The Music and Recordings Page

This page is still being migrated and compiled from the flash site. In the meantime, to tie you over on your curiosity, here are some recordings of my piano and keyboard playing.

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Music Home

I have been playing music for about twenty five years, ten of which were logged in the music industry. I began piano at seven, but quit shortly thereafter. I picked up the guitar at around 10 and it was the instrument I played until my mid twenties, ending with the guitar synthesizer. As any prepubescent child will testify, I too, initially held a fascination for the tongue-in-cheek music of rock and roll, which has its roots in the blues. My youthful investigations fortunately began on the right path, leading me into the blues and soul of the delta bluesmen, chicago blues, chain gang worksongs, gospel music, and the many wonderful forms of these traditional American genres.

One evening, on the lower east side of new york city inside the old Ritz (now Webster Hall), at a Ramones concert, two punks with mohawks cuped their hands together and waved with their heads for me to go over and climb on. The moment I did, I felt someone rushing up behind me at a great speed, the three of them worked together in a single action to catapualted me high above and over Joey Ramone's head. As I was airbourne, watching the three punk slammers' smiling faces (with missing teeth), and thumbs up, my love affair with the wildly exuberent punk rock music began. I found happiness on the dance floor, in those salad days before 'moshing' turned into an afterschool football practice session it is today. Slam dancing, taken collectively was extraordinary chance choreography in the tradition that would have made Merce Cunningham proud. In the midst of this high-spirited, comical, and in-the-moment dance, I discovered my youth.

Back in my early teenage years, curiosity with jazz rock fusion quickly pointed in the direction of modal jazz, which opened the doors to avant-garde, post-bop, and bebop. I have also played the tenor and alto saxophone, flute, indigeneous woodwinds, drums, and keyboards. I have a deep love for middle-eastern music. Both the Armenian douduk and the call to prayer in the Qu'ran are among the most beautiful music I've heard. My love of vocal music also found nourishment in very old precious Philips recordings of Gregorian chants from the monks at a Luxembourg monastery, as well as rare recordings of the Sisters of St. Cecilia at Isle of Wight. I spent several valuable years in good company under the guidance of composers Dan Goode and Philip Corner. Philip gave me a collection of tapes of his piano compositions, some of which comprised of one chord being repeated on the piano for an extended period of time. Each repetition sounded entirely different, opening vast possibilities in what I perceived to be subtle gradations of overtones. This laid the groundwork that would later become my foundation in understanding the extra, implied voices in fugal pieces. In this period of time, I also created a process of translating spoken interviews with individuals into musical scores, turning the content of their life stories into metaphorical music motifs.

Writing and singing original alternative-pop songs with the Lovesick Cows on the side, while cameoing on texture-oriented saxophone playing with an old friend's band, Jehova's Waitress, I eventually met two musicians in New York City and the band Hooch started. We signed a record contract with the label Futurist with our brand of semi-experimental pop music. After our record was released, the vocalist left to pursue a film-maker and we became another pop entity altogether. I took on the majority of the songwriting, vocals, and lyrical chores as a frontperson for Loving Trance. At the same time, I remixed some of our original songs into deep house pieces. While I gained proficiency in sequencers, I started admiring the skills of rap and hip hop producers and how their art was, in fact, a logical coninuum of r&b music. The syncopated hip hop, house and disco rhythms rekindled my love of the dancefloor, which had been dormant since my punk and hardcore heydays. Slowly, in true connect-the-dots fashion, I back-traced my path across hard house, deep and garage house, acid, techno, ambient, bungra, drums and bass, industrial until I reached my original fascination with those adrenaline-filled soundtracks from 70's blaxploitation and detective car-chase movies. I also got reacquainted with all the body language I knew, as a child growing up in the disco era watching overweight foghat fans stomping on records en masse at a football stadium. I combined my perceptions of what fashion runway music is with the string overlays in Italian romance movies, and the Brodie-5 sound was born. On the quiet side, I started rediscovering the piano as well. Now I play the piano exclusively and quite amateurly, I might add. My love is in the Tudorian pieces of William Byrd and Orlando Gibbons, as well as the fugal music of J.S. Bach.