I think comparing these two videos is the best way to understand why I love working with this group so much. We’re able to play the song wildly differently depending on the setting, but I think both performances are effective and powerful. For me, “Bye Bye...
“Hymn of Thanks” was the result of my study of Bach Chorales. One of my best experiences in college was doing an “independent study” course with Dariusz Terefenko that was focused on improvising fugues and other Bach-ian styles. As part of the...
I wrote “The Inevitable Letdown” in New York City in 2009. I had two things on my mind: The stock market crash that led to the 2009 recession: As reports came out regarding the short-sighted greed of the financial industry, it reminded me of the same ravenous...
“Kneel” is a song inspired by Caribbean poet Derek Walcott’s autobiography, Another Life. In one passage, Walcott describes having a pseudo-religious experience – he takes in the colorful richness of his island of St. Lucia and is moved by its beauty, but in the same...
“What is that Feeling” takes its title from a passage by Jack Kerouac in On the Road. On the Road is one of those books that it seems every teenager or college student has a passionate infatuation with, and I was determined to be “cooler than” liking it myself, but –...
The genesis of the song “One Art” comes from reading Elizabeth Bishop’s beautiful poem of the same name. I’ve read it in a few different classes, but I remember it most recently from a poetry seminar I took at Columbia with Michael Golston. The poem stands out to me...
This one is personal. Linda Martinez was my first jazz piano teacher and an important mentor to me. She was a freelance composer and jazz pianist in the LA area, who tragically committed suicide when she was 29. She was an incredibly gifted musician and generous...
This piece kind of snuck up as a group to become one of our favorites. The impetus for the piece was a beautiful poem by Irish poet Seamus Heaney called “A New Song”: I met a girl from Derrygarve And the name, a lost potent musk, Recalled the river’s long swerve, A...
“If You Can Read” is a song based on something I’ve heard my mom say a lot – that if you can read, you can cook. The idea is that cooking is merely a matter of following a recipe. If you do what the recipe says, the dish will turn out fine. However, I always find...
This is the first cover I’m posting here. This tune is originally by the doo-wop group, The Inkspots. You can watch their original performance here. It was because of a few odd coincidences that we decided to perform this tune. Nancy was invited by a mutual...
