It’s been five years since the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown irrevocably changed life as we know it. The resulting silence was especially deafening for musicians.
Their livelihoods — like those of other performing artists and people from all walks of life around the world — came to a grinding halt overnight. There were no concerts, no club dates and no recording sessions, just that prolonged, soul-sapping silence and an increasingly acute feeling of existential angst about a future in which nothing felt remotely normal or predictable.
“I try not to what happened. I’m just glad we got through it,” said jazz drummer Richard Sellers.
“Everything seemed so bleak,” agreed blues guitarist Laura Chavez. “I wondered if we — musicians and audiences — would ever get back together again. I’m so grateful that we have.”
Sellers is one of seven area artists The San Diego Union-Tribune profiled in the November 2020 Sunday Arts & Culture cover story, “Faces of the Arts Shutdown: The Musicians.” Chavez is one of nine additional area musicians we profiled in the January 2021 cover story, “My Last Gig.” It was published a year after the lockdown began and the unthinkable was still a reality.
Today, five of those 16 musicians revisited their memories of the shutdown and reflect on how their lives have changed since 2020.
While each of them faced formidable challenges after all their work evaporated, they did their best to pivot to new paths until they could resume their careers and return to some sort of normal. At least three of the five contracted COVID along the way.
Each now cites the kindness of friends and strangers in hard times for helping them persevere. And each is keenly aware that some of their peers didn’t make it through the pandemic.
“So many musicians ed away during COVID,” said tap dancer and percussionist Claudia Gomez. “We thought they’d always be here, and some of them are not.”
Laura Chavez
THEN
Before the pandemic shutdown, blues-rocking guitarist Laura Chavez was constantly on the road. She performed an average of 250 concerts a year across the U.S. and in Europe as a key member in the bands led by North Carolina singer Nikki Hill and Philadelphia saxophonist/singer Vanessa Collier.
“I’m usually out of town 300 days a year,” Chavez told the Union-Tribune in January 2021, when her only gig was busking for tips each weekend on a Little Italy street corner with Chickenbone Slim & The Biscuits. “Busking was never something I thought I would do… It was a big adjustment, especially at the beginning of the pandemic.”
Faces of the arts shutdown: Laura Chavez: ‘This is the first time I have ever busked in my life’
In August 2020, Chavez played at one private party and at a drive-in concert at the Del Mar Fairgrounds with San Diego vocal dynamo Whitney Shay. She commuted by train to give socially distanced guitar lessons to three students in Oceanside.
“This has definitely been a blow to my livelihood and psychological outlook,” Chavez said in her 2021 interview. “I was used to being constantly busy performing music. It’s an emotional outlet, and it’s more than just an occupation or career. With all that’s going on in the world right now, it’s really hard to have that ripped away so suddenly.”
A professional musician since she was 18, Chavez grew up in the San Jose/Mountain View area. In 2008, she became the guitarist in San Diego vocal favorite Candye Kane’s band. She soon became the group’s musical director and they embarked on multiple national and European concert tours, which continued until shortly before Cane’s death from cancer in 2013.
Chavez moved to San Diego in 2018, then began extensive touring in Hill’s band, which performed at the San Diego Blues Festival. Less than two years later, concert tours everywhere disappeared in a flash. So did many careers.
“Financially, it’s rather bleak, but everybody is dealing with one thing or another,” Chavez said in 2021. “The music industry has been hit so hard, and it will take so long to recover, that I’m thinking way more about the future than I ever have.”
NOW
The future is here, and bright, for Chavez.
“Post-COVID, I’m busier than I’ve ever been in my life,” she said in a late-May interview from a Philadelphia concert stop with Vanessa Collier.
“We’re doing four dates on the East Coast, then I fly back to San Diego for a day before going to Canada to do four shows with Casey Hensley. I’ll spend most of the summer touring Europe with Nikki Hill, after which we’ll mainly be doing concerts in the Midwest and on the East Coast.”
