Traveling 1

I went for a short vacation to see my family in the Buffalo area. The drive into the city, from the Southtowns where my parents live, was beautiful. Buffalo is much flatter than Pittsburgh, and has a beautiful sky. The drive up 219 is something I took for granted as a kid, but now I understand what people mean when they say it is scenic. Of course, Pennsylvania is also very scenic. The Pennsylvania part of 86 East, the road on which I based my piece "Southern Tier Suite", was a mess, with bumps every couple seconds where the road had cracked and been filled with patching asphalt.

I realized one day that I liked listening to old YES music as I drive, though I have to be careful not to let Bruford's propulsive drumming make me speed! A lot of the longer pieces, especially "Tales From Topographic Oceans", remind me of landscapes, that become more interesting as one becomes familiar with them, and all the detail within. This is what inspired me to write my first "geographical" music, the "Southern Tier Suite", and later things like "Niagara". The "Suite" refers to the three sections of the piece: "86 East", which represents the usually boring part from Erie to about Chautauqua lake- though a bit monotonous, it does have a "groove" to it; "Plateau" which represents all the places where the road feels as if it has reached some kind of summit, sometimes within view of either Chautauqua Lake or Lake Erie; and "The Senecas", which represents the Seneca Nation which lives around Salamanca. In this way, I never run out of inspiration- I can always just do a "musical landscape".

Welcome to the Tea With Warriors blog! I may not have a lot of updates, since I also work a demanding day job in addition to my creative life, but I hope to post things about my new musical plans, mp3's of works in progress, and discussions of music that has meant a lot to me.

I thought this would be a great time to start a blog, since I recently released a new CD, called "Niagara". I got the idea for the CD after a visit to Niagara Falls, a little over a year ago. As the CD liner notes describe, I was really struck by the power of nature, and thought it would be good to translate that into music. The end result was a mix of new age, minimalism, rock and jazz. I started with some synthesizer background "colors" and added layers of guitar work, percussion, and violin. I think it makes excellent background music, of a cinematic sort. I had visual images in mind as I composed it, and for the CD cover enlisted my friend Margaret Sharrow for the paintings. I would like to find someone who would be interested in making some videos that I could put on YouTube to promote it. Any takers out there?

I was pretty happy that over the last month or so, one of the tracks, "Skydiver" got played on the "Echoes" radio show several times, giving me some national exposure. I think the other tracks from the CD are also very good, and deserve some exposure, thought I understand that they are not really the right style for a radio show, being more "minimalist" or textural. I think they would make a beautiful background for a nature movie or something like that, though.