Greetings all. Major changes in the past little while:

1. I said goodbye to the Glenn Miller Orchestra in April of 2016, and hello to Basic Military Training in May of 2016. My seven years touring the world with the GMO were in short amazing, scintillating and full of seven times seven years worth of life and relationships.

2. The USAF Band of the Golden West is now my home, and what a wonderful home it is. I also have family in northern California, by pure coincidence, so it’s a great fortune that I was stationed here. The Air Force is also an intensely supportive organization, and a great place of thriving for a full-time musician with diverse musical and knowledge interests. In fact, I may be teaching a course on base soon. More on that later.

3. Slowbern continues to burn like an ember in the background. Gigs this last December and January went very well, and soothed my jazz soul. We will have a record release on December 23rd, 2017 at Chris’ Jazz Cafe in Philadelphia. Online release is November 1st, so keep an eye on the relevant sections of the website for that. The album will be available via CD Baby and affiliates, Bandcamp, and Spotify. I have a team of folks working hard to get this off the ground and into the right hands so that it gets heard by enough ears. I’m currently scouting for a venue for the west coast edition of the band, and we may do some kind of west coast release some time at the beginning of next year if I can find a monthly residency. Ideas fully welcome here; area of possibility includes Vacaville/Fairfield, Davis, and Sacramento.

4. I also released Starlight Serenade with pianist Quin Arbeitman, a duo CD of mainly original compositions, in Japan. We toured the CD all over that country for three weeks in July and are currently working on stateside rights for the handful of licensed tunes on the record. We are holding off on electronic releases for now, until we can get the full battery of international rights squared away (as it turns out, there’s a reason that US and Japanese release of albums are typically quite different, and it all has to do with licensing fees and legal requirements). Quin and his wife were amazing hosts, and a number of enriching friendships from across the years continue. My spirit home is always calling to me, and thankfully I can still afford to go there from time to time and enjoy a nice jazz vacation.

5. Next project: my original composition for saxophone quintet which was debuted in January at Andrea Clearfield’s Salon. The first draft played at the Salon was more or less a sketch; the full butterfly will be premiered at the International Saxophone Symposium in Fairfax, VA on January 12th or 13th, with the USAF Band of the Golden West Saxophones, aka Delta Burst. The program will also feature my arrangement of the Air Force Hymn and a brand new commission by Gordon Goodwin. My excitement is brimming on this, and as we still await our final time slot, I’m also working in some teaching days for us out on the east coast. This event is free and open to the public, so if you find yourself in the DC area on the weekend of January 12th, come on out!

6. I’ve been enjoying monthly theme concerts at Shine in Sacramento with Tenor Explosion, featuring four tenor saxophones and rhythm section. For August we played the music of Radiohead, September was Michael Jackson, and the October 26th show will feature music from the film, O Brother Where Art Thou? The concerts are totally free and occur at 8pm once per month, followed by an open jam session for the community. Keep an eye on the Tenor Explosion Facebook page for more on these shows.

There is a lot more to come in this space, and updates on all of the above. I promise! One thing I’ve learned in the last few years: don’t bother with SEO. Instead, have a decent, simple website with good content and some kind of track record of accomplishing things. Even a minimal one like mine is enough to keep you at the top of searches, apparently. Thanks again to Bristow for setting this up, and finally kicking me in the pants to update it and continue building an online presence.

In the past year or so, my interest in a number of subjects has been rekindled. I’m working on that novel again, studying Japanese and chess for real, and shooting that stick bow every now and again. That may seem like a monumental workload, but thanks to fellow thinker Scott Young I have a lot of ammunition going into these learning projects.

Quin offered the idea of generating incentive for me to continue writing by posting snippets of the novel here on the site. Once I can get another text embed on a separate page going, I’ll begin posting draft portions. If it’s something you seem to be interested in, I’ll keep it going with monthly excerpts. If not, I’ll still do it but offer them as private links for draft readers to critique as the process continues.

I’ve also become interested in furthering my education and knowledge through a few simple tools. One of them is Crash Course, a great educational YouTube channel that acts as a video version of Very Short Introductions to a number of subjects. The world history and philosophy courses were particularly good for long car rides. Sam Harris’s podcast has also filled up a lot of my driving and cooking time in the last few months. We don’t see eye to eye on every little thing, but much like his interactions with the folks he has on the podcast, I find this to be the knowledge intersection where good discourse happens. Sam’s gift of attracting intellects from all walks of life has steered me in a lot of good directions, and his commitment to meditation has gotten me back on track with that as well.

It’s great that this type of open content is offered for free due in large part to the services of Patreon and the like. I may need to get involved with them if I’m going to offset the $(value redacted; it’s a lot) I’ve already spent out of pocket on this big band album, but only time will tell if that’s sustainable and I can produce enough content to make it worth your while. As always, your input is welcome and encouraged. Until next time!

On the road with the band as usual, and the bus is rolling along. After a brief spike in interest about a year ago, I took a year off of chess to pursue other interests and focus on music. Somewhere, somehow, about a week ago, everyone in the band started playing all at once, and I’ve caught the fire once again. I’d like to review the movie from which this post takes its name, a great performance by John Turturro and proof that chess can be as nail-biting as any sport out there. Currently I have nine games going at any given time, and I seem to win about half of them. I’m studying and learning all that I can about this funny little game and all the logic that goes into it. Can you guess which of the following luminaries are chess players? Or rather, which are bad chess players?

