Among the many events that we are trying to complete during our last month in France before a visit to Canada is the completion of an album for a Columbian classical guitar player who is a believer, working as a pastor trying to plant a church, and wants to use his music to reach out to people. 

It's been a fun experience having various people come in and contribute musically to the project.  The guitar player, Daniel Sanchez, has chosen the title "Douce Présence", which doesn't translate all that well into english, but would mean something like "Gentle Presence".

Besides the work of getting tracks down sounding good, we've had good conversations about France (he's an immigrant so has a different view on things than a typical French person), music, and the joys and challenges of doing ministry in France.  One of the things Daniel plans to do with this album is have a CD of just the backing tracks (basically everything except his guitar) and do concerts in cafés and coffee houses and use this as a way of starting conversations with people about his relationship with God.  So there is a strong evangelistic aspect to this CD, which we really like to see.

One of the fun things that happened for this project is that Martin Bartlett (good friend and bass player extraordinaire) had his son playing drums for us.  So the rhythm section was 100% Bartlett!

We also had Dominique Bijan come all the way from his home in Germany to add some very tasty electric guitar parts.  We had a lot of fun trying out different amp, speaker and pedal combinations trying to get that elusive "Dominique" sound.

I still need to put down a bunch of keyboard tracks and do the final mixes, so hopefully everything will still come together in a good way.

Russ