i haven't been here for a really long time. but i made this for you

allergic to myself

This friday 6/23 NC’s Crowmeat Bob. A true journeyman- Bob has played every genre, all over…he’s sat in with Quintron, GodspeedY!BE, free improv with Chadbourne, Kovald, Nakatani etc etc. Come hear! 8pm at Red Room.

https://t.co/u8xAm0Cqpe

RIP to a true superhero

Looking forward to this jammer Sunday at zissimos’s. Playing some of my tricky tunes with Shelly Purdy and @RoseHammerBurt. Dave Ballou/Mike Kuhl and @Holzter’s band.

...Hang on tight, keep banging your head against the wall, and things come around sometimes. Put your eyes and ears on my bandcamp if you like strange piano music kinda played by a computer but also kinda played by a person too. Thanks for reading.

...In addition to some rudimentary and entirely stupid Max patch shenanigans, I also started recording these old pieces. Of course the scores are hand written, so I had to jam them into Dorico. But there you go...

....So that brings me to the situation at hand. A few years back when I got hired full time to teach music technology, we took delivery of the Steinway Spirio computer controlled piano. I realized I had finally had the pianist I needed to play these pieces...

...In Buffalo I wrote a three act "drama" for solo piano called Wilderness and Self-Sufficiency, that was all about my reverence for piano music and my struggle with the instrument itself. It's three hours of somewhat difficult fever dreaming that no one wants to play...

...Then my obsession continued at SUNY Buffalo while studying with Jeff Stadelman, another treasure who didn't bat an eye at my pianistic requests. Before I got heavily into the open form graphic scores, I was still writing a lot of "new-complexity" type stuff...

...No pun intended^, but I wrote a piece called Ruby (coming soon!) while studying with Finnissy. It's what I would want to sound like while improvising over Thelonious Monk's Ruby My Dear. Did I mention my first grown up piece was an Epistrophy rip off?..

...I studied composition with Michael Finnissy, who is a piano virtuoso and would sight read my four-stave, eight-voice, irrational-laden, music while asking about my weekend and giving advice for fingering and pedaling. What a gem!...

...But also, my class piano teacher screamed at me over my shoulder and said "never darken my doorstep again" once I barely passed my proficiency exam. As a composer interested in pitches, I saw the value in the piano and it's range and continued to compose on it...

...In college I made a huge swing from dumb skater kid to intellectual composer guy and learned that you could play INSIDE the piano and that Henry Cowell's music made some of the sounds I liked as a kid...

...Then for many years the piano was just the out of tune upright thing we had to sing (or pretend to sing) along with in school chorus and Sunday school. As a "cool" teen in the '80's I avoided it...

...She played piano in movie theaters and church but I never heard her play. At around 4 or 5, I remember writing a piece called All the Fishes in the Sea. I was just holding down the pedal and blooping around in the low end, with an occasional swim up high...

Storytime/shameless self-promotion...I made a series of pieces with a Steinway Model B Spirio piano. I am not a pianist and the piano has haunted me my whole life. My first musical memory is being told to "stop banging on" my great grandma's piano... https://t.co/HlL90PGwev

honk if you like bizarre piano music that might drive you mad

I really want to click on the new Coltrane/Dolphy lost recording link and be rickrolled into hearing the jazz odyssey scene from Spinal Tap