The Girl in the Scarf

The days just slip by, and before I know it, it’s time to write again. I wore my purple, custom-made Brain Salad Surgery album cover shirt to the office today. Custom-made, since I have rarely any lucky finding good prog shirts made for women, especially ones that aren’t black, gray, or very, very dark blue. The color palette of my closet was increasingly monochromatic, so I decided to add some tops that gave the other colors of the rainbow some love.

Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, and I go back almost to the beginning of my prog journey, with 2010 being the Year of ELP, followed closely by, I think Yes. I listened to ELP everywhere. While I did homework, on road trips, at summer camp, in doctor’s waiting rooms. The spring was also kicked off with Keith Emerson and Greg Lake performing at the Orpheum Theatre as part of an acoustic-style show that featured covers of music from the multitude of bands they were involved in, like ELP, King Crimson, and The Nice.

They are one of the most important bands I ever discovered, not just because of their musical influence, but also because they were how I came to have numerous good friends , including musical prodigy and fellow SoCal resident, Rachel Flowers. Over the summer of 2010, I stumbled across her video of her covering ELP’s “Hoedown,” and I was immediately struck by the fact that I had found another girl in my age group that loved this band as much as I did. By complete chance, she also happened to live in Oxnard, just barely outside my neck of the woods. What were the odds? I got in touch with her mother Jeanie on Facebook, and was eventually able to meet the two of them during a recital with Rachel’s RPM Jazz Trio in Santa Monica, CA around Mother’s Day 2011. My whole family and I went to that show and each got to introduce ourselves. For those of you who may not be aware of Rachel’s talent, for you, I will post a link to one of her videos at the end of this entry.

Jeanie and I kept in touch over the next few years, chatting on and off about coming to their home to jam with Rachel. With me still in high school and Rachel having a busy schedule of shows and video recording for her YouTube channel, it was difficult to find a time where we were all available, but eventually, we found a time, in September 2015, just a few weeks before I left Ventura County to drive to Riverside, CA to start college.

I visited numerous times in between 2015 and about 2020. Our time together involved a number of musical activities, from jamming to our favorite artists, to songwriting, and to listening to tunes on her sound system. I’ve had the honor of introducing her to some of my favorite artists, like Arcade Fire, Keane, and Marillion. With her being far more well-versed in the jazz world than myself, she took the time to introduce me to a few favorites of her own like Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, and Jacob Collier. It has, of course, meant to world to me to have a friend like her, since there are still so far and few of us in the music world, let alone in the prog world. Even though we haven’t visited with each other in quite a long time, we still do keep in touch regularly over email and are always keeping each other in the loop about our musical and personal endeavors. I’m happy to have Rachel as a friend.