The pandemic shutdown is now several years behind us, but it is still fresh in Chavez’s mind. Not being able to tour or to play gigs locally made her contemplate her future in a way she never had before. Ditto being so inactive as a guitarist that she briefly lost the callouses on her fingers.
“I think about losing my callouses once in a while,” Chavez said. “Once that happened at the beginning of the pandemic, I said to myself: ‘I will make sure this won’t ever happen again.’
“The hardest thing was wondering: ‘What am I going to do with my life? Who am I?’ This existential question of: If I couldn’t play music, what would I do with the rest of my life? There was a time everything seemed so bleak I wondered if we would ever be able to get back together. And watching and reading the news made it even bleaker.
“Every aspect of my life came to a halt, not just music.”
But as some doors of opportunity slammed shut, new doors opened for Chavez.
Her Little Italy street-busking gigs with Chickenbone Slim & The Biscuits — a band she had never played with before — led to her making two albums with the group. They now do regular performances together, both here and on the road.
Chavez and Shay formed a duo that played numerous outdoor gigs with social distancing. Their musical partnership has continued. The guitarist also teamed up in a vocal-free soul-jazz band with pianist Taryn Donath and they, too, continue to work together.
By 2023, Chavez was back on the road full-time. That same year saw her become the first female artist to win top honors as a guitarist at the prestigious National Blues Awards. But not being able to tour during the shutdown paid unexpected dividends for her.
“I don’t know if I could have developed these musical relationships with Chickenbone, Whitney and Taryn without being in San Diego for an extended period,” Chavez said. “My life came to this grinding halt with the pandemic. The new opportunities I have had here since then have been a real blessing.”
The shutdown has also given her a deeper appreciation for her career.
“l will never lose sight of how lucky I am to get to do this for a living,” she said. “I am so lucky to make music with other musicians in front of people. I get to travel across the county and the world, and that is the greatest gift.”
Next gig: June 12, with Chickenbone Slim, at Tio Leo’s in Bay Park
Claudia Gomez
THEN
Equally skilled as a tap-dancer, percussionist and yoga and dance instructor, Claudia Gomez is extremely adept at pivoting.
But the pandemic shutdown required her to make a series of pivots on the fly. Some of them were costly and demoralizing, others unexpectedly rewarding. All of them tested her resiliency in the face of adversity.
In July 2020, Gomez optimistically opened her Tap Into Yoga & Reiki studio in North Park. The pandemic surge that summer led to the studio being shuttered —after hosting only one event — until the fall.
“I was hoping we could continue and not get shut down,” Gomez said in a January 2021 Union-Tribune interview. “But all of a sudden, everyone had to shut down again. I went from being able to teach a small percentage of people in the studio with limited capacity, to nobody, which was a bummer.”
Faces of the arts shutdown: Claudia Gomez: ‘Now is a time when people need their spirits lifted’
Disappointed but not defeated, she moved her studio a few blocks south to the Bird Park section of Balboa Park. There, Gomez gave dance and yoga lessons at no cost to her students.
“I was like: ‘OK, let’s keep this going’,” she said at the time. “I took it as a positive thing and a way to safely create free classes, outside, to promote the studio once we were able to open again. I figured the shutdown would not be forever. And now is a time when people need their spirits lifted. They need to dance, make music, create art, do yoga and really get into the mindfulness aspects with everything going on.”
Gomez reopened her North Park studio, but only briefly, and with masking and class sizes reduced from 30 students to no more than eight. She was forced to shutter the studio just six months after its grand opening, although more because of an ill-tempered neighboring tenant than because of the pandemic.
With all of Gomez’s music gigs with the groups Besos Jazz Trio and Trio Gadjo having been canceled, she again pivoted to Balboa Park. Gomez quietly began hosting weekly Saturday jam sessions with a Django Reinhardt-inspired swing-jazz band called Hot Club of Bird Park. As her bandmates and guest artists played, she would tap dance on a portable wooden two-by-four.
