Japanese Garden San Jose

Jason Mraz joins CSN for all-star benefit

You may have to travel to see Jason Mraz perform live this summer.

The Grammy Award-winning San Diego singer-songwriter's only confirmed California concert this summer (make that, this year) thus far is an Aug. 7 benefit show at Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, near San Jose. It is one of only three U.S. performance dates he has scheduled for this year.

Ticket go on sale Monday at 10 a.m. for the concert, which is being staged to raise funds for earthquake relief efforts in Japan, as well as to support non-nuclear energy organizations worldwide.

Mraz will be part of a lineup that includes Crosby, Stills & Nash, Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, Sweet Honey In The Rock, Rage Against The Machine's Tom Morello, the Doobie Brothers, Japanese New Age music pioneer Kitaro, John Hall, Johnathan Wilson and other artists.

Given that Neil Young lives nearby and uses Shoreline as the venue for his annual Bridge benefit concerts, it doesn't seem far-fetched to speculate that Young could just pop up for the Aug. 7 show. And given Mraz's budding friendship with Graham Nash, who Mraz visited at Nash's home in Hawaii a few years back, well, the musical possibilities are intriguing.

The musicians at the Aug. 7 benefit gig are banding together to perform on behalf of MUSE (Musicians United for Safe Energy) , the non-profit organization launched in 1979 by Raitt, Browne and John Hall to promote non-nuclear energy sources. Proceeds from the August concert will help aid Japan’s earthquake relief efforts as well as to promote safe, alternative energy on a global scale.

MUSE, veteran rock fans may recall, first took off when it held a series of concerts in 1979 at New York's Madison Square Garden. In addition to CSN, Raittt, Browne, Hall, Sweet Honey In The Rock and the Doobie Brothers, those 1979 benefit shows included performances by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, James Taylor, Carly Simon, Ry Cooder, Chaka Khan, Jesse Colin Young, Poco, Nicolette Larson, Raydio and recently deceased rap pioneer Gil Scott-Heron.

The result was a live double album and concert film. (To see Springsteen and the E Street Band's 11-minute-plus performance of "Thunder Road" and from the "No Nukes" film, click here -- and be sure to savor the rousing tenor sax work by E Street Band mainstay Clarence Clemons , who died Saturday, June 18. from complications from a stroke.

Japanese Garden « John Roberts Photography

Japanese Garden

Color is not a principal objective in a classical Japanese garden. It’s all about shape and form. These two Azaleas will shed their blooms in a few weeks and the garden will be just as imposing as it is now.

This is a Chaniwa style garden built for holding tea ceremonies. There is usually a tea house where the ceremonies occur, and the styles of both the hut and garden are based on the simple concepts of the sado. Usually, there are stepping stones leading to the tea house, stone lantern, and stone basins (tsukubai) where guests purify themselves before a ceremony. It is also a strolling gardens, for viewing a sequence of effects from a path which circumnavigates the garden. The 17th-century Katsura garden in Kyoto is a famous exemplar. Evergreens including Japanese black pine, and such deciduous trees as maples grow above a carpet of ferns and mosses.

Noteworthy American Japanese Gardens include:

Anderson Japanese Gardens (Rockford, Illinois) Brooklyn Botanic Garden (Brooklyn, New York) Chicago Botanic Garden (Glencoe, Illinois) Earl Burns Miller Japanese Garden (California State University, Long Beach) Fort Worth Japanese Garden at the Fort Worth Botanic Garden (Fort Worth, Texas) Hagiwara Japanese Tea Garden (San Francisco, California) Hakone Gardens (Saratoga, California) Hayward Japanese Gardens (Hayward, California) The Huntington (San Marino, California) Japanese Friendship Garden (Phoenix, Arizona) Japanese Friendship Garden (Kelley Park) (San Jose, California) Japanese Garden at Marjorie McNeely Conservatory (St Paul, Minnesota) Japanese garden at Minnesota Landscape Arboretum (near Chanhassen, Minnesota) Kumamoto En (San Antonio, Texas) Morikami Museum and Japanese Gardens, Delray Beach, Florida Normandale Japanese Garden (Bloomington, Minnesota) Portland Japanese Garden (Portland, Oregon) Seattle Japanese Garden at the Washington Park Arboretum, Kubota Garden (Seattle, Washington) The Japanese Garden (Los Angeles, California) Seiwa-en at the Missouri Botanical Garden (St. Louis, Missouri) Taniguchi Japanese Garden (Austin, Texas) Yuko-En on the Elkhorn (Georgetown, Kentucky) Shigematsu Memorial Japanese Garden at Lansing Community College, Lansing, Michigan

This is a companion Blog to my SmugMug site. Eventually, most of my photos at SmugMug will also appear here. I hope to add at least one new photo per day but I’ll be adding more frequently until I begin to catch up.

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