The nightmare before Christmas

On the night of December 9, jazz pianist Jordan Pollard did something she had never done before: she left her Nord Electro 2 keyboard inside her car. She had just finished a private gig and decided to leave the instrument in the car because she had to give a class early the next day. Bad move.

Pollard lives in one of those useless "gated" communities, the type were all would-be robbers have to do is wait for someone to drive through so they can sneak in behind them... which apparently they did on this night. The next morning, the keyboard (which you can buy at Guitar Center for around $4,000, and that's used) was gone. Yet five days later, she got a new one, an even newer model, and she didn't have to pay a cent for it.

She started getting the word out about the theft immediately, and word traveled fast thanks to the solidarity of her fellow musicians. When she went to FedEx to make flyers, even the guy behind the counter had heard about it.

"Is that your Nord?" the FedEx guy asked her. "I saw on Facebook that it got stolen." "It turned out he is a friend of a friend or something, and does some playing himself!" Pollard told the Current. But that wasn't all.

At one point during the King Williams Jazz Collective's show at Carmen's de la Calle on December 15 (Pollard made the gig with a borrowed Nord), Bill King surprised her with a brand new Nord 3 HP.

"It took me a minute to realize that he was giving me a brand new keyboard," Pollard said. "I was hugely surprised, overwhelmed even! It was truly a moving moment, and I will never forget it."

Credit goes to King and all those who made it possible to raise the necessary funds in just two days: the King William Jazz Collective and others in the SA jazz community, King's church band, and even Sweetwater, the company that cut a little off the price and gave free overnight shipping as soon as King told them what he was trying to do.

Pollard isn't the only one who received a juicy Christmas present recently. The Heroine, the loudest and baddest band in SA (at least in my book) just signed an entertainment deal with Dallas' Executive Music Group. According to vocalist Ernest Isaac Benavidez, the label will re-release Playing For Keeps (2008) and, besides a winter tour in January-February, the band will open for bigger headlining acts while preparing their new album, to be released in early 2013. The Heroine and a national record deal? It was about fucking time.

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