Life+Music

First of all, I realized I never mentioned this item of news: in the fall I'll be moving to Hanover in the fall to start my studies in the Dartmouth Digital Musics Program. It should be a lot of fun and as John McDonald told my friend Peter McMurray (he and Derek Hurst were two of the guys who first encouraged me to check out that program): "Everyone in that program seems happy as hell," and I can say from my visit that it seemed to be true--and keep in mind, I showed up in February and for people to seem that happy in New England in winter is impressive. I was just watching a little TV as I was cleaning my apartment and I saw a funny ad that made me laugh enough to decide to blog about some stuff:

Yes, that mistake is highly improbably, but I did enjoy the part where a guy gave the peace sign when having his picture taken with "Big Papi"--nice touch. When I visted Japan in 1999 tons of random girls wanted their picture taken with me (I really should go back) and quite a few of them gave the peace sign to the camera (plenty of other dudes and dudettes around Japan flashed the sign to me--I guess that's what we do in America). Now to tie the posting of a TV ad (I'll have to blog more to run this down the front page): starting in Maine, moving to Massachusetts, and now to New Hampshire, I guess I'm still going to hang in Red Sox Nation (although I only really got into it when I moved to Waltham and dated a Yankees fan). Which New England state will be next? Rhode Island, Connecticut...or even Vermont? Probably not. If I stick around New England after Hanover, NH, it will probably be to Cambridge, MA. Speaking of Connecticut, I suppose that state is pretty lucky to be in two regions: New England / Tri-State [New York] Area. Speaking of Japan, here is an awesome email Grey Filastine posted to his blog. ----- Now for two adminstrative notes:

• I'm consciously slacking on using categories and have temporarily removed the categories link from the sidebar. They will be back when I take a revise my categories.
• After the Hydra concert at Harvard in May, I will be updating my website with new bio info and a Max abstraction, externals, and javascripts page. VSTs and iPhone software coming soon after that.

So I noticed my friend Ken Ueno just joined a Thelonious Monk fan group on facebook. I clicked to check it out and what was the first video listed? Epistrophy! Seeing that I had to join up. When I was in eighth grade I had been studying piano with Mary Anne Driscoll for a year or so and she could see the improvisor/jazz musician inside of me. She had showed a few jazz tunes to me before Epistrophy (All Blues, Stolen Moments, and So What are some tunes that come to mind) to try to pull me in, but while I had fun none of them really held my interest. I guess maybe she got some clues from my improvising, but one day Mary Anne showed me Epistrophy and my world changed from there. While a lot of the music write and improvise may not seem like "Jazz", I feel that my approach to composing and improvising would not be the same if it was not for the early years studying jazz with Al Delgado and Mary Anne Driscoll. That day Mary Anne showed me Epistrophy was the day that it all began. And now for your listening/viewing pleasure:

Man, Monk is so cool.  It is hard to drag myself away from YouTube....I can't get enough.