Nailed it...
ON. POINT. (except that I actually love doing the work, asking the questions, synthesizing epistemological frameworks, etc. The Academy is absolutely full of Sadists.)
ON. POINT. (except that I actually love doing the work, asking the questions, synthesizing epistemological frameworks, etc. The Academy is absolutely full of Sadists.)
Tonight I had the pleasure of hearing the Dan Tepfer/Ben Wendel Duo at Smalls in the company of Caroline Davis, Sean McCluskey, and Brian Lindner. Oh, and LEE KONITZ. As if that weren't enough, Ari Hoenig's band was on afterward. New York has a mindbending concentration of amazing musicians and I was so happy to be swept up in it tonight. Do yourself a favor and check out the new Tepfer/Wendel record Small Constructions. Amazing record.
(Also - Yes, I know the picture is sideways. Meh.)
From The Guardian, Friday, April 26th
We seem to have evolved into a society of mourned and misplaced creativity. A world where people have simply surrendered to (or been beaten into submission by) the sleepwalk of work, domesticity, mortgage repayments, junk food, junk TV, junk everything, angry ex-wives, ADHD kids and the lure of eating chicken from a bucket while emailing clients at 8pm on a weekend...

I'm excited to announce that I am wrapping up my MA in Humanities and Social Thought at NYU's Draper Program and have accepted a fellowship to pursue doctoral studies in UCLA's Systematic Musicology Specializaion within their Ethnomusicology Department. I'll be working with the wonderful Dr. Roger Savage (author of Hermeneutics and Music Criticism) on problems of music's affective vehemence and my interests with regard to the ontolological underpinnings of musical phenomena. This is big news for me as I've been trying to get into this program for five years - ever since Dr. Pantelis Vassilakis hipped me to the field and the UCLA program back when I was living in Chicago. Big thanks to all of you brilliant and patient people who've supported me in my studies and musical endeavors thus far. Go Bruins? Cheers!

Here it is, my aforementioned Master's Thesis for the John W. Draper Interdisciplinary Master's Program for Humanities and Social Thought at New York University. Basically, a survey of the last 3,000 years of thinking about the problem of music's affective vehemence. Rounding up ideas on how we've thought about how and why musical phenomena communicate anything at all without recourse to discursive language and narrative. About 50 pages of nice bedtime reading for you.
Download and read HERE
The lovely Angela Steil and I took in the
Had a fantastic time last night playing in the Manderely Bar inside Sleep No More's McKittrick Hotel. Working with a quartet featuring Scott Bradlee on piano, Bennet Miller Huxley on bass, Django Carranza on drums, and the fantastic Karen Marie Richardson (as the feisty Ms. Stella Sinclair) singing her ass off is a wonderful pleasure. It's so rare to play small-group jazz for such a rapt audience these days and I count myself very lucky indeed. If you haven't been out to Sleep No More yet you are missing out. Here's Stella schooling Pink on "Summertime" when Pink wandered on stage a while back.
What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human relations which have been subjected to poetic and rhetorical intensification, translation, and decoration, and which, after they have been in use for a long time, strike a people as firmly established, canonical, and binding; truths are illusions of which we have forgotten they are illusions, metaphors which have become worn by frequent use and have lost all sensuous vigour, coins which, having lost their stamp, are now regarded as metal and no longer coins. - Freidrich Nietzsche from On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense
It sometimes feels adolescent to refer to Nietzsche in the constellation of thinkers who've stated the same thing (Kuhn, Derrida, Yeats, nearly all of 20th Century thought) with different language. He's just so damned poetic about it. I get more out of On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense every time I read it. Check it out.
or best band logo?
I'm excited to begin a new improvisational project with long-lost and long-time friends Gerrit Roessler and Cory Healey. The new trio, Wintermute, will be performing at Brooklyn's Goodbye Blue Monday on Wednesday, February 20th.
I first met Gerrit about ten years ago when he visited from Germany to study piano for an entire academic year. We played a lot and then lost touch after he moved back to Germany. Cory and I played together back in Chicago - he was the first drummer in my ALDRIC project - before he headed to grad school out of town. We've all circuitously landed in Brooklyn and are finally making noise together again. These guys are monsters on their instruments and have huge ears. I couldn't be happier.
Wintermute features:
AJ Kluth: Tenor Saxophone, Bass Clarinet, EWI, Pedals.
Gerrit Roessler: Fender Rhodes, Toy Piano, Melodica, Ephemera, Pedals.
