Concert Honesty

Chris is a jazz fusion guitarist. We sit in the So studio and talk about his process in approaching the guitar and improvising. He’s a great player and a good friend of our mutual friend Nelson Dorado, So Percussion’s live sound engineer. Any friend of Nelson is a friend of mine. Chris is a great guy and a great player. Check him out.

https://www.chrisbedward.com

I started off by saying his last name wrong. I’m the worst. Chris is a great composer and his percussion writing for Third Coast and Sandbox, Goldbeater’s Skin, is incredible. Check it out. We sit in the So studio and chat about practicality and making decisions as a composer and the importance of workshopping your works. We also both hate what social media makes us think about each other. So yes, we talked about Trump (a little bit). It’s worth your time. Chris is great.

www.christophercerrone.com

Hoyt-Schermerhorn by Chris Cerrone, performed by Sonya Belaya

Double Happiness by Chris Cerrone, performed by Evan Chapman/Sean McFarland

David and I sit in the So Percussion studio and talk life as a percussionist, growing up as a singer in really good high school church choir, and finding the dulcimer at a renaissance fair as a child. I had no idea of the history of that instrument, and it blew my mind. I would have never known. David is a good friend, colleague, and former student, and is the husband of better half of his marriage, Abby Rix Degge. He’s a brilliant dude and a really great percussionist. Check out his work with Meredith Lustig, called The Drivers.

Margarette is a student of theology in Berkeley, CA. We sit in my hotel room while on tour with So Percussion and talk about advocacy for the LGBTQ+ community and the challenges of how to bring change to institutions, including the church. I met Margarette and her wife Abby at Grace Lutheran Church in Scarsdale, NY through my wife, Stephanie, the pastor there. Margarette and Abby are saints and are doing the Lord’s work. She’s brilliant, so enjoy. I certainly did.

Dan is the owner of LA Percussion rentals in Los Angeles, CA. He’s been supplying So Percussion and California in general with high quality instruments and service for a good while now. He’s a great pan player as well and he and his wife Abby are two of the West Coast’s biggest percussion advocates and ambassadors.

Adam and I do a book review of sorts on the book called “Einstein walked with Godel”. We discuss the relativity of time in music and space, though we know (clearly) less about space than we do about music.

We sit in Larry’s office at the University of Akron and talk about his life in percussion and exposing students to the music of Trinidad and Tobago for the last 40 years.

Mike and I sit in his teaching studio at Kansas University and talk life, studying percussion, teaching percussion, and I learn the Kansas was a former British colony (not true)

Richard Preston is the Author of The Hot Zone, Panic in Level 4, The Wild Trees, and The Demon in the Freezer. His work about contagions and emergent viruses is fascinating. We sit in his studio and discuss his current work about the Ebola virus.

We sit in Joan’s kitchen and chat about her life as a music educator and she shares some great early stories about HER experience teaching the 5th grade Josh Quillen. She’s one of my heroes.