One thing that has been on my mind lately is community.  I’ve been reflecting on how grateful I am for the communities around me (via some essays for a workshop application) and the fascinating ways in which they intersect.  Salsa dancers and journalists, undergraduate music majors, bloggers, community activists, jazz elders, marketers, neighborhood associations, theater employees, rich entertainment clients, local politicians: I affect and am affected by my participation in all of these and more.  I am only a moderate Facebook-user, and I am new to Twitter.  At that reasonable level of non-addiction it is easy to see how these technologies really do help connect busy people to each others’ happenings, even if is only by a thin, virtual fishing line.

On a different topic, I recently reconnected with my good friend Yuri, who talked about self-publishing, pedagogy and education in the “real world” (outside of the university system) and the specific desire to start a blog/internet resource for more advanced, but ever-exploring jazz pianists along the lines of NewMusicBox.  If I were to find time to be a member of the writing team, one of my first posts would most certainly be about injury-preventive technique.  I’ve managed to avoid back and wrist pain in my playing for quite some time, but with some increased stress they have returned.  The prerogative is to recognize the whole-body athleticism of piano playing and develop a pre-cognitive body awareness that allows you to naturally support your body and use your muscles without undue wear-and-tear.  The result can be liberating.  Though I am early on my journey here, I can recommend two great resources:

1. this book: What Every PIanist Needs To Know About The Body, by Thomas Mark.  Not an anatomy reference tome, but rather a guided practice to how the body works when it is at the piano.

2. this person: Barbara Lister-Sink.  Only an hour from where I live resides a super-friendly piano health guru, with a great DVD and training curriculum to boot.  I saw her give a workshop and I’ll certainly be back for more.

The purpose of these techniques isn’t just to prevent injury, but rather to liberate the body so that a deeper musician expression might be executed, unencumbered by any form of resistance, physical, mental, or otherwise.

One last note before I head off to rehearsal: I am still in love with “Vento Em Madeira” by Lea Freire.  Soundtrack of my life!

Last night I heard Branford Marsalis and Philarmonia Brasileira play a piece by this composer.  Beautiful!

Have a great Friday.

Anyone who has been keeping track of my shows calendar has noticed that it has recently exploded with an abundance of Beast gigs.  I’m thrilled about this, it’s great to watch that band really get off the ground, but I certainly miss the weeks where one night I played jazz at a club, another was an improv comedy show: the variety of artistic experience was really rewarding.

This week, a project near and dear to my heart returns for the first time in years: a modern jazz ensemble that plays my own compositions.  Back in 2005-2006 you might have remembered a group called PrimeraJazz.  It was led by percussionist (and great friend) Brevan Hampden and featured a rotating cast of fiery young jazz cats playing moody, out-there, bacchic latin jazz.  We held down Thursday nights at Tallulas in Chapel Hill for awhile, the vibe was fantastic.  Well, this week that group returns with much of its original lineup in tact: myself on piano, Pete Kimosh on bass, Stephen Coffman on drums, Brevan Hampden on percussion, and Al Strong on trumpet.  Rehearsals have been a lot of fun: most of us have only gotten to play jazz in damped-down restaurant and wedding settings lately, so here is a chance to really let go.  We’ll be performing this Friday at the North Carolina Museum of Art as part of their Art in the Evenings series.  There will be Cuban food and Latin American wines, and the galleries will be open for late viewing.  It should be a great hang.  I even get to play on a real grand piano (don’t get me started on what a luxury this is for the contemporary gigging jazz pianist)!  This will more than likely be our only appearance in 2008: here’s hoping we can find some more venues and become a Triangle mainstay in 2009 (which is fast approaching!).

In other news, The Beast travels to New York City this weekend for the final round of auditions for Rhythm Road: American Music Abroad, which is something of a jazz ambassadors international tour hosted by the US State Department and Jazz at the Lincoln Center.  Wish us luck!

UPDATE:

Sylvia blogs about this event here.

(here are the links if you can’t see the embedded videos: first clip, second clip, third clip)

This weekend is the Shakori Hills Grassroots Music Festival and The Beast is appearing on the main stage Friday 10/10 at 5:45pm.  If you want to hear some great music and relive your Woodstock days, head on down to Silk Hope, NC!

I’m particularly excited for the next morning when we’ll be a featured interview on NPR/WUNC’s “The State of Things.”  We’ll be talking to Frank Stasio live and also performing live in the studio.  I’ve recorded interviews for Zenph to tape but never for live broadcast, so this will be a first for me.  I’m thrilled, but a little nervous of course.

The show is at Broad Street Cafe, 1116 Broad Street, in Durham, North Carolina.  It is free and starts around 10pm.  They have a new pizza oven and lots of beers on tap, albums will be only $5, I’d love to see you there!  I’ll soon post where you can get the album at local stores, and an e-tailer will be set up soon enough.  I’ll also post a track here on my site for your listening pleasure.

