Album Notes

This CD has been a long time in the making. The music was recorded several years ago and sat on my hard drive waiting for the funding to finish it off. During that time, the music industry has continued to change and, recently, the “fan-funding” or “crowd funding” sites like Kickstarter and Rockethub have popped up to, hopefully, give independent artists and their fans/friends/supporters a way to work together to create and disseminate art. One pleasant side effect of running a crowd funding campaign was the affirmation that there are, in fact, many people scattered around who believed in my work enough to support it sight unseen. Sounds unheard? Well, you know what I mean. I want to take this opportunity to give a huge THANK YOU to all my RocketHub supporters.

This CD has also been a journey for me. I had a steady gig (I know, right?) at the now defunct Spoken Words Cafe in Brooklyn that NO ONE ever came to. Why they kept having us back is beyond me, but what is important is that after almost a year of playing there - sometimes monthly, sometimes weekly - the group of players on this recording had transformed from a bunch of musicians into a band, and when that happened the music began to change, to breathe and grow. I’m sure you can imagine what an amazing experience that was! The Spoken Words Cafe is also where I began working with the two poets you’ll hear on this disc. Les Lopes came to one of our performances and soon I was writing new tunes to live alongside Les’ words. Les then introduced me to EJ Antonio, who recently told me that it was her experience reading with my band that started her on a path of combining jazz with her poetry. Not only by having musicians play behind her, but by embracing the looseness and fluidity of a jam session in her own performances. I’ve played on her gigs often since then and she even recorded a poem that she wrote to go with one of my tunes on her new CD!

Now don’t quote me on this, because my source is a bit of a speech that was given to the incoming students at Boston Conservatory in 2004 and someone else posted on their Facebook page, but apparently the ancient Greeks considered music and astronomy to be two sides of the same coin. Astronomy was seen as the study of relationships between observable, permanent, external objects, and music was seen as the study of relationships between invisible, internal, hidden objects. I like that idea. I feel that the music on this CD is much more about such relationships than clever writing or neat chord changes. This music is about stretching and breathing, overstepping boundaries and things not quite seen. And fun! Hopefully, lots of fun.

Enjoy