Blog

Jan 24, 2012

GPOY

GPOY

Grace Church (Broadway and 10th) has some pretty windows. AND falsely advertized Bach at noon. Booh.

This is my lucky year - so say DRAGONS!

Angela and I headed over to Chinatown Monday the 23rd for the New Year's celebration. We weren't dissapointed. Not only were there adorable children dressed as dragons (see below), we were blessed by dancing dragons (this being the year of the dragon and all) while we ate in a cheap-ass restaurant. These dragons were really doing it - I got luck all over my face.

The Chinese New Year fortuitously corresponds to NYU's beginning of the Spring semester. Looks like I'll be knee deep in Aristotle and Descartes for yet another blessed semester. Squee! I've got a few fun gigs coming up as well on various instruments and with different types of band so keep your eyes open. That clarinetist killing it with the Gypsy Jazz group while you eat dinner could be me. 

Jan 19, 2012

Have you checked out Sleep No More yet?

So, last night I got to sit in with one of the house bands in the Sleep No More lounge thanks to my good friend and marvelous drummer, Dave Tedeschi. Basically, Sleep No More is an immersive retelling of Macbeth in a late 30's hotel. You wear a mask, walk around five floors of the hotel following actors, peering in room after room, and having the most Lynchian experience of your life. Check out the site, buy tickets, have a remarkably unique theater experience. DO IT. I can't say enough about how amazing this show is. DO IT.   

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Jan 1, 2012

AJ's Wrecent Writing About Nietzsche and Music - The Gang Gets Thinky

AJ's Wrecent Writing About Nietzsche and Music - The Gang Gets Thinky

Hey guys - I took a Nietzsche class this last semester at NYU taught by the effervescent and melodious Professor Friedrich Ulfers.  I ended up writing a paper examining the concept of a truly Nietzschean, Dionysian music as manifest in the relatively young tradition of Free Musical Improvisation.  Are you a musical improvisor?  Do you seek to swim in Dionysian annihilation?  Maybe this could prove an interesting read.  Check it out if it's up your alley, any thoughts or feedback are more than welcome.

Cheers!

Free Musical Improvisation, Dionysus, & Nietzscheʼs Ontology of Becoming

|| Wrapup ||

I've somehow managed to survive the semester, have written and submitted 40ish pages for end-of-semester assignments at NYU, hit up Wisconsin to visit family and eat far, far too much, and close the year with good people and good victuals.  2011 was challenging but fruitful and found me playing music on four continents, releasing a record, relocating, changing my primary vocation from saxophoning to reading, and moving from painfully skinny jeans to slightly less skinny jeans.  Oh, and I got a bass clarinet. 

I can't thank you all enough for whatever part of my life you've played.  2011 has been quite a net positive - thank you.  Let's read more and write more and learn languages more and travel more this 2012, eh? 

Nov 30, 2011

This is making the rounds and for good reason: PAYTON GETS IT ON THE NOSE

Musical juggernaut Nicholas Payton, "On Why Jazz Isn’t Cool Anymore . . . ."

Nov 17, 2011

From NYC's Foley Square

From NYC's Foley Square

The New York Supreme Court building from the OWS crowd in Foley Square. The front of the building reads, "The true administration of justice is the firmest pillar of good government." We are (I am) the 99%.  Also - beautiful night for a stroll over the Brooklyn Bridge.

Nov 8, 2011

Mr. Sean McCluskey

Mr. Sean McCluskey

So, my buddy Sean released a record a few weeks ago.  Guess what - it's really good.  Fantastic piano trio date with Chicago mainstays George Fludas and Dennis Carroll.  Listen to a few tracks at his site.  He visited me in Brooklyn from his native Boston this last weekend.  We hung, played some bass clarinet and accordion duets (you're welcome, neighbors), had a random conversation in French with a Belgian man on the train, and hit the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Magical bromance time. 

Aaaand - on the topic of new music to check out:  I caught violinist Zach Brock and The Magic Number this last Friday night in Manhattan.  Fantastic sets of original music.  Check him and them out HERE.  Inspiring writing and playing. 

a few things...

I just read Elizabeth Grosz's Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism.  Question: How does ANYONE still cling to Cartesian Dualism as a viable model of consciousness?  Anyone?  You there in the back?  Any ideas?  Yeah, I understand that It's difficult if not damned near impossible to talk about the practicalities of lived experience in non-dual (mind/body) language but, it's so damned far from the reality of lived experience.  How's this going to play out?  Is everybody going to read Merleau-Ponty's The Phenomenology of Perception and a mess of Nietzsche and then hug it out?   

