Shawn goes on the road!

It’s mid-April, and I find myself in Portugal, in a small city just south of Lissabon. It’s warm here, often sunny and quite close to the Atlantic Ocean which certainly sets a nice scene to settle into. 

I‘m presently taking a year off from teaching and freelance playing in Germany to travel through Europe with my family. Back home there hasn‘t been much playing work to do and after three semesters of running the big band at the Hochschule für Musik in Detmold through lockdowns and contact restrictions, we‘ve decided to make the best of the situation, organized ourselves a Volkswagen T5 van and headed south-west, and its turned out to be the best thing we could have done! 

Putting our regular lives on hold, renting out our house, picking up and travelling, has given us a sense of control in our lives that we couldn‘t have experienced, otherwise. It feels great to be living so pro-actively, to be making choices as to where we want to go and what we want to do. We have seen so many beautiful places and met many wonderful people along the way. We have not travelled with set plans, but instead have relied much more on our intuition and its good to see how well this has worked for us.

Our music-making continues, in spite of having no planned performances. This has been a very reassuring experience for me; I’ve realized that I don‘t need an upcoming concert to motivate myself to play music, I just like doing it. I have come up with new ways of improving my playing and staying musically active, like practicing jazz standards to playback tracks, freely improvising, playing in interesting spaces/acoustics or with newly befriended musicians. It feels great, and I feel that as my focus has moved more towards improvisation, my trombone technique is improving in a new way. I am playing more of what I’m hearing as opposed to things that other people have heard and then written down. This is activating my embouchure in a new way and calling for more exactitude, which feels very good. Also, just generally being physically more relaxed, having no time-pressures, practically no meetings, tends to have had a positive effect on everything I do. 

Other creative outlets I‘ve found while on the road are my online activities: two Music-Channels on the Telegram platform, Discovering Improvisation and Just Great Music, my new web-site www.shawngrocott.com as well as online seminars on improvisation.

Another motivating activity continues to be my trombone teaching, which is completely online for the moment. In spite of never knowing exactly where I’ll be, I have had really good experience with internet connection. A big help here has been a Netgear Nighthawk M1 Mobile Router with external antennae which I purchased before leaving Germany. With that and an iPad Pro from 2020 it’s been smooth sailing so far. 

In spite of all the challenges of a nomadic lifestyle, we have found it very motivating and have found ourselves living much more in the moment through this experience. There are so many beautiful places in this world and its wonderful and inspirational to get out and see them. If you wish, you can follow us and our activities on the following platforms:

my new website - www.shawngrocott.com

my Telegram channels - Discovering Improvisation & Just Great Music

My partner Meike’s Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/meike_leluschko/