Safety was an imperative for Gomez, whose chronic asthma puts her at a higher risk for contracting COVID and other viruses. The musicians at Bird Park were socially distanced. So were their listeners, who learned of the jam sessions through word-of-mouth and sat on the lawn. Some brought picnics. Gomez felt she was serving a greater purpose.
“Everyone was safe and it was a beautiful way that we all came together,” she said. “It provided an opportunity, not just for the musicians but for people who had been isolated at home and needed to hear this music.”
The summers of 2020 and 2021 were financially difficult for Gomez. San Diego’s Keiller Leadership Academy, where she has taught dance classes since 2010 to kindergarten through eighth-grade students, does not pay its teachers during summer vacations. The pandemic required her to begin giving her Keiller dance lessons online. And the studios where she had taught since 2000 as an independent contractor were closed.
“It’s definitely been a struggle to make ends meet,” she said in 2021. “But I feel it won’t last forever. I’m positive things will get better, somehow.”
NOW
After opening a new dance and yoga studio in City Heights in 2022, Gomez moved the studio to a better location in the same neighborhood last December. She now teaches five classes a week there, the majority of which focus on tap dancing.
After a lengthy hiatus, Gomez is also back to regularly performing at indoor venues. She may be the only tap-dancing percussionist — or percussion-playing tap dancer — in San Diego. Either way, she is elated to be back on stage.
“Not having music gigs for sure was challenging,” Gomez said. “And teaching dance online was quite interesting. I made it work, but it was really difficult. When we came back to in-person lessons at Keiller, I felt the kids had a delayed sense of rhythm at first. They didn’t know how to tap on beat because, learning online, there were glitches and time delays. They had to relearn how to dance the beat of the music in real time.”
While she is understandably grateful the pandemic shutdown is now behind, Gomez speaks with pride about having served the community with the free dance lessons and jam sessions she led at Bird Park.
“You have to be flexible and learn to roll with the punches,” she said. “And after learning how to teach online with Google Teach and Zoom, I’m grateful to the people who created those programs and platforms. And I’m very grateful that when fall came around, I had my job at Keiller.”
The shutdown also gave Gomez a new appreciation for the opportunities to make music and interact with audiences without any restrictions.
“I realized: ‘Oh my gosh, being able to work as a musician can be taken away from us’,” she said. “Music has always meant a lot to me, but now I hold it even closer to my heart.”
Gomez is now at work on the 2025 edition of the San Diego Tap and Jazz Dance Festival, which will take place Nov. 22-24 at Keiller.
She launched the event in 2015 and led repeat editions in 2016 and 2017. After a two-year break, Gomez planned to resume the festival in 2020. But the pandemic shutdown pushed the reboot back until last year. At this point, though, making another pivot is almost second nature for her.
“The biggest takeaways for me,” Gomez said, “have been learning how to be more flexible and having more gratitude for what I have with my music, my job, my family, and my friends. And, also, being okay with learning new things. Because you never know what’s going to happen.”
She paused in a moment of contemplation for what has been lost.
“Before the pandemic we thought nothing bad like this would ever happen, but then it did,” Gomez lamented. “Even though we’re a few years past the shutdown, I still don’t feel like we’re all the way back to normal.”
Next gig: June 25, “Tap Jam” with Hot Club of Bird Park, at Panama 66 in Balboa Park
Website: tapintoyogaandreiki.com
Gregory Page
THEN
Was the title of singer-songwriter Gregory Page’s “One Hell of a Memory” prophetic?
The 22nd album of his career, it was produced by Grammy Award-winning troubadour Jason Mraz, one of Page’s biggest irers and closest collaborators. “Memory” won Album of the Year and Best Pop Album honors at the 2021 San Diego Music Awards. It was a bittersweet victory.
