Innovative Giving Enhancement (IGE)‘s fourth-annual Music and Art Immersion Community in Barcelona, Spain, is currently underway. The yearly event brings a crew of talented musical ambassadors to foreign destinations where they cross paths with a broad range of multi-genre European artists for ten days filled with immersive international improvisation and collaboration. Lauded music photographer Jay Blakesberg and New York Times best-selling Allman Brothers biographer Alan Paul will be bringing you daily updates on the happenings of the 2018 IGE Music and Art Immersion Community via Live For Live Music. You can check out today’s entry from Barcelona below:
The IGE 2018 Barcelona Music and Art Immersion Community is currently happening with Eric Krasno; Nicki Bluhm; Grahame Lesh, Elliot Peck and Ross James of Phil Lesh’s Terrapin Family Band; the String Cheese Incident’s Jason Hann, Keith Moseley and Bill Nershi and his wife Jillian; Greensky Bluegrass’s Paul Hoffman and Anders Beck; guitarists Scott Law and Barry Sless; and Everyone Orchestra drummer and leader Matt Butler. Every day and night has the musicians playing in various formations at hand-picked venues around the city, virtually all of them exclusively for the trip participants.
Yesterday was day five, the halfway point, and it began with Bill and Jill Nershi playing an intimate acoustic show in the hotel’s H2O room as guests sat rapt, while some sipped coffee and others did their morning yoga at the Nershis’ feet. The afternoon saw Holly Bowling play a two-hour set of her interpretations of Phish and Grateful Dead music in the otherwise empty European Museum of Modern Art.
The night was capped off inside a beautiful 17th-century hall with an exclusive and quite excellent flamenco performance, followed by Greensky Incident, a one-time collaboration between Beck, Hoffman, Moseley, Nershi, and Hann. Jill Nershi and Nicki Bluhm jumped on stage for some spirited chorus singing, and when they ended, the guests filed out into the slick cobblestone streets and mostly headed off together for the 15-minute walk back to the hotel.
Today began with various group tours of the epic Sagrada Familia. More musical adventures await this evening.
–Alan Paul
You can check out Jay Blakesberg’s photos from day five of IGE’s 2018 Barcelona Music and Art Immersion Community below. Check back tomorrow for another entry in Alan Paul and Jay Blakesberg’s IGE 2018 Barcelona Music and Art Immersion Community diary, exclusively on Live For Live Music.
