Hi all,
Life is unpredictable, but I hope to be able to keep this news section fairly fresh and up to date, perhaps through RSS feed. A lot is happening or very much in the works as I write this.
First and foremost, the music perhaps nearest and dearest to my heart recently, the Billy Collins project will be doing a series of three major concerts in the Bay Area coming up on May 2nd, 3rd and 4th. The three shows at at three of my absolute favorite places to play in the Bay: May 2nd at the Jazzschool in Berkeley at 8PM, Sunday May 3 at Pete Douglas' wonderful Bach Dynamite in Half Moon Bay and Monday May 4 at Yoshi's SF, my first time ever at the SF Yoshi's. (I have probably played the Oakland Yoshi's in it's various incarnations at least 30 times as a leader and a sideman.) I truly loved writing the music for the Collins Project, deeply inspired by Billy's words, and you can watch a couple of performances of it here. There is really only one singer I know of who can pull off these songs: Ann Arbor's Andy Kirshner, and fortunately, we were able to bring him out for this, to join the wonderful rhythm section of John R Burr, John Shifflett and Jason Lewis. I will do (or have done, depending when you read this) an interview on KCSM about it on Tuesday, April 28th, which is posted here.
