursday was a travel day that started at 8am with a 2 bus journey to Padova, Italy. For most of the trip I was convinced Free Fall had a concert in the evening, which would have been tough on less than 5 hours of sleep 2 nights in a row, but it turned out that it was only a travel day and we got to enjoy the town instead of struggling with a sleep deprived performance. For most of the time on the bus I worked on editing photographs; already since arriving in Europe I’ve been able to spend more time taking pictures than I had in Chicago since the beginning of the year- one of the benefits of being on tour is being able to utilize all the “down time” creatively. Also started reading 2 books since arriving in Europe: “The Writings of Robert Motherwell” (one of my favorite painters and artistic thinkers), and Fernando Pessoa’s, “The Book of Disquiet” (a gift from Christof Kurzmann while in Portugal during the Made To Break tour); both are outstanding. Footage of Free Fall from a concert in Moscow:
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