Also - Google image search this: Codex Seraphinianus

Also - Briane Greene wants to answer all of your questions about the universe and everything.  Do so here: http://worldsciencefestival.com/blog/topic/ask_brian_greene.  The more I learn about theories of consciousness and ontology, the more they fit with current theories of physical reality.  It seems that at the quantum state, scientific descriptions of matter become plastic and poetical.  Metaphysical duality becomes not either/or, but both/and.  Reality hinges now on a chiasmic unity, an invaginated and self infolding dual/unity.  Wave/particele.  Tiny vibrating strings?  Gah! 

Also - go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Go NOW.  It's amazing. 

Oct 31, 2011

The Goat Rodeo Sessions

Hey you guys - Yo-Yo Ma, fiddler Stuart Duncan, bassist Edgar Meyer, and mandolinist Chris Thile made a record.  For real.  I've been on a bluegrass tear recently and this record is not helping.  Not only is this a great album, it's perhaps my new favorite term.  Check it out.

Goat Rodeo - definition courtesy of Urban Dictionary: "About the most polite term used by aviation people (and others in higher risk situations) to describe a scenario that requires about 100 things to go right at once if you intend to walk away from it."

Oct 28, 2011

Ca-Ca-Ca-Cameo

Ca-Ca-Ca-Cameo

Had a great time last night playing with The Shackeltons at Cameo.  Good moody punk with me on horn = good times.  If you haven't been to a show at Cameo in Willamsburg, it's worth the trip just for the fascinating hanging light piece above the stage.  Rave. 

Oct 14, 2011

I don't think it's possible to over-articulate just how much I LURV this blog: ANIMALS TALKING IN ALL CAPS

Yeah.  Click on that link.

Caramelo

Caramelo

Good time tracking at Seaside Lounge last night with Caramelo.  Their new record is sounding a-pretty-pretty-gewd!

Just in my room taking glamour shots of my new Bass Clarinet.  No big deal. 

Oct 10, 2011

A Whining Rant - or - An Embarassment of Riches. This is a blog, anyhow...

So, this week finds me knee deep in esoteric readings about embodied experience, race, gender, Nietzsche and his influence, history of Psychological systems, pre-Socratics, etc.  I feel like I’m keeping up with the bulk of readings and references bandied about in my classes at NYU but am actually really feeling the fact that I’ve not read Derrida, Deleuze, or Foucault.  Damn.  Now that I’m actually in a graduate program I’m stuck trying to figure out why the hell it’s relevant.  Don’t get me wrong - world class professors and access to the entirety of NYU’s Graduate School or Arts and Sciences is wonderful.  It’s just dawning on me now that the onus of responsibility for doing anything worthwhile with this embarrassment of riches now rests squarely on my thin shoulders.  I feel like I’m running from this responsibility back to the arms of music, practicing clarinet etudes when I should be reading “The Will To Power”.  The good news is that I’ve just bought a bass clarinet.  The bad news is that I’ve just bought a bass clarinet.  What’ll I do with all of this?  
I’m beginning to find myself drawn more to neuroscience and cognitive psychology than I am to music and it’s relationship to trance as I first was.  Perhaps because I haven’t myself identified with any particular spiritual path for some time, nor have I had a good cathartic artistic experience in a while.  First world problems.  Still, it seems to be inhibiting my interest in studying music and it’s lived experience.  Instead I just want to play and write melodies again.  I want to step away from the esoterically considering things and have a purely (Nietzschian) Dionysian experience/worldview and make and consume music in a pre-conceptual or non-conceptual  sense - if that sort of thing is even possible.  To get away from reference and concept/object relationship to that “given-ness” before conceptualization.  Ugh.  Talk with me in a few weeks.  Hopefully I’ll have sussed this out or at least gotten a direction.

Sensorium Saxophone Orchestra - Cloud 11

This was a great performance of the SSO at White Box Gallery on 9/10/11.  Glad to have been part of it. 

Sep 10, 2011

Miss John Cage's birthday - It's never too late to celebrate.

Miss John Cage's birthday - It's never too late to celebrate.

Hitting at White Box Gallery tonight with the Sensorium Saxophone Orchestra at 7pm. Special performance of 4'33" in honor of John Cage's birthday! Roll out and check the current exhibit, "How To Philosophize With A Hammer". $10 suggested donation.

Sep 7, 2011

what it is

what it is

...one thing I am ready to fight for as long as I can, in word and act - that is, that we shall be better, braver, and more active men if we believe it right to look for what we don't know... - Socrates

- Plato, Meno, 86B

Sep 6, 2011

L'Orchestre Super Vitesse - Des Bruits De Coach House (?) - Coach House Sounds

L'Orchestre Super Vitesse - Des Bruits De Coach House (?) - Coach House Sounds

Here be link to the Coach House Sounds session we (L'Orchestre Super Vitesse) did back on Halloween in 09'.  What I mostly remember about this session was being sick as a dog.  I could hardly get out of bed, let alone play the saxophone.  Yet, the session sounds great.  Put it on for an end-of-summer party, have a few drinks, and dance close to someone pretty.