For most people, the success of an artist is seen as something simple, which in many occasions is expressed in comments such as: how nice to stand up there and sing and get paid for it!

And of course it is a great pleasure to work in what you like, the only detail is that one does NOT get paid for just standing there singing and that's it. In reality, the payment comes from a constant effort for years and years, study, preparation, perseverance, effort and also, why not to say it, to suffer blows, rejections and disappointments.

Last year, after three years preparing my salsa project as El Ruso, I managed to get the support to record an album with the accompaniment of a salsa Big Band, from one of the most serious and representative projects in Venezuela, as it is [El Sistema] and we had scheduled a couple of concerts, as a preamble to major projects.

This is a salsa project which includes several Russian songs and traditional Venezuelan songs, all played in latin rhythms, as salsa.

Of course, no one could imagine what COVID-19 would bring and the whole project fell apart.

For a whole year I was waiting to see what the prospects were with the pandemic worldwide so that I could take on new plans that would be realistic. However, this has been a severe blow to the whole of humanity and there is no clear scenario of what is to come in the near future.

What did become clear to me, after my most recent reflection and analysis, is that no more time can be wasted and projects must be set in motion. So I decided to take the smaller version of the project (it has three formats: Big Band, with about 25 musicians; band format, with 12 members and and a sextet) and start preparing a show, with a view to start looking for the possible performances, since eventually public events are organized, some night venues are presenting small shows and there are people organizing private parties.

A new mishap

In more than a year of inactivity two mishaps happened, one of them is that the folder with the printed scores "disappeared" of two of the instruments "disappeared", so there was a need to reprint them. The second mishap is that some time ago I had to change computer and operating system and the arrangements I originally had in the Finale program, although I managed to export them as XML, lost all the structure and I have practically had to organize each of the songs, almost as if I were writing the arrangement again.

But this is not a great novelty, the artist's path is full of work that the public does not usually see.

For me it is a pleasure to have resumed my project and to have some excellent musicians who are also great enthusiasts and mean a great support for this stage that is beginning. This rehearsal stage is crucial, because this is where everything that one imagined, all those musical ideas that were emerging little by little and that have been taking shape in small steps, become reality, in real sound.

For the launching of the project I prepared two spoken presentations last year, one in Spanish and one in Russian, which I never got to publish. So in this new beginning, I leave you both versions (I owe you the English version).