Photo by Mark Sheldon

It’s been a long time since May 2012 — it turns out that I don’t have the gift for regular blogging that I thought I possessed. In fact, I went exactly against my original mission laid out in my first post to provide regular, meaningful updates instead of a static, boring website. Well, I’m happy to return here to have some news actually worth reporting.

Debut Album
My trio has finally recorded its first album! We’ve recorded it at the beginning of February, and we haven’t finished mixing it yet, but I am extremely pleased with the results, and am looking forward to releasing a debut recording — a move that, like this post, is extremely overdue! It’s a trio recording with the wonderful bassist Nick Tucker and excellent drummer Greg Artry. We’ve been playing every Thursday night at the Chatterbox the past couple of years, developing a good rapport and developing a bunch of material. The album will largely feature my original music — mostly trio, with a couple of solo piano tracks — and a couple standards. More news will come as the album progresses!

Lone Prairie

I’ve also had the great opportunity to work with the guitarist Corey Christiansen. I played keyboards, piano, and even audio synthesis programs I wrote in SuperCollider, on his new album Lone Prairie, which came out on Origin Records July 2013. The album is composed of electric jazz covers of cowboy songs, which I think makes for a pretty standard jazz release. I got to play alongside musicians I very much admire — also playing keyboards on the album was Steve Allee, Jeremy Allen on bass, Michael Spiro on percussion, and Matt Jorgenson on drums. We basically made the jazz version of a Quentin Tarantino movie, but with fewer instances of gratuitous violence and references to Sonny Chiba movies. Getting to use SuperCollider was a blast as well — I never thought I’d use any of the stuff I do in my computer music experiments on a jazz album. On the album you can hear a pantheon of weird sounds I made, including recording the end of a burning cigarette and running it through a feedback delay line, which I believe may be the first time that that’s been done on a jazz album, at least intentionally. You can buy it on Origin’s Website, iTunes, Amazon, or anywhere else quality electric cowboy jazz is sold.

Lil BUB

Those who would like to get their playing out to the most people possible should look no further than hitching their wagon to an internet-famous cat. I am the pianist on internet-cat-phenomenon Lil BUB’s Big Show, where you can hear me play synthesizer on the theme song, as well as improvise on Lil BUB’s theme song in a variety of different styles, a different one featured in each episode with guests like Steve Albini and Whoopi Goldberg. I also am playing on her Animal Planet special. In fact, Andrew W.K. is miming my piano part, banged out on the semi-tuned piano in Bloomington’s Russian Recording.

Other Gigs

I’ve had the excellent fortune to play with a number of musicians touring through the Midwest the past two years — these include Wycliffe Gordon, Tessa Souter, Nicole Henry, Alexis Cole, and even ELZHI of Slum Village.

Thanks for reading! Stay tuned for more news!