Greetings!

From September 2002 to April 2003, I was employed as the pianist in the veteran trumpeter Maynard Ferguson's band. In that period of time we played approximately 100 concerts all across the United States, and spent a significant amount of time traveling on the tour bus.

Before I joined the tour, I naively expected that since a lot of Maynard's concerts were scheduled to take place in small towns, this meant that there would be a wide variety of regional and local cultural flavors to experience. While my expectation was partially met, I soon recognized that there is a trend in America where huge corporate businesses have overtaken everything in their path, kind of like invading weeds, and much of our food, architecture, music, art, and business is fast becoming bland and homogenized. From what I saw out on tour, the so-called "Mom and Pop" type establishments are almost extinct.

Everywhere we traveled in the USA, I saw the exact same fast food places, malls, motels, and discount department stores. I'm talking about McDonalds, Wal-Mart, Pizza Hut, Wendy's, Holiday Inn - you get the idea. Whatever remains of our cultural identity and expression that is creative, unique, humorous, or original, is deteriorating rapidly. I'm not sure how we got to this point (corporate greed, government corruption, our desire as consumers for the cheapest possible products maybe?), and I'm not sure what can be done about it now. It's extremely challenging for small business to successfully compete against these corporate giants in the current socio-economic and political climate.

Fortunately for us, our country is abundantly blessed by Mother Nature in all her diversity. There is an incredibly wide range of interesting and beautiful natural landscapes to behold in America.

I brought my simple point and shoot camera along on the tour in the hopes of getting some good shots. While the photo opportunities were generally few and far between, I did manage to take a few shots, and thought I would share some of them with you here.

I wish I had some decent performance photos to share with you, but as of now I don't. If anyone out there has some nice shots of me with the MF band and you would like to share them, please let me know - I'd like to see them. Thanks for your interest, and enjoy the photos!

All text and photos Copyright (C) 2002-2003 Harry Miller
(introduction text written 10/03)