At the time of his double-award wins, two of Page’s European tours had been canceled because of the pandemic shutdown. Two more of his tours there subsequently fell through. Virtually all his San Diego gigs disappeared in 2020 and didn’t return. Moreover, most of the intimate venues he had previously performed in had closed, including the Gregory Page Stage at Lestat’s West, which was named in his honor.
“I’m desperately afraid of catching COVID, but I’m equally afraid of catching ‘Cancel-itis.’ My livelihood has been taken away,” Page told the Union-Tribune at the time. “If it wasn’t already a blow to independent musicians that their recorded music is available for free to stream online, the fact that — as a performing songwriter — all my live engagements have been taken away is about as scary as it comes.”
My last gig: Singer-songwriter Gregory Page: ‘My livelihood has been taken away’
By the time he could finally perform again in Europe, in October 2022, Page contracted COVID immediately after playing his first concert in the Netherlands.
“I canceled a few shows,” he told the Union-Tribune in early 2023. “Then I took antiviral medicine and tested negative but was still sick with bronchitis for the rest of my seven-week tour. I let all the promoters know I was ill and they didn’t really care. It wasn’t feasible for me to cancel the tour.”
Three years earlier, in April 2020, Page launched “Almost Live, a series of 10-minute one-man variety show episodes that he hosted, starred in, directed and produced. He also served as the show’s cameraman and props person.
Page posted 24 episodes of “Almost Live” on his website and Facebook page. Musical pals — including Mraz and fellow singer-songwriter Jack Tempchin — were featured in socially distanced conversations with Page, who used his dry wit to engage viewers and as a coping mechanism in a grim period.
“I think a lot of us have been forced to take a look at different aspects of our creativity that we might not have looked at otherwise,” he said at the time. “Humor has always been really important to me, so I feel like I’m sharing a side of myself that people don’t always get to see.”
Some “Almost Live” viewers sent in small donation to Page. But with no gigs to play in San Diego and no viable source of income, he relied on emergency rental assistance and EDD benefits as a gig worker until he could get back on his feet again. The irony that he fared better economically when the pandemic prevented him from working was not lost on the British-born musician.
“This is the first time in my life I have had a steady income, so I guess that is something good that has come out of the pandemic,” Page ruefully said. “I know my position seems so petty while others are fighting for their lives on ventilators.”
NOW
Like tap dancer and percussionist Claudia Gomez, who is also profiled in this article, Page made several unplanned pivots in response to the pandemic.
His “Almost Live” online variety series deepened his friendship with 2019 Songwriters Hall of Fame inductee Tempchin, whose credits include penning such classics as the Eagles’ “Peaceful Easy Feeling” and Johnny Rivers’ “Swaying to the Music (Slow Dancin’ “).
The result was 2023’s “Midnight Jack — The Movie,” which Page directed and made as a labor of love. It won Award of Recognition: Documentary Feature honors at the 2023 IndieFEST Film Awards. Buoyed by the response, Page is now working on a second film with Tempchin.
The same year also saw the release of Page’s album, “Modern Man,” which was produced by Mraz. It finds the guitar-strumming Page temporarily moving to a synthesizer-dominated musical setting, the better to capture the doubt and turmoil of the times.
On “F the Future,” Page sings: “The future came to take away my acoustic guitar / It left behind a synthesizer, soulless and bizarre.” On “The World’s Gone Mad,” he sings: “The world’s gone mad / What shall we do? / You can’t put back the genie / He’s on the loose.”
“Anyone who wants to know what I went through during the pandemic can just listen to ‘Modern Man’,” Page said.
The lasting impact of the pandemic has also inspired him to become more hands-on with his career in Europe, where the record label that put out Page’s albums in the Netherlands ceased to exist.
“I have learned how to release and promote my records in that market,” Page said. “A big lesson from the pandemic is that, at any moment, all this could be taken away. So, you damn well better appreciate it while you have it. And that awareness has had a ripple effect with audiences as well.”
Another pandemic ripple effect for Page is his decision to end his social media presence altogether and deactivated his s on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.
