Check out the vid and youtube “The Sequence”.

We had to travel from Lund, Sweden to Gothenburg.  It was only about a 2 hour’s drive, but this is a great opportunity for me to show you the tour bus that has become my second home!

Everybody tries to act like it doesn’t matter where anyone sits, but the truth is everyone has their favorite spot and that seat to the right is mine..ha ha!  It’s in the front where I can see out the front windshield and play the Playstation 3, have some say so in which movie is watched and never get left!  Here’s other pics of the bus:

We like to call this the bedroom. There’s a door that allows this room to be private.  The room also has its own tv, surround sound, DVD, PS3, Satellite and light dimmers in about 10 different colors.

These are the bunks where everyone sleeps.  There are only 6, so you know someone has to sleep elsewhere.  I personally sleep in the seat I showed you earlier.  It actually reclines to about 120 degrees.

This was supposed to be my bunk, but there is a draft from outside that was making me sick.

Windows Media Center with over 300 movies and a router for wireless internet on the bus!

Here’s a pic of everyone in the front watching a movie.  This was before I claimed my seat…ha ha!

This is the inside of the venue for Gothenburg

Above is a shot of the stage.

We didn’t spend the night in Gothenburg, so I don’t have any city shots.  But here are pics of outside of the venue in all of the snow!!!

It was snowing pretty hard!

The Parking Lot

The sidewalk.  They had to dig out a path for people walk through!  Do you see the evening rush to the right?

Outside of the venue.  Can you believe people actually came to this gig?

The fried chicken that blessed my soul after the show!!!

My New Boss - Angie Stone - Photo by Dave Ellis

Hey guys!  For those of you that don’t know I’ve recently joined Angie Stone’s band and I have been doing shows with her all over the US.  It’s been a great experience and as of Monday 02/22/10, it’ll become an experience that we’ll take over seas to Europe! We’ll be visiting Sweden, London, Norway, France, and Poland over a three week period.

I’m very excited about this opportunity and another chance to see parts of the world that I’ve only seen in books or heard about in the movies!  As usual, I’ll try to blog as much as possible and post as many pictures as I can.  This will be a great adventure!  Stay tuned!

We Really hope that things work out so that we can be a part of the program again.  They have given us some incredible opportunities and we are eternally grateful.  Keep your eyes open for information concerning the band!

AFAR - Detox, RJJazz, Frito, and JayeBerry

Here are the last few pictures from after our Hutuz performance:

AFAR and the producers of the Hutuz festival:

TV interview with MTV Brazil:

Part of the team that took excellent care of us in Rio, Victor Tamm and Anna Vianna – We miss you guys!!

AFAR has a lot of stuff brewing in 2007!  Keep checking us out!!

The main reason that we were able to be here in Brazil is because of the Hutuz Festival. This event is the biggest festival dedicated to hip hop in Latin America and the Counselor General’s office has been involved for the past five years. An organization called CUFA (Unique Central of the Favelas) is the force behind the festival and let me tell you I was very excited to see all of the many great things that they have offered.

CUFA is a self-sufficient organization that has made so many tremendous strides in the community that the Department of Labor and Tourism partners with them to provide programs and training in Break Dancing, Grafitti, Basketball (street ball), DJ’ing, Audiovisual and Theater.

The have an area under a bridge in one of the communities and it’s a wonderful place for all of the local neighborhoods to come and learn about the different elements of hip hop. For so long, the older people have tried to make us believe that nothing good would ever come out of the hip hop generation, but here we have an organization that is using the culture of today’s generation to provide a healthy, positive alternative to the negativity that kids face on a daily basis. I definitely applaud the efforts of this organization and I am truly honored to be apart of it.

This is the reason that everything is worthwhile:

We did a workshop for the people in the program and here’s a crowd shot from the stage:

CUFA helped some local artist produce their own CD and what better way to give back the community than by giving the music away to the children:

Here is CUFA in action with a break dancing class:

The skateboarding instructor invited Jahah to show off his skateboarding skills:

AFAR is still making friends everywhere we go.  This is AFAR with a local band that performed for us after the workshop:

Me and Claudia, one of CUFA’s organizers (she was handling business when the pic was taken!):

They were doing so many great things that Che almost left AFAR to stay with them:

Jahah participated in a roundtable discussion on discrimination in hip hop.   Pictured here is Jahah and me with Fred Hampton Jr.:

AFAR performed at the Hutuz award show as well.

