Background

In March of 2022, I went into the studio with a few fellow jazz majors from the University of North Texas to record my original tunes. I had graduated from UNT three months prior and much of this music was performed on my masters recital. My first two albums were mostly jazz fusion arrangements of Eastern European traditional music I made with San Francisco players after coming back from studying in Bulgaria in 2015. This one would feature my original composition for all tracks except the American folk song, “St. James Infirmary.”

We recorded seven tunes, six of which made it onto the album. Two of them were written around 2010 when I was an undergraduate in Reno: “On the Dinosaur Dance Floor,” and “Around the Dial.” In those days my career as a full time musician was just starting and I didn’t have the confidence to record my music, so I focused on getting experience touring, composing, and performing wherever I could.

In my San Francisco years (2013-19) there were times I was juggling ten bands as a full time member or frequent sub. These included gypsy swing and jazz ensembles, Irish and Scandinavian string trios, even a baroque orchestra, playing Monteverdi and Purcell. In retrospect this deep dive into radically different traditions helped me add a lot of elements to my toolbox as a composer and improviser.

Traders of the Lost Arts (2018) and The Fast Crusade (2019) were made toward the end of this time. I had grown from a teenage rock guitarist who studied classical playing and bebop in school to a full time working musician with a jaded outlook on economic prospects for a full time musician on the west coast. I decided it was time to try my hand at academia more seriously with the hopes of finding a steady job, and began applying for graduate schools. I was accepted at Frost School of Music at the University of Miami and USC Thornton School of Music in Los Angeles, but decided on UNT and moved to Denton, TX in the summer of 2019.

“Sugarcane,” “Sonder,” and “Two Straight Lines” were written between fall of 2019 and 2021 while I was a student at UNT, and would not have been produced in any other context. They were directly inspired by my musical experiences with that community in that time and place.

The Pandemic Era

The Covid pandemic hit during spring break of my second semester, which mostly brought the student music scene to a halt. In that first pre-Covid semester I remember house parties packed with people, multiple bands playing original music, and several venues in town offering cheap drink music nights. My impression was that music majors had a lot of opportunities to experiment with projects and play and hear each other outside of school. When UNT made the call to extend spring break an extra week and keep the campus highly restricted for the remainder of the semester, the situation seemed very serious.

Despite the strong opinions flying around, none of us were sure how serious it really was. Even I had taken to wiping groceries down with antiseptics. Among high performing music majors is a tendency for neuroticism, obsessive thinking and attention to detail. I saw the mental health of many of my peers rapidly decline, not only because of the bummer of losing the opportunities that made being a music student fruitful, nor the general anxiety and uncertainty of watching such a dramatic crackdown come all the way from the top of the chain of command, but because when economic times are hard the arts are the first thing to go, and go they did. Musicians saw our income drop suddenly, and in some cases, completely. Many of us who were supporting ourselves and had put our whole lives into music found ourselves in a situation in which we had no other marketable skill sets and nowhere to work. The government-issued unemployment checks that many people used and abused were mostly unavailable to artists who couldn’t demonstrate a lost steady income from a single employer.

Texas has a strong libertarian culture that opposed authoritative insistence on the restriction of social gathering or business, but many of the musicians I knew were too afraid of getting sick or being shamed to perform. Those who did usually wore masks and often went outside to be away from people between sets. Musicians outwardly judged and criticized each other for not being strict enough about social distancing, but we all knew we were hurting and it wasn’t that simple. A lot of friendships and working relationships were permanently damaged by this. By the fall of 2020 I was gigging again. I took almost every paid opportunity I could to perform, including indoor parties and dance clubs, and probably got a boost to my longer-term presence in the Dallas scene for being one of the musicians willing to work during this time.

The Album

By the time we recorded All Hands Up in 2022 I had been mostly working in classic rock and soul/funk/R&B cover bands. It was a labor of love to get my music I’d had for over a decade recorded with my peers. Like my masters program at UNT, I funded it completely with my own savings. This music is not only a product of my development as a musician over more than a decade’s time, but the pandemic era and the unique experience of being surrounded by passionate young music students, eager to do something unique while navigating the hardships and politics of the most extreme social era of America since the 1960s.

The title of “On the Dinosaur Dance Floor” relates to a site in southern Bolivia in which the largest recorded collection of dinosaur tracks had been found by a team of researchers in 1994. The intro reminds me of them stomping around, and the chaos of a world in which the apex predators are carnivorous beasts with no intellectual or ethical concerns.

“Sugarcane” is about a quote a yoga teacher I used to know in Reno had pencilled on her wall: As life chews me up, may I be like sugarcane and only get sweeter.

“Around the Dial” was a clock-themed tune I wrote when I had a band in Reno called Clock’s Magic Bandits, and was inspired by Allan Holdsworth pieces I was learning like, “Devil Take the Hindmost.”

In 2021 I was watching a video about obscure words, and “Sonder” came up, defined in the video as: the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own. I later learned that this definition was a recent invention by John Koenig, published in his Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, but in German the same word means special, and in French it means to probe. Somehow all of these seem appropriate to my tune so I never changed the title.

“Two Straight Lines” is a theme to the heartbreak of two people, at least one of whom wants their private lives to intersect, but for reasons out of their control they are doomed to be parallel and never come together.

“St. James Infirmary” is the only track with a true group improvisation. We play the melody a few times at the beginning and again at the end, but the bulk of the performance is free-form. This is an approach to music that no one at UNT really did while I was there, but free jazz and post-jazz improvisation was a major element of the performance philosophy at UNR when I was an undergrad. “St. James” likely has its origins in Britain but was popularized in the jazz canon by Louis Armstrong and Cab Calloway. The popular version is told from the perspective of a man who goes down to the morgue to identify his woman who is dead on the table. I decided to base this free improvisation on the perspective of the dead woman, and explore the frightening imagery and uncertainty that may accompany the death experience.