“There’s a price to pay, business-wise, for not being on social media anymore,” he acknowledged. “The upside is I have more peace of mind and more time to get back to my life and be creative, rather than being online. I don’t know what I’m missing because I’m not on it.”
Page’s most recent album, the Mraz-produced “Once Long Ago,” won Best Pop Album honors at the 2025 San Diego Music Awards. Page and Mraz will do an extensive t European tour in September and October.
Closer to home, Page now performs two to three times a week at retirement homes, assisted care facilities and memory care centers. His penchant for expertly playing vintage songs that are 80 or 90 years old resonates strongly with his listeners at these locations.
“I’ve found this path of joy and connection with elderly audiences, many of whom are shut-ins, that doesn’t happen when I play at the Belly Up or the Casbah,” Page marveled.
“I’m not a music therapist, but I get an incredible feeling performing these great old songs for elderly people who sing, clap and dance along to Great American Songbook standards. If someone had told me that, after the pandemic, a lot of my work in San Diego will be in the retirement community, I wouldn’t have believed it.
“But this kind of connection is the reason I became a musician. And it has filled me with immense feelings of gratitude and joy about what I can give people in these moments. The music is medicinal.”
Next gig: June 27, at Mom’s Pie House Garden, in Wynola
Website: gregorypage.com
Victoria Robertson
THEN
Opera singer Victoria Robertson didn’t have to leave her North Park neighborhood when she sprang into musical action soon after the 2020 pandemic shutdown saw live-events and public gatherings vanish around the world. She didn’t even have to leave her home.
Less than a month after the shutdown began, the former Miss USO San Diego performed the first of her weekly Sunday “Separate But Together” concerts. The outdoor venue was the 6-by-14-foot concrete balcony porch of her 1920s Craftsman home.
The porch’s location at the top of a 23-step staircase ensured Robertson was a safe distance from her listeners on the sidewalk and street below. They were happy to observe social distancing guidelines in return for the opportunity to hear the dramatic coloratura soprano perform.
Robertson’s porch concert debut on Easter Sunday 2020 drew about 30 people. By the next week, her word-of-mouth audience had grown to about 100. One attendee listened from his convertible, which was parked in front of her home. Even without amplification, her luminous voice could be clearly heard a block or more away. Some neighbors enjoyed the performances without leaving their own porches.
“The Easter Sunday concert was really emotional, because people felt suppressed,” Robertson told the Union-Tribune after her second 2020 porch performance. “Today was more like a celebration. (With this pandemic), people don’t get to hear live music, so it’s really nice to do it.”
Undeterred by coronavirus, San Diego soprano continues singing – from her North Park front porch
Robertson mixed up her repertoire from week to week. She interspersed Puccini arias and musical theater chestnuts from “My Fair Lady” and “Cats” with patriotic songs for her Fourth of July and Memorial Day performances.
“I did a Christmas show and another with an all-Spanish theme,” she said. “For Mother’s Day I did classical favorites like ‘Ave Maria,’ and I had guest musicians sit in.”
Prior to the pandemic, Robertson worked for a broker for whom she traveled around the world shooting videos of super yachts that were on the market. Her VR Productions made videos for the travel industry and she had a small company that used virtual biometrics to create 3-D videos of theaters and other performance venues.
With all those jobs shelved by the pandemic, along with her out-of-town operas gigs, Robertson strived to create new platforms for herself.
She sang and played guitar outdoors on the small patio in front of Dobson’s restaurant, downtown. When police expressed concerns about crowds that gathered on the patio, she began performing on top of a nearby pickup truck that belonged to a Dobson’s bartender. That led to her being booked to do a weekly dinner-show performance at Jamul Casino which lasted until 2023.
Rather than close down Opera4Kids, the San Diego Arts nonprofit she founded in 2019, Robertson moved its performances to Bird Park near her North Park home.
