Hello friends,
It’s a warm, windy afternoon here at the Longhouse in Northridge, California; we’ve had huge rains and I expect the spring to be quite marvelous here. My various native plant gardens, bird feeders, seedlings and flower gardens are showing signs of much beauty to come. I want to welcome everyone to my newly designed website, created by my close friend, collaborator, and mentor, Mark Nubar, with deep thanks for many years of great work with Russ Paris as well. As there are several new projects coming round the bend, it seemed like a good time to make a new website as well: besides: spring is almost here, I do believe, a good time for new beginnings.
Lots going on around here, new stuff coming up and coming out this year and I’ll just mention a few of them.
The new WW CD, which of course has taken forever, is close to being finished now. With apologies to a handful of my friends and fans, I’m happy I’ve been able to take my time with this one as it has presented a few challenges along the way. Not quite sure exactly when it will be out ‘officially,’ but it’s definitely this year. I have uploaded 3 tracks from it as I’ve gone along, and I expect to put one more up pretty soon, then to be followed by the whole thing.
Also, a cool project that’s been in the works for a couple of years is a collaborative work between Mietek Szczesniak, the legendary HB Barnum with Life Choir, and me. Mietek is just coming off two superb platinum projects in Poland—I got to work on them both along with Rob Hoffman-and now the next one up for him is this cool gospel-soul tinged project we’ve been writing with HB.
The Refugees are also in the studio working on the new cd, with a little video coming soon. We don’t have touring plans yet, but perhaps next year. In any event, we love making records, and we’re hoping to start doing some interesting stuff online together as well. More on that later.
Speaking of HB Barnum, we are planning, quite soon, Dios willing, to film HB and Life Choir here at the Longhouse, performing some of the incredible arrangements and songs HB has created for the choir over the years. This is a vital and missing piece of the vast puzzle that is HB Barnum, and I’m lucky to be able to put together a project like this.
At my age, who needs sleep?
Still in school, studying traditional harmony and theory and getting my butt kicked on a weekly basis, but it is impacting my work and keeping me very very excited about composing, film, larger and different kinds of works—gotta get your chops up for that.
Studio is in good shape, a few different artists and engineers using it and enjoying it. In the most wonderful news, after the passing of both Roz and Howard Larman, whose priceless radio Folkscene has been such a vital part of so many of our music lives, there’s a new generation of Folkscene Radio happening here at the Longhouse!!! Allen Larman, a righteous ethnomusicologist/folk and soul DJ has taken over the helm and we now have Folkscene the next generation! I hope Roz and Howard are looking down on their son and his comrades with great pride. Allen Larman, his wife, Kat Griffin (also a fine folk DJ, both of them on KCSN) Peter Cutler, long time engineer of Folkscene radio and his wife, musician/presenter Debbie Hand, are now hosting the show. We had Dave and Phil Alvin here along with Bobby Rush and co, right after he won his grammy a couple of weeks ago!
What else? Going to play some gigs (gulp, it’s been a while) with Cid Bullens up in Alaska end of this month. I see some heavy duty woodshedding in my immediate future, in between studying classical music theory and editing in the studio.
Most of my commentary won’t be this long—there’s a lot to do, better to do it than talk about it. But, I thank you for visiting the new website, and I will keep posting as we go.