To tune into “The State of Things”, set your dial to 91.5 FM at 12pm Friday 9/12, or if you aren’t local catch the online stream here.

****UPDTATE 09/12/08 4:36pm****

The show went great!  Here is the link to download the mp3.

http://wunc.org/tsot/archive/sot0912c08.mp3/view

But I digress. Next week I’ll be announcing some really big things for my hip hop band, The Beast. For now we’ll say that it involves dope beats, a gospel choir, Nnenna Freelon, crazy-awesome graphic art, NPR, and a club near you.. I haven’t properly introduced The Beast on this blog, so I’ll give some background, pics, music next week. In the meantime, I’m really excited to share with you the result of our first year’s work together. It will all have to wait for my cable modem though..

I just spent lunch catching up with my brother, Greg, before he heads back to college. We started comparing iTunes libraries and musical tastes which highlighted my continued disinterest in/aversion to giving rank or superlative to music that I like. I am very much an intuitive person, many times at the expense of my ability to process the world rationally or articulate an intellectual point to someone. My conversation with Greg got me excited enough to realize I do have favorite music, it’s just that the reason for picking it all is a strange combination of irrational and aesthetic.

I’ve noticed it is easier for me to have favorite individual works. But there are a few albums that have come into my life that I can listen to all the way through over and over again and still feel that profound sense of joy and alive-ness. And, like many people, I tend to fondly associate each album with a certain time in my life. Here they are in something of an order:

10. Henry Purcell, Dido and Æneas

What? A baroque opera? A graduate student in musicology could probably inform you that this is nowhere near the greatest opera of the period, or that I should be checking out other aspects of Purcell’s career. But, hey, I like this one. We’re so used to rich, textural film scores and crazy layers of sound. I like that this music can still feel so powerful and beautiful with only a continuo and an SATB choir. Perhaps I’m a sucker for fairly obvious tonal motion. But man, that choral finale (”With Drooping Wings”)? Takes my breath away.

9. Foreighn Exchange, Connected

I first heard this album over the PA while breaking down after a gig. After hearing the first few beats I dropped everything and asked the drummer “What is this??” This collaboration between local emcee Phonte and Dutch producer Nicolay is a cover-to-cover hip hop masterpiece, especially the beats. You can really lose yourself in the aural space created by the production on each track. The music psychologist in me is absolutely fascinated by Nicolay’s use of microtiming within the rhythmic rhetoric of the drums. When I first moved to Durham, this is all I listened to in the car for a month.

8. Adam Guettel, The Light In The Piazza

Easily my favorite musical of the latter-20th-century (probably because it aligns closer to contemporary opera than Broadway drivel). I spent an afternoon talking shop with Adam once, such a humble and generous guy! After making it’s way to Broadway and going on an American tour, LITP gets it’s operatic premiere (that is, staged by an opera company, not a theater company) in Winston-Salem, NC this October.

7. Jazzanova, In Between

Most of the techno I listen to falls in downtempo/nu-jazz/drum n’ bass/IDM territory. If I had to pick a favorite album amongst all of theseIn Between would be the clear winner. A really catchy blend of old jazz samples, new compositional ideas, sultry vocal hooks, and pseudo-Brazillian grooves. Each track is really multifaceted and tells a story.

6. LP Outsiders, All Purpose Crackers

Although this now-retired band is based out of my hometown, St. Louis, Missouri, I only got hip to this CD after I had moved to North Carolina (and a friend back in St. Louis sent it to me). For me it’s a testament to the gems of independent music culture: somewhere out there, in a town you’ve never visited, there is a band making amazingly high-quality awesome music. I really like the versatile blending of 2 male and 1 female lead singer (and they play trumpet, trumpet, flute, respectively). This was my “I just moved to North Carolina” CD. It has shades of Jamiroquai and Maroon 5 (who hadn’t even formed by the time of this release).

5. Israel, Whisper It Loud

The Christians in the house will recognize the name Israel Houghton as the leader of “Israel & New Breed,” a successful worship music franchise that fuses elements of gospel, jazz, and funk. But years and years before you could see him at every mega-church, he quietly put out this album, which has been out of print for quite some time. My father and I led the youth band at our church when I was a young teenager. Another music director lent us this CD and we fell in love. Simply put, this is some of the most cogent Christian songwriting I’ve ever heard. The arrangements and musicians are dope, the lyrics are poignant (rather than vaguely preachy), and Israel himself is just a fantastic vocalist. Find your own copy on eBay today!

4. Frou Frou, Details

I’ll admit that I got hip to Frou Frou like everyone else: watching the end credits to Garden State in the movie theater. But rather than go get the soundtrack, I went straight for the source. This gets my vote for “Best All Time Pop Record.” The songs are pop. But the production is perfect. Guy Sigsworth really knows how to give you a lot of enveloping ear candy without taking away from the meaning of the song itself. This record is so influential on me that it is difficult for me not to emulate it when trying to work on some electro-pop songs.