Cory Healey: Drums, Cymbals, Toys, Pedals.
...Yeah - that's a first for me. I was pleased to be joined by the fantastic Stephan Kammerer on a club-date EWI excursion featuring more bleeps, bloops, and synth swooshes than anyone has ever heard before. Ever.
Anat wins clarinet.
Here's what I'll be working on this winter as I attempt to finish up my MA degree program at NYU.
I HAVE ALL THE EXCITE!
The greatest tool of Western civilization since the Enlightenment has been the scalpel of reason, paring away mysticism and laying open the workings of the world. Regardless of the usefulness of reason, our lives are not lived as perfectly logical propositions but rather are filled with emotions, affects, and irrationality. Therefore, any epistemology which attempts to describe and delimit the reality of lived experience must recognize the limits of logic, language, and discursive thought because, as Susanne Langer stated so well, “...the limits of language are not the last limits of experience” (Langer 265). Due to their somatic resonance, the temporal nature of their poetic development, and their ability to simultaneously express opposites, musical phenomena have a special situatedness in Western culture as being associated with emotion, irrationality, and the ineffable while also being understood as very real.
This special space musical phenomena inhabits can be described by its resonance with theories of the state of radical flux of the world as described by Nietzsche, Heraclitus, and others as well as musical phenomena’s association with intuition rather than positivism as suggested by Husserl and other Phenomenological thinkers. In this paper I will discuss the multiple layers of relevance of musical phenomena and show that despite the systems of reference by which we approach musical meaning (e.g., cultural situatedness, psychological theory, somatic entrainment, systems of spirituality, proportions, logic, and numbers), it is music’s character as a space for intuition and chiasmic unity that has maintained it’s importance in a world otherwise delimited by positivist theory.
I'll have four months or so to get this together. Wish me luck!
My favorite line is at 2:09, "We are not necessarily thinking machines that feel, we are feeling machines that think."
Musical sound is set apart, and its traditional connection with the soul and with feelings has divorced it from the intellect, at least as far as its essence is concerned. Its outward, technical manifestation absorbs the theorists, provided the ultimate question is not posed - how is music possible? This is more profound even than it looks, for in it is hidden a deeper question, namely WHAT IS THE NATURE OF THE WORLD IF IT CONTAINS THIS EXTRAORDINARY PHENOMENON CALLED "MUSIC"...? (capitalization mine)
...To be very fair to Mitt Romney, I think he is an intelligent man with a good heart. One of the lesser spoken things about having a heart, if you will, is the fact that it doesn’t have to mean the same thing to everybody. If everybody agreed with everyone else, it would be terrible and we would all kill ourselves tomorrow out of boredom.,,
Did you know you can rent out ELLIS ISLAND for your party? Did you? Like, I mean, Ellis Island. For real.
I just played a wedding with the Bobby Attiko Band (who earnestly have a song about Patron and just KILLED the party) for a full house of surprisingly rowdy guests in the Registry Room on Ellis Island. It's insane to thing this place was the doorway to America for millions and the tiles they stood on to be checked for lice are the very same ones upon which well-to-do party goers danced the night away. Honeslty, I don't know how to feel.
Regardless, it was a hell of a party with a hell of a band.
Caramelo continues to be a fantastically fun band to work with. Check out the video for "Brooklyn" from Caramelo's recent release, "Ride" (available HERE). The band features members of Brooklyn's flamenco, jazz, and afrobeat communities; wonderfully talented musicians, dancers, and genuinely sweet folks who love what they do. I love living in Brooklyn and this video is a great way to show (rather than tell) a few reasons why. "Spread love, it's the Brooklyn way." Dig!
Had a fantastic rehearsal with Ben Miller's Sensorium Saxophone Orchestra this last Sunday night. We're rehearsing his Symphony of Suspicion for 10 (and more) saxophones plus two drum kits. It's equal parts through-composed and aleatoric and showcases Ben's penchant for dissonance, clouds of sound, and straight out noise. I dig how committed to his aesthetic he is and how recklessly he tosses his scores on the ground during rehearsal (see picture) in fits of excitement. Can't wait till we can bring this to the studio!
Chicago's own Mr. Chris Ploeg applied his formidable talents to re-mixing a few of the tracks from ALDRIC's 2011 release on OA2 Records, Anvils and Broken Bells. This means, above all, even HUGE(er) DRUMS and super spaced out reverb. Check the remixes out and dig the great writeup of the original album from Bird is the Worm. Learn more about the album and download here!
Click HERE to listen to and download five remixes from the PLOEG.