It has been a minute since you’ve been updated on the state of my music and my life. I’ll keep it brief. But, there have been some cool happenings.
First of all, I’ve been offline a lot more (for no great reason). This explains the lack of updates and slow response times to many of your messages and comments over the past few months. I appreciate hearing from you all and I’m not ignoring you! I’m just in a more analogue season I suppose.
You may remember the little piano sketches I was putting on social media (IG and TikTok) during quarantine. I got around to developing, recording and releasing a few of them over the past few months. I’ve been blown away by the response. So far on Spotify, 11,000 listeners have checked them out. Here is a link to them if you want to give them a listen: The Fall, What Feeling Means to Me, Visions.
If you are a pianists who would be interested in playing these, let me know and I’ll try to make sheet music available down the road.
This week I released a new track that is very different. I’ve been learning a lot about additive synthesis. This has been a big learning curve but I’m really excited about how this recent experiment turned out. The piece is called “Genesis”. The cover art was taken at dawn in the hills near the LA Observatory. Here is a link to “Genesis“. It’s also on all streaming services. Btw, you may not be able to hear much if you listen on your phone… It’s pretty bass heavy.
A few years ago Gallagher Lawson came to me for lessons. He had a strong classical piano background. He wanted to learn about jazz and improvisation. After spending a couple of years doing that, we started to drift towards his interest in composing, electronic music and production. This week he released a full-length album of his piano-electronic music hybrid creations. It’s really amazing how much he has learned in a short amount of time. For those of you who have worked with electronic music and production, you know how slow it can move. But Gallagher hung with it and created a really great first album. You can check it out here!
My dear friend, Michael Shrieve, released a beautiful record a couple of months ago. Michael has been such an inspiration and musical force in my life since the early 2000’s. He reached out and asked if I could add some vibey sounds to a record he was working on. It was so fun to create some rhodes and effect layers for his beautiful release. For those that don’t know Michael… He was the drummer for Santana for years and years… And played a famous drum solo and Woodstock. For me though, his music and sensibilities go so far beyond that era. It’s a real honor to be on this record. And it’s very cool to be on a track with Michael, Airto and Jack DeJohnette! Here are the tracks I contributed some layers to… The Breath of Human Kindness & Hejira.
Thank you all for listening and following along in my journeys. It’s very much appreciated to have you along for these parts of the ride.