I've been planning on posting a series of stories from some of my road trips, and today on twitter I got the inspiration to kick it off. Guitarist Rob Michael (@AtmosTrio) sent out a 'tweet' with the hashtag #cheesegigthrowdown, asking musicians to share their lamest gig moment. It got me thinking about not just my most lame gig but one disastrous road trip.
When I was living in Brooklyn, I had avoided touring the US because the cities were so far between and so much driving was involved with shitty food along the way. In 2003 I decided to go for it. Yeah! My album "Live in Europe" had just been released, I had hired a radio promoter and I had invitations to play at nice venues in North Carolina, Virginia, Ohio and Michigan. So I grabbed my boys, bassist Matt Pavolka and drummer/hubby Scott McLemore and off we drove in our fabulous Ford Windstar. (read more…)
Lately, I have had the good fortune of being featured on other people's blogs. Trumpeter Jason Parker from Seattle is an active blogger who features other musicians every Friday and calls it Makin' it Happen. Well last Friday he was kind enough to feature yours truly, which you can read here.
Slightly further to the north, Ottawa-based reviewer Peter Hum just posted a review of my album "Songs from Iceland" on his jazzblog.ca where he calls it "… a warm, satisfying blend of rigor and freedom." You can read that here and leave comments too.
Interestingly both Parker and Hum bring up my catchphrase "bridging the Brooklyn-Reykjavik jazz divide with European elegance and a fiery New York drive." This was actually a homework assignment for a course I took (read more…)
This is just a short little note to announce that I will be performing in a duo setting with guitarist Andres Thor, Wednesday November 6th. We are doing a 30 minute lunch hour concert at the Nordic House in Reykjavik, as a part of a concert series organized by the University of Iceland. Show time is at 12:30pm. We will be premiering two tunes. One is a composition of mine that has been given the title "Long Pair Bond". The title was suggested to me on Facebook and you can read all about it in my previous post Name That Tune…My Listeners Did.
I was very much inspired by the submissions and wrote a new tune last Friday that I call "Autumnalia". That title was suggested by Michael Paul Pavlic. Thank you Michael. You can see a video of me playing it on Facebook.