“The kids were spread out on the lawn,” she said. “People had fewer things to do, so if you were performing outside you were exposed to audiences that may not have seen you otherwise.”
Robertson then launched a series of free weekly Sunday concerts in the parking lot next to Meshuggah Shack, a small Mission Hills coffee stand owned by fellow opera singer Rosario Monetti. The series lasted nearly two years.
“We called it ‘Concerts at the Shack’ and had some of the best artists in town perform — Whitney Shay, Chickenbone Slim & The Biscuits with Laura Chavez, a 16-piece band called The Flyboys,” Robertson said. “All the tips went straight to the bands, who did pretty well.”
NOW
Robertson concluded her porch-concert run in September 2020, after the house she lived in was sold and she moved to another North Park location. The initiative she demonstrated during the pandemic shutdown laid the groundwork for other endeavors.
In August 2023, Robertson and Meshuggah Shack owner Monetti opened Divo Diva in Hillcrest.
A European-style cafe, wine bar and restaurant in one, Divo Diva lives up to its name by hosting four dinner performances a month at which both Robertson and Monetti sing. The two are now contemplating opening a second location in Little Italy.
“People ask why, being a singer, I co-founded a cafe-restaurant,” Robertson said. “I always wanted to get my MBA and this is a good way to learn about many aspects of business I never knew about. I’ve learned so much. When you put your money on the line, you are forced to learn and we are building a strong community for Divo Diva.”
Opera4Kids is back in full swing and recently collaborated with Museum of Making Music in Carlsbad and an opera company in Santa Barbara. Robertson is continuing her longtime singing engagement each Thursday at the Westgate hotel downtown, and she credits her pandemic porch concerts for helping her become more media savvy.
“I’d written to all the local media and got no response,” she said. “Then, after the Union-Tribune cover article on my second porch performance, all the local news networks called me and Reuters news agency picked up the story.
“I started getting letters from people who sent me $50 or $100 because they felt bad for out-of-work musicians. I would not have got such attention had it not been for putting myself out there during the pandemic.”
Her entrepreneurial drive notwithstanding, Robertson estimates that her bank in 2020 was “negative $5,000.” Yet, while COVID brought her out-of-town work to a standstill, it also opened new doors for her here in San Diego.
“The silver lining is that a crisis can give you a chance to be creative,” she said. “So, I did whatever I could to put myself in front of people and to lift them up. I was frightened at the beginning of the pandemic because, as musicians, we live very much month by month. I was a little bit panicky, as a lot of people were.
“The pandemic changed the trajectory of my career from constantly being on the road to being here in San Diego and building a community. Music helps people through hard times and that’s the job of a musician, to lift people up.”
Next gig: June 20, “A Night of Spanish Songs,” at Divo Diva
Website: victoriarobertson.com
Richard Sellers
THEN
One of the most versatile drummers in San Diego, Richard Sellers has some very good reasons for not wanting to recall the pandemic shutdown.
Before COVID hit, he was a member of 13 different area bands thanks to his ability to perform jazz, rock, reggae, blues, calypso, and more with equal elan and authority. Sellers also drummed in productions for La Jolla Playhouse and San Diego Ballet. And he gave private drum lessons and taught at Cal State San Marcos.
After the pandemic took hold, his only gig that didn’t disappear in an instant was a once-a-week music job at Promise Church in Escondido. But a difference of opinion led to him and his family leaving for another church.
“Everything has changed,” Sellers told the Union-Tribune in early 2021.
“I used to play sometimes two or three gigs a day, starting with 8 a.m. school performances, but everything is gone. I’ve performed at Pala Casino once since March (2020). I used to have six drum students. Now, I have two.
“We’ve cut down on all our expenses, our groceries, everything is cut down. I’m just hoping we can get back to work as quickly as possible. Being a Christian, my background of knowing the Lord provides for me, so I’m just trusting in Him.”
