Making the Record

I’ve spent the last eleven years here digging into the nyc music scene and enjoying the priceless opportunity to watch and learn from the masters themselves. I still study regularly with one of those masters and with his encouragement I began preparing to record this album about a year ago. I’ve always loved the old school groove of the jazz organ trio, always gravitated towards the Jimmy Smith style of bluesy gritty organ groove. But I've also tried to find a different path through the organ as well. A more cinematic side of the hammond. This record attempts to span some of that ground. 

The songs range from ethereal layers of organ colors blending into cloudy soundscapes to the soulful In The Garden, which is an old gospel hymn my folks used to play when I was a kid. Radiohead’s moody ‘There, There’ is the lone cover song and the album wraps up with an original, The Calling, an anthemic chant featuring the brilliant vocals of rising young star Michelle Willis. Hopefully the sum of all this music forms an album of genre blurring “jazz” that honors the past and present while seeking the future. 

I was very fortunate to have two of the most renowned musicians in the world join me to form the core trio of this album; the great Peter Bernstein on guitar and Jochen Rueckert on drums. I have enjoyed both of these musicians’ albums for many years and to find myself in the studio with these two veteran cats, cutting my music, well it was definitely one of those ‘pinch yourself’ kinda moments.  All the music was tracked at Flux Studios in Manhattan on January 4th 2020.  

This project has felt like the culmination of a lot of things. From my youth in Texas, to uprooting and moving to nyc, to touring the world with CSN. But it doesn’t feel like the end of a long journey but rather the beginning of a new, hopefully even longer journey. Certainly making this record has inspired me to keep making more albums and to find the next sound hiding somewhere down the road...