Look at all of the people trying to get into the venue:

Here I am in soundcheck:

Backstage view of our performance:

and lastly, the wonderful people from the United States Counselor General’s office that helped to make our visit possible (Not pictured is our other translator, Anna):

Mondays are days off for us, so we decided to get some sightseeing in. As we were riding from the airport our host, Victor Tamm, suggested that we at least check out two of the city’s attractions – Cristo Redenter (Christ the Redeemer) and Sugarloaf. We took him up on his offer and had a great time! Here are some pics from the day!

Oh wait! Before we begin. I was about to brush my teeth and saw this bottle of water:

So uh, you replace the comma with a period, divide the number by about 1.6 or so (because the dollar is continuing to weaken), and there you have it!…. an $11.04 bottle of water! I later found out that we are staying in arguably the best hotel in Rio.

Since it was night when we arrived, I couldn’t really see the area that we were staying in. I could smell and hear the water but I couldn’t see it. When I woke up I was able to see this from my hotel room:

Playing jazz gigs, you always get a person that asks “Hey, do you know The Girl from Ipanema?” And always respond “Yeah, but don’t believe anything she says!” I know it’s corny, but most people seem to enjoy it. It’s one of those songs that some people will request because it’s the only jazz tune they may know by name! I now have a connection with that song because we are actually staying in Ipanema!

We arranged for the hotel to provide one of the tourist guides to show us around the city. His name was Carlos and he was great. Our first stop was at Cristo Redenter. You can see it far off in the distance:

Most people view this and say that Christ is blessing the city of Rio. This statue is on a “mountain” called Cocovado that stands about 730 meters in the air and the Statue itself adds another 30 meters or so. This is the equivalent of over 2100 feet in the air. It was funny for us to hear people around us speak about the altitude of the monument, especially with us only being 3 days removed from a city that’s close to 6 times the altitude of Cocovado!

There were many stops on “The Road to Heaven”, as we were told it was called. Here is AFAR at one of those stops:

At another stop a little closer, we were able to see a breathtaking view of Rio:

The city is absolutely beautiful!

We finally made it to the city’s star attraction:

The statue was so large that we had to lay on our backs to take pictures with it!

From there, we went to Sugarloaf, a place that was specifically used for military operations in the past. It now provides another unbelievable view of the city. Here we go again with the cable cars!

Sugarloaf is directly opposite Cocovado, so we had a great viewing point of more of Rio. Here’s the city and the local Yacht Club:

This is the airport for domestic flights only:

Jahah posing in front of the city (photo by yours truly, lol)

uh, I do weddings, receptions, turkey day parties, etc.

The next picture really looks like something you would see the guy painting on those PBS shows. The mountains don’t even look real!

Now, the thing about Rio is that to me, it looks like a mix between two cities. These pics make me thing of New York:

And these pics remind me of Miami:

And lastly, what would fun be without friends?  Too bad we had to travel to Rio to meet people from Atlanta!  We also met a couple of people from Uruguay that just wanted in on the fun!

A great day!

These are the young ladies that organized our coming and all of the events here in Bolivia:

I know I have a very interesting name, but it baffles me sometime how people screw up the spelling of it. I was told that the press had a copy of our press release, yet my name was still misspelled as “Demonsterius”:

Santa Cruz is a bit of a conundrum because it looks and feel really tropical, yet there is no massive body of water anywhere near. The wind blows very heavily and if you allow your mind to trick you, you can smell salt water… just kidding! Well anyway, the resort we stayed in was a tropically themed resort and on the way to my room I found this nicely manicured resemblance of a jungle:

Marc’s pre-performance club shot:

Another new Afarian:

It’s always fun to get people that have no idea what they’re doing to represent Atlanta for you! Check out Debbie from the US Embassy in LaPaz (in the purple!!!)

Thanks for the love Bolivia!