“Chess is ludicrously difficult.” -Stephen Fry
“Chess is one long regret.” -Stephen Leacock
“Chess is a sad waste of brains.” -Sir Walter Scott
“Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency.” -Raymond Chandler
“Chess is not a game but a disease.” -Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman
“Chess is one of the sins of pride.” -John Bromyard
“Chess is a game of courteous aggression.” -Julian Barnes
“Chess is a game of skill and not of genius.” -William Hazlitt
“Chess is both profoundly trivial and trivially profound.” -George Steiner
“The best chess-player in Christendom may be little more than the best player of chess but proficiency in whist implies capacity for success in all those more important undertakings where mind struggles with mind.” -Edgar Allan Poe (whist is some sort of card came comparable to Checkers in its scope)
“Chess is a game of bad moves.” -Andrew Soltis

Soltis is a Grandmaster who has written extensively on the game. The others are critics, politicians, writers etc. who either barely knew the moves or likely had some bad experience losing to a more experienced opponent. Hazlitt hits it nearest the mark. Granted, there is a huge learning curve in this game compared to the majority of simple board games and card games. I suppose the fact that familiarity and experience both trump innate ability and genius has frustrated many an example of said geniuses, where games like checkers (“draughts”) or whist have a much faster learning curve and thus allow the mentally mighty to flex their cranial muscles straight away. I like Fry’s application of witticism to indicate his frustration with (but deep respect for) the game.

It is, after all, just a game, and that’s often forgotten by the layperson. Chess is stereotypically lauded as this crowning mental achievement which pits the greatest minds against one another. True, it possesses an innate depth and a catalogue of variations beyond the capacity of your typical mind to come by with any rapidity… but it is still just a game. The most avid chess players in the world will be quick to tell you that, and researchers who were seeking an affirmative have instead found little support for the notion that chess aids in applicable meta-skills like mnemonic recall, foresight, strategic planning, critical thinking etc. This might be a typical confusion of correlation with causation: perhaps people who already have a knack for these principles will gravitate toward the game, but chess probably doesn’t make their innate predilections any better. Only the player who has some skill with analogy and active powers of broad speculation will find chess as informative to his other skill sets and pastimes.

Here’s an attempt to do just that. Though I disagree somewhat with the premises, I admire the effort and I think making these types of analogies is at the heart of building strong connections between devoted skill sets. Seeing analogies, no matter how skewed or faulty (every analogy has its faults and the point at which it breaks down or becomes meaningless), is a great mental exercise and can help to fortify one skill with another. Perhaps comparing a musical art form to a strategy board game is a tall order, and any coherent effort should be admired. Why not? Maybe I should think of my own analogy between these two near and dear pursuits, and see if the results have any effect on the way I perceive them in the moment. Perhaps Magnus should take up saxophone and see where that gets him?

Welcome to the site. It’s pretty sparse at the moment but I almost prefer it that way. Thanks to my buddy Mike over at Dobis for building this for me, and giving me the motivation to create some kind of an online presence. It won’t be much for now but it will be fun with any luck. I’ll try to update this page monthly or so as things roll along merrily.

I’m currently on the road with the Miller band, hitting it hard with shows almost every day for the next month or so. We have a recording session coming up on February 1st, and last minute preparations for it are coming together nicely. After that the tour takes us out west, through the desert and the mountains all the way up the west coast, winding up in Seattle in mid April for a nice stint at Benaroya Hall. Geographically speaking, this is my favorite tour since I joined the band in 2009. After Seattle we head home for a nice Spring break and recharge.

I’ve decided to spend my break in Japan, partly because the Japan tour at the end of 2013 is so far my top life experience and I simply cannot wait to return. I’ve made so many new friends, found new places to jam, and shared my music with some very important people in and around Fukuoka. These were deeply enriching experiences which felt, somehow, incomplete as of mid-December. I’m hoping to complete the circle as it were.

Something else I’m very excited about: my album debuted at #14 on the CMJ jazz charts this week. Not too shabby, though to be perfectly honest, I don’t know exactly what this means. If I do come up with the answer, I’ll let you know! Glasswork has also been getting some decent radio play and one reviewer had a really positive and insightful reaction to the music. I’m excited to see what the future brings with respect to this music, and frankly relieved to finally have it documented in a form that I’m happy with. Check out the projects page for more info.

Speaking of, due to a mountain of backlogged work and a busy road schedule, creative projects are mostly on hold for a minute. But I have plenty on my plate coming up for this year, including a novel (formerly graphic novel) based on the thematic material of Glasswork; another story that came to me in three dreams which I’m itching to get out in a rough draft; a solo album of all-woodwind music to be recorded by my dear friend Alan Ens; and a number of other things which you can find some info about elsewhere on the site. I’m finishing up some arrangements for another dear friend, Gary Meggs, and listening to the complete Beethoven string quartets as performed by the Alban Berg quartet, in the meantime.

Long story short: life is pretty cool right now. I hope it is for you too. Care be taken, until next time.