Faces of the arts shutdown: Richard Sellers: ‘Everything has changed’
Not wanting to lose his drum chops, Sellers began playing weekly Facebook Live concerts with keyboardist Mikan Zlatkovich and other San Diego jazz mainstays. He also completed “Revelatory Drums,” a recording project he created to be used for audio system demonstrations and evaluations.
But with no income to speak of, the challenges Sellers encountered were formidable. He and his family fell $7,000 behind on their rent payments. Even though he taught drumming only part-time at San Marcos — pivoting to online lessons because of the pandemic — it disqualified him from qualifying for unemployment compensation. Sellers looked for any possible work he could find, be it music-related or cleaning garages.
“I’m living day to day and hoping there will be some kind of way to safely perform live, just so we can get back to work and out of this loop of owing money for rent every month,” he told the Union-Tribune at the time.
“Some people are acting like it will be another half year, or longer, before things start to return to normal. I don’t want to hear that. I’m like: ‘Let’s just get through this week and this month’… We’ve just got to make it through until we get back to doing what we do, which is playing music and making other people happy.”
NOW
A man of deep faith, Sellers did get through the pandemic travails. And he continued to tithe 10 percent of his earnings to his church, even when his earnings were almost nonexistent.
But it wasn’t easy. And discussing it now, several years later, is still difficult for the soft-spoken drummer.
“I don’t when I was able to start working again after the 2020 shutdown,” Sellers said. “I don’t want to . I’ve put that behind me.”
In March of 2021, a few music gigs began to open up for Sellers. “But not a lot,” he noted, “just occasionally.”
Things were no better that summer, but a government rental assistance program provided some temporary relief for the drummer, his wife and their two young daughters.
“It helped, but we still didn’t have enough to catch up,” said Sellers, whose quest for a day job didn’t pan out.
It was not until the summer of 2022, when he scored a two-week residency performing at the New Mexico State Fair with the Bill Harris Salsa Steel Band, that Sellers began to sense his situation was starting to turn around. He played again at the fair in 2023 and 2024.
“Two weeks of out-of-town (work) paid pretty well. Then I started to see gigs pick up a bit here in San Diego,” he said.
“Going through all that stuff during the pandemic, I was very concerned about having a place to live and being to provide for my family. A lot of our church were moving to places like Tennessee, but I didn’t want to start over. I’m a tither and the scriptures say, basically, that if you continue to tithe, God will provide for your needs. And that has been true.”
Sellers and his Bulgarian-born wife, Snejana, are now worship leaders at Summit Point Church in Mira Mesa. While their faith helped sustain them through the difficult times, friends and strangers also lent a hand.
“There were some individuals who helped us make it possible to have a Christmas with our girls because we didn’t even have money to buy them gifts,” said Sellers, who cited saxophonist Charles Mherson, flutist Holly Hofmann and pianist Mike Wofford for being much more than good Samaritans.
“They were very generous,” he said. “So was Nancy Fletcher, who gave us some money she had been saving for her grandkids. Without the help of these people, it would have been terrible. My heart goes out to all of them for their kindness.”
Sellers also received some unique from a jazz fan in Temecula, Dr. Charles Martin.
“He wanted to figure out a way to help my family, so — without telling me — he took a picture of me and put it on a t-shirt,” the drummer said. “He gave me a case of the t-shirts in all different sizes and told me to sell them for whatever price I wanted. Now there are some people out there wearing Richard Sellers’ t-shirts!”
Happily back to working three to six days a week in a variety of musical contexts, Sellers recently completed a second edition of his “Revelatory Drums” recordings. He hopes to release it by the end of the year.
Sellers paused when asked to cite the biggest lesson he has learned since the pandemic shutdown of 2020.
“That tomorrow isn’t promised to anybody,” he replied. “So, spend as much time as you can with the folks you love and try to help make the world a better place. Try to help somebody instead of hurting them.”
Next gig: June 12, with the Mikan Zlatkovich Trio, at Westgate Hotel
Website: richardsellersdrummer.com
