Hello Friends,

My new recording Fortune Telling (Adivinhação) is finally here.  And some of you may be interested in the story so I’ll tell the long version in installments (the short version is in the liner notes below).

Our old teacher and eminent trumpet player Bobby Bradford used to caution us in subtle ways not to put anything out into the world that isn’t original. Paraphrasing here, but he once told me, “The walls of the Village Vanguard have heard ‘Body and Soul’ enough times.” I can’t say that I took his advice all the time as my album “Signs of Life” was fun but entirely in the post-bop tradition with all the tunes being covers from the jazz repertoire. Other recordings such as the two I did with the collective ensemble, Big Neighborhood were very original, thanks mostly to the compositions by David White and Doug Miller. Recently though, not wanting to add to massive lava flow of unoriginal releases flowing into the jazz ecosystem by young musicians, and not being a motivated composer myself, I had thought my recording days were finished.

But a couple of things happened beginning about two years ago. First, I discovered the amazingly user friendly and free notation software MuseScore. And secondly, I fell in with a couple guys that committed to composing and playing each other’s work regularly. The material was all over the map; free tunes, bebop tunes, Brazilian pop tunes, tunes that are hard to classify. So after about a year of regular composers’ workshops or “salons” as we called them, I started to accumulate a portfolio of tunes.

The opportunity to give the world a peek at my work came when my long-time friend, collaborator and all-round bad ass tenor player, Tim Armacost came to town in early 2025. We played a gig at the Jazz Fellowship here in Seattle and another out at Boxley’s in North Bend and we some of his tunes and about six of mine. And as I remember it, we were standing on the bandstand when Tim said you’ve got about enough for a recording to which I asked, “should we do it here or in New York?”

…..to be continued…..

CD Liner Notes:

May I tell you a little about how this project came about?  I began writing these tunes a couple of years ago when I fell in with a supportive collective of musicians that composed and played each other’s music in regular sessions here in the US.  I also made some trips down to Brazil in this period, and became impressed with how central music is to daily life in Brazil, and how the joyful energy and openness of Brazilians is reflected in the various rhythms and harmonies of their music.  It’s as if everyone in Brazilian society PARTICIPATES in the music; by playing it, by singing it, by dancing to it, on the beach, on the streets, in nightclubs, everywhere. The careful listener will also note that while there is a tremendous amount of sameness in the harmonic vocabulary of the American jazz repertoire, Brazilian composers have shown an admirable disregard for these conventions.  The bridge to perhaps the most recognized tune on earth, Garota de Ipanema (Girl from Ipanema), uses traditional jazz harmonic building blocks to take the listener on a journey of radical unexpectedness after an admittedly uneventful opening 16 bars.  I also tried to break free of this post-bop predictability and let my inner ear and the aspirations of the melody tell me where the harmony should land.

Thus inspired, I eventually had seven original tunes that straddled the jazz and Brazilian Popular Music genres and then wondered how, where, and when I would record them.  Would they sound too generically Bossa Nova as so many Americanized versions of Brazilian music tended to be?  Would some of the jazzier tunes such as Chegando Atrasado with its busy Coltrane-like harmonies fit in a Brazilian style?  Experience, or rather experimentation, made the decision for me.  I performed and ultimately recorded the tunes in the US with fantastic jazz musicians and found that the essential Brazilian-ness of the tunes was lost.  I didn’t feel tropical warmth.  I didn’t feel the Amazon, the jungle, the creatures, the families of rhythms that survived the great crossing and lived on in the new world.  I didn’t hear strangers laughing and talking like family in the streets and in cafes and on the beach.  Brazil had vanished.

So on a trip to Brazil, I recruited my long-time friend and collaborator, David Rosenblatt to help me find the right Brazilian grooves and together we made the recording in Rio de Janeiro, him on guitar, me on woodwinds, and the very talented Brazilians Matias Correa on bass and João di Sabbato on drums and percussion.  And here we are.  I was satisfied that the timbre of the tenor and clarinet–new instruments to me–projected the emotions that call to me in my continual awakening in this mysterious universe, emotions that I could never communicate with my speaking voice, and enough novelty to claim a place in the massive lava flow of creative material that is our commercial music ecosystem and share what I have with you.  I hope you enjoy.