[powerpress]
I’m playing a lot of Kaddishim this month lying on my back on the floor, in preparation for a dance project I have coming up. Unfortunately, holding the horn upside-down turns out to be really hard on my sprained left index finger, and the Tuesday night Kaddish using my even heavier descant horn did a real number on it.
I saw my hand therapist yesterday morning, and she crafted several thermoplastic support braces for me to try out, one a thick, stiff white brace, and the other a thinner, slightly more flexible black brace. I had intended to take my horn in with me, so she could see what I was up against, but like an idiot, I forgot, so we had to work from memory. Fortunately, after 37 years of playing horn, my muscle memory of how I hold it is pretty good.
This, then, is the first Kaddish recorded supine but using a hand support—the thinner black one. It helped a lot—the horn was still slipping downward, but it didn’t pull my finger out of position when it did so. This is progress.