God, I love making music! There is a sense of communing with the Truth of life, yet something ethereal and not of this world. And with what you feel in your heart along with the musical instrument you are playing, you are able to bring this ethereal “thing” into the earth. This is what a music listener relishes because it affects them in beneficial ways. It’s why they pay money to hear musicians who more often than not accomplish this. For a musician, we feel it’s definitely a higher calling, bringing into this world something real and truthful yet not quite part of this physical reality. The feeling of that experience . . . is beyond anything human words can describe. I’m sure most musicians would agree with me that music-making, gives our lives purpose. When we’re not music-making, things can kind of feel pointless, at least for me. However, this is exactly the position all creative people have found themselves in when the Covid-19 virus struck us early in 2020. As we moved into 2022, for 2+ years now, it is still with us, along with those feelings of “pointlessness” when not music-making, and the world of “normality” before Covid, seems with each passing day to be a distant memory. Our gut tells us that things will never be as they were before, as we each scramble to find our place in this new reality. This is why during this period, I decided to put on the Covid Era Concerts for the Dale Fielder Quartet. They are a means of us maintaining the musical consistency that we’ve enjoyed since we were formed in 1995; -that’s over 27 consistent years of music-making together. Because of the pandemic, the first 3 concerts were via live stream only. As of this writing, we are on the eve of our 4th Covid Era Concert for February 5, 2022, and it will be our first performance before a live audience in two years! The first, Covid Era Concert #1 was on August 7, 2020, and was salvaging a previous booking at the Katy Geissert Civic Center Library in Torrance, CA. Covid Era Concert #2 was on November 7, 2020, and Covid Era Concert #3 was on May 15, 2021, and were both live-streamed from Alvas Showroom in San Pedro, CA. Alvas is our favorite venue because as many of us musicians have noted, has perfect acoustics as well as two choices of Steinway grand pianos; the German or American model! What makes these concerts so special to us, is that we are the producers and perform in a setting that is ideal for music-making as well as playing what we want, which is mainly my new original compositions and those of others that are not usually performed. Fortunate for me as always my marvelous musical companions, Jane Getz-piano, Bill Markus-bass, and Thomas White-drums join me!