I was there for a week around the start of the festival, and it could have been an experiment in how to get on stage in the shortest amount of time.  I scouted out some live venues early in the week, met some local artists, and by Thursday I was making guest appearances at Union Street Station bar, Kilkenny's Irish Pub, and a martini piano bar called Beacon Lounge on the 10th floor of the Park Place Hotel.  Highlights include meeting singer-songwriter Levi Britton, who let me sit in on his Union Street gig, and Tom Kaufman from Beacon Lounge. 

Levi is an incredible performer, and if I closed my eyes I could have sworn I was listening to Martin Sexton.  Post-Jager-shots, it turns out, Levi's performances are even more interesting.  Around midnight it was getting hot on stage, and he decided to strip from the waist up - as did the rest of the male band.  Having a woman on stage singing who was still fully-clothed seemed to bother them though, so Levi made up a song about how I and everyone else in the audience should take their shirts off as well.  The band jammed along.  Their efforts were amusing, but in vain.  (And eventually I changed the subject of the song to "cherries" long enough to get their minds off the idea.)

Performing at Beacon Lounge was the musical highlight of the week.  The regular entertainer there is Mr. Tom Kaufman - a singer-keyboardist extraordinaire who also dabbles in metal art, fashioning wire into unique and intricate shapes.  After I sat in and played a short set of originals to a charming crowd of regulars, Tom and I jammed for the rest of the night, hitting standards from "On Broadway" to "I Will Survive."  (Amazing how a few martinis will bring out the Gloria Gaynor in everyone.)  Spectacular night.

As a souvenir from the evening, I came away with a delightful metal wire sculpture of my name that chimes when I tap it.  Check out Tom's wire work HERE.  (You can order personalized sculptures by e-mailing him.)  Now you know what to get your aunt-who-has-everything for her birthday!

This is what my name looks like...

I fold them up, Lick them,

Experiment with them,

Like paper airplanes.

I throw them away, and the

Ones that catch the breeze and come back, I keep...

Save a tokens of an odd Moment, of could-be-perfection.

If I play my cards right.

Which means that, as of today, you can now comment on them.  So comment away!

Blow me away with your wit and good taste.

The aforementioned Roll Over Baby music video, conceived and shot by students at the New York Film Academy and complete with cool stop-motion paint make-up, is now available for your viewing pleasure.  Thanks to the wonderful students who put it together!!  Especially Celia Barreda, Clara Mahieu, Carmen Simon, and Mert Erdem. 

To watch:  Please click on the Videos page in the Navigation Bar at the top of the screen.  (The site will not allow me to post it within this blog entry.  Any computer savvy people want to help me override the system?)

"Roll Over Baby," track 3 on the EP, now has its own video!  It is the result of two long days labor and luck.  (And if the video was playing on Sesame Street, Grover would have to tell the audience that it was brought to us by the song "It's a Small World After All."  And maybe the letter Q or something.)  I say this because as fate would have it, the reason I was selected to do this music video (I say 'selected' because the whole thing was not actually my idea) is that a Peruvian friend of mine happens to works for someone in Lima who's daughter is a student at the New York Film Academy, where she was producing a music video as an assignment with a bunch of other students.  (This is where "It's a Small World After All" starts playing in the background.)  So the students contacted me, and I said "Yes, please."  And we did it.

We filmed in Central Park, in the East Village, and in Brooklyn.  I loved their ideas.  The video is a play of contrasting fantasies, spinning artistic elements, and this amazing stop-motion sequence in which Celia Barreda, the director, proceeds to put make-up all over my face for five hours, taking a picture every 60 seconds or so.  (It took at least 30 minutes to get it all off again, but was so very worth it.)  In addition to being kind, wonderful folks, they were all incredibly creative and talented, and I can't wait to show you what they did.  The music video will be posted soon on the "Videos" page of this website.

Here's the film crew at the end of a long day:

The "news and happenings" aspect of this site has been painfully neglected and it's time to catch up.  A whirlwind May included wrapping up my Masters and then promptly moving all of my possessions twice.  Granted all my possessions can fit into a small room, so I do have that going for me, but not having a car when you want to move can be a - well, it's not good.  That's why you have wonderful friends with pick-up trucks.  And you pay them in pizza and beer.

As of now I have a new place on LI - this time the house has siding on it, awesome - but after having lived there a total of two days I moved again, into Manhattan for the summer.  Or, more specifically, to that part of Manhattan which is a stone's throw from the Bronx, and over an hour away by subway from the midtowny-downtowny locales that NYC tourists and locals alike treasure.  But I am in the city again nonetheless, and I have missed it so.  Hip, dimly-lit restaurants and colored lights and saxophones in the streets and green parks in the middle of traffic circles and people everywhere speckling taxi-yellow-stained avenues.  I know I'm back, because I've gotten home increasingly later each night this past week, and rolled out of bed increasingly later each morning.  It's the blessing and curse of working at a recording studio where I never have to be in before 10 a.m., and sometimes not till 5 p.m.

This week also included two nights at Tutuma - an awesome little Afro-Peruvian jazz club on 56th btwn Lex and 3rd - and a night at a dive bar called the Recoup Lounge - Ave C & Rivington.  The week before included filming a music video.  (what?  yes.  indeed.  better believe it.)  But those events get their own separate entries...

The new website is up and running! Point and click to your heart's content, then leave me a note on the contact page to tell me what you think of it all...

Don't forget to check back here often for more news, random stories, etc. 
(You can click on the orange icon below to make this page a regular bookmark.)