Polyrhythmics play Chicago for the first time! My sister has lived in Chicago for some years now, so I was happy she would get the chance to see the band in her town. As it turned out, the venue, the Tonic Room, was about a 10-minute-walk from her apartment, so it was an area I […]
Category: Music
Tour Blog, Fall 2018, Day 4
On Tuesday night we played in St. Paul, Minnesota, at a club called Vieux Carre. Vieux Carre is a sit-down dinner club that focuses on the food and culture of New Orleans, as evidenced by the name. The walls of the club are covered with beautiful black and white photos like the one below of […]
Brian Blade Fellowship
I first heard the Brian Blade Fellowship, now known as Brian Blade and the Fellowship Band, in 2003 when they performed at the Ballard Jazz Festival. I was not familiar with any of the musicians in the band except for Blade, and it was honestly one of the most significant turning points in my musical […]
Paul Gonsalves Continued
Some more Paul Gonsalves from Diminuendo in Blue. I really like the mix of traditional and modern (at least to my ears) in his playing. The last chorus on this clip gets me every time!
Music Interview Podcasts
Gilles Peterson (middle) with Stretch and Bobbito I’ve been doing a bit more driving lately with my private teaching, so I’ve started to get back into some podcasts, specifically music related ones. I have heard some interviews in the last couple of months that I found completely fascinating! I thought they would be worth […]
Paul Gonsalves
I have a new project! I’m not sure how long I will last but I have begun working on Paul Gonsalves’ famous 27 choruses on “Diminuendo in Blue” from Duke Ellington’s 1956 performance at the Newport Jazz Festival. There is a lot of backstory surrounding this performance, none of which I can verify as true […]
Junior Walker
My earliest memory of “Shotgun” by Junior Walker & the All Stars doesn’t actually involve the song, exactly. I remember watching the Cosby Show with my family a lot as a kid, and I thought, when I was younger, that “Shotgun” was the theme song, at least for a couple of seasons. As it turns […]
A Corner of the Internet
Thank you to everyone that’s watched the new video clips I have been putting up! In the last several months, I thought a lot about what I wanted my career to look like online, and what I wanted to share and have accessible to others around the world (even if it’s just family and friends […]
King Curtis
A little yakety sax for your Thursday! One of my grandmothers had a bunch of old records that she would let me look through, and one of them was a Boots Randolph album. Randolph was famous for the record entitled “Yakety Sax”, the title tune of which became the Benny Hill theme song and was […]
Stuck on the Inside
Recently, Grant (drummer for Polyrhythmics) told me that he has been discovering new music primarily from his non-musician friends, rather than other musicians, and that got me thinking about my similar experiences. I would think, logically, that the best resources for music that would be new to me would be my musical and professional peers; […]