Welcome!
I am a percussionist, music-lover, chamber musician, teacher, curator, writer, and life-long learner.
I’ve moved most frequent updates to my two newsletters:
Older news below:
NEWS
Tight Sweater
New Vid Alert!
Stay at home orders don’t stop New Morse Code and Thomas Kotcheff. We had a blast with the first movement of Marc Mellits’ Tight Sweater (“Exposed Zipper”), tracking from KC, Chicago, and LA. Enjoy!
Cleveland
Back at Avaloch after a great few days in Cleveland for Cleveland Uncommon Sound Project’s Re:Sound Festival. Congrats to Noa and Sophie for all their work organizing the events.
NMC presented George Lam’s The Emigrants and Christopher Stark’s The Language of Landscapes, two amazing pieces about important issues facing our society. We also premiered Andrew Lucia’s stunning new video for The Language of Landscapes. It was also great to share a bill with andPlay, our NYC-based nemesis duo (just kidding).
pc Emanuel Wallace
Friends!
Next up, the music of Hannah Lash in St. Louis, for which I’ll be busting out my trusty cheat sheets:
And All the Days Were Purple
So happy for Alex Weiser’s new album, just released on Cantaloupe Music.
Alex sets Yiddish and English poems with beauty, grace, and poignancy. I was proud to be able to contribute a little bit of vibraphone and glockenspiel, and to be part of such an amazing ensemble : Eliza Bagg (voice), Lee Dionne (piano), andPlay (Maya Bennardo and Hannah Levinson, and Hannah Collins (cello)
Alex wrote a nice blog post about the album’s genesis HERE. This project hits home for me. It combines study of archival texts, personal cultural history, and new work which rethinks historical ideas. Alex is the perfect composer to tackle these texts, and the disc is really amazing.
At the same time, being on a Cantaloupe release has been a dream of mine for many years, since my first year at the Bang on a Can Summer Festival, when I realized all my favorite music was being released by one record company. As always, it was a privilege to record at Oktaven Audio.
Listen and purchase here, or below:
Dream Team!
And find a common language that we could speak
Practicing George Lam's "The Emigrants" before New Morse Code premieres the piece next week in Queens. In this movement, "Translations," George has Hannah and I weave in and out of unison with the spoken text. How am I doing?
Heard in this excerpt are:
Chris Yip, NYPD sergeant and pianist
Hikaru Tamaki, cellist, member of Duo YUMENO 夢乃
Nivedita Shrivraj, Carnatic musician
Harold Gutierrez, composer
Catharsis Update
Last summer, Hannah and I spent a week with David Crowell at Avaloch, workshopping his new piece for cello/percussion and pre-recorded cello/percussion. We spent a few days at Guilford Sound tracking, and David has been busy mixing the piece, adding some synthesizer parts and fine tuning the sound.
I’m happy to report that Catharsis is done. Two movements, each of which includes multiple cello and percussion parts. Take a listen here:
I can’t wait to play this piece with the rest of the consortium!