Where do I begin?

I've never written a blog before, but I assume that in order to share the journey it's best to start at the beginning.  This blog is about the making of a documentary of how an event came to be.  The event was called "Voices of the Homeless."

I wasn't looking to help anybody when I went to my orientation meeting at the Ventura County Arts Council.  All I was looking for was money.  I sat in my seat and was told, along with many other people, that in order to be awarded a grant of up to $5,000, I must find a way to use my art to help solve a community problem.  The grant was called an "Artist in the Community Partnership Grant."

I thought, "I'm a jazz singer with a day job.  What community problem could I possibly help?  I don't paint.  I can't paint a mural depicting some outreach program.  I sing.  How can MY voice help, well, ANYBODY?"

Enter Bob.

I went home from that orientation meeting with a defeatist attitude.  And the very next day, I finally started talking to Bob.  Bob is homeless . . . or was.  Bob is gone now.  But when Bob was around my neighborhood, he used to scare the hell out of me.  He had helter-skelter eyes, he was tall, his eyes were a shocking blue, and he had no teeth.  I was afraid of him.  But everywhere Bob went, his guitar followed.

And that made me wonder -- how could a voice or some voices (since that's all I had to offer) connect the homeless with the rest of us.  The homeless who, maybe like Bob, were touched by music, were helped along their way by music.

Since I am a performer, I thought that the only thing I could do was produce an event, an event that might bring together the homeless with my form of music, jazz.  I wasn't at all sure how the two would come together, but an idea was forming.

My next step was to find a community partner.  In order to get the grant I was not allowed to work alone, as I always had.  I had to partner with an organization.  At this point, thanks to Bob, I figured that the only people I might be able to help were the homeless.  So I looked up homeless shelters on the internet and found one organization that had a cartoon on their website.  The cartoon sold me.  The place was called, "Project Understanding."

Then, on this one particular lunch hour in January of 2010, I went to Project Understanding on the Avenue in Ventura, California, and tried to find someone who would talk to me.  There I found Todd Goehner (pronounced Gaynor), who became my community partner.  I was literally walking down the alley wondering where people were (they were at lunch too) when Todd saw me wandering.  He asked me to come in.  I sat in his little, humble, old office and preceded to cry.  I felt like an idiot.  I blubbered how I wanted to have the homeless tell a large audience what the experience of homelessness was really like, who the homeless really were, that the homeless were not all the same, and on top of all of that, I wanted jazz improvisers to create music in the moment behind them in order to support them and to show the audience a level of jazz music most people do not understand.  I wanted the event to be about listening.  I wanted to promote the listening of all of us to each other.  I wanted to become a better listener myself.  I wanted to show the community at large that there was a LOT more to know about the homeless as individuals and a LOT more to learn about American's Classical Music: Jazz.

And I guess this is where I'll stop my blog for tonight.  I want you to know that first I had to need money, then I had to need a partner, and then I had to create an event that could actually do the community some good.  This eventually led to the performance of "Voices of the Homeless," which the documentary is about and for.

If you care to see any short videos of the performance held on August 21, 2010, go to my YouTube Channel here:
http://www.youtube.com/user/TJazzka
There are about 8 videos of the event.

I'll say goodnight for now.

Thanks for reading!
Toni