3. Dave Grusin, West Side Story

West Side Story easily gets my vote for best work of musical theatre. And lots of people have covered the songs from the show (from Oscar Peterson to bazillions of pop orchestras). But Dave Grusin, arranger for the GRP All-Star Big Band was somehow able to understand the original orchestrations, infuse them with even more jazz and Latin music, and come out with something better than the original (!!). This is my favorite big band album for such lush but rhythmic arrangements, chords that are so angular but still true to Bernstein. And it features some of the best New York jazz cats. My old piano teacher gave me a cassette tape that had “America” on it, and I wore it through until I could get the CD.

2. Kurt Elling, Man In The Air

Honestly, it’s really hard for me to listen to most contemporary jazz albums all they way through. If everyone is covering the same standards or writing the same kind of 7/4-polytonal-hiphop originals, then the end product is pretty hit-or-miss. And let’s not get started on jazz vocalists. Since when did it become OK to add horrendous lyrics to just-fine-as-is Monk compositions? Diana Krall and Harry Connick don’t count. But along comes this guy Kurt Elling, who used to be in Divinity School, is not afraid to explore the full range and timbre of his instrument, and is known to bust out an improvised rendition of a Shakespeare sonnet in the middle of “My Foolish Heart.” Something is going on here. Elling writes strange, spiritual, compelling original lyrics to carefully selected previous jazz works. And I think his pianist, Laurence Hobgood, is an underdog. When he solos, it makes me listen. There is something so clear about his ideas, as if he was playing for you as much as he was playing for himself. Also, I wish I had his job. I’ve met Kurt a few times at shows and IAJE conferences: another guy who is refreshingly humble and very Aware of his musical purpose.

And Eric’s Number One Favorite Album of all time….

1. Katia Labèque Band, Unspoken

If I had to sum up all of my inspirations and passions about music and find one existing work that represented it, it would be this album. Classical/jazz pianist Katia Labèque teams up with electronic composer David Maric and ridiculous drummer Marque Gilmore to produce a tremendously beautiful set of pieces. A really evocative balance of rich piano sonorities, subtle electronics, staggered beats, neo-romanticism, a large harmonic vocabulary (from atonalism to pandiatonicism), with jazz and drum n’ bass influences. But enough of the intellectual labels. I can’t say enough about this album (and you can see I once enthusiastically posted a review). I know Katia and David have long since moved on to other projects, but I would love to see a live tour happen again. Sadly, the way I found out about this music was from my best friend, who had gone to the concert at UNC the night before (I didn’t even know about it) and bought the album there. This is music that breathes and flows. I’d love to make a living doing this.

So there you have it! What trends or themes do you notice in this list? What is missing? What might it say about me? And most importantly, what are you’re Top 10 Favorite Albums, and why? Let the comments begin!

The show had a great run and John Q. Walker (Zenph founder) couldn’t be happier. For such a small software company to write, hire, design, promote, and produce a show and have a strong NYC opening in only four and a half months is quite a feat; I need to take a moment to be very proud of that.

On opening night I was approached by jazz pianist Phineas Newborn Jr’s widow and son, who were both very moved (even by the live playing of Art Tatum alone) and couldn’t wait for Zenph to bring Phineas back to the stage. Sunday’s show was buttoned with a ceremony where Zenph conducted the donation of Tatum’s estate by Geraldine (Tatum’s widow) to the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, which includes not only Tatum’s suits and Grammy, but also his Steinway piano!

This is the first time I’ve managed/produced such a large project, and it turned out I was more than capable (not without a requisite amount of anxiety). I was also happy to be a theatrical sound designer again, a hat I haven’t worn since college. Although I don’t feel destined for a career as a Broadway bigshot (too much inauthenticity), the real-life (and sometimes sobering) education I received while managing this show will certainly apply to many areas as I move forward in an entertainment industry career.

But now it’s time to put down the cell phone and the business cards and return to the practice room. Learning about music administration on your feet comes at the price of time to compose, arrange, and hone your craft. For the second half of this summer I will re-center myself, return all the way to my artistic roots (perhaps for the first time), figure out what it really is that I want out of an artistic life, and go from there.

I have been blogging about Zenph and Orquesta GarDel, and soon I will introduce you to The Beast, a hip hop/jazz/soul collaborative that I have been writing and performing with since last summer.  I’ve been longing to consistently rehearse and perform with a jazz trio, a project which might finally materialize in the next few weeks. I feel long overdue for my next round of original jazz compositions, I just need a vehicle to perform them.

When I read back on what I have just written, how can I not feel an extraordinary sense of gratitude for the people, gifts, and opportunities in life?

Thanks for all the support and well-wishes over the past few weeks, and stay tuned for some new developments! Downtown Durham will be a welcoming sight.

Here is the link:

http://www.newsobserver.com/105/story/1116398.html

Enjoy!