All the music-related news I can find to share with you.
DownBeat Magazine featured a nice article about the October 11th Trumpet Summit: Honoring Roy Hargrove here at Western Michigan University. Five outstanding trumpeters — Jon Faddis, Freddie Hendrix, Corey Wilkes, Maurice Brown, and Ashlin Parker — came to campus to celebrate Roy’s music and legacy. We performed several of Roy’s compositions, including “Nothing Serious,” “Natural […]
Kalamazoo’s Second Wave Media wrote a really nice article about our Jazz in the Crawlspace series in a recent article by Mark Wedel. Mark beautifully captured the vibe of our recent sold-out performance with Grammy-nominated saxophonist Jimmy Greene. One of my favorite lines was that the night felt like “a New York jazz club, but […]
We’re super-excited that the 2025-2026 series at the Crawlspace Theatre here in downtown Kalamazoo is underway! My good friend, Keith Hall, and I partnered with Dann Sytsma to create a monthly series of concerts in a listening room here in town. We are so grateful to the John Stites Jazz Awards for funding our series […]
I’ve added some PDF downloads to my online store. You’ll find arrangements and original compositions from my recordings. A lot of these charts are the same ones we used in the studio (well, maybe cleaned up just a bit so they look a little more professional for you). Visit the new area on my site […]
Don’t forget to add A Tri-Fi Christmas to your holiday playlist. 12 seasonal classics done up in a fun and swinging way. DownBeat Magazine put it on their roundup of the best holiday jazz albums: “This tight-knit trio turns tired chestnuts into launchpads of improvisation. On the menu are songs you’ve heard a million times, […]
One of the great perks of my teaching job here at Western Michigan University is the faculty I work with every day. My colleagues in the jazz area are some world-class musicians and I’m so excited about this recording project we just released as a faculty ensemble. It’s a project featuring some amazing original music […]
My trio’s recent performance at Merriman’s Playhouse will be broadcast on Monday evening on Dawn Burns‘ show “The Sauce Live” on wvpe.org. Dawn and I also chatted a bit for a quick interview that will be included in the broadcast. Tune in on April 22, 2024 @ 7pm to hear the live broadcast (or look […]
A performance with my trio from last year is going to be broadcast on the award-winning Live at the Bop Stop podcast. They’ve been broadcasting select performances from the venue and our show from March 2023 will be available in their upcoming episode scheduled for Monday March 18th. The set features my good friends Carlo DeRosa (bass) and […]
We’ve got another concert in the works for our Jazz in the Crawlspace series. This time it’s a whole band of super-exciting musicians from NYC. Spin Cycle is on tour in the Midwest and we worked out a stop in Kalamazoo. They’re out presenting the music from their recent album “Spin Cycle 3” – a […]
I recently did a solo piano performance and discussed connections and similarities between the surrealist art movement and the development of jazz improvisation as part of a wonderful exhibition at the Flint Institute of Arts called Beyond Dreams: Surrealism and Its Manifestations. The exhibition featured well-known artists like Salvador Dalí, Joan Miro, and Leonora Carrington, […]
I’m excited to be working with Jazz in the Crawlspace again to bring one of my favorite vocalists to Kalamazoo. I loved working with Emily Braden in NYC, and I look forward to playing with her in Chicago at the end of the month – BUT, we managed to get her to stop by Kalamazoo […]
We threw together a “little” celebration of UNESCO’s International Jazz Day on April 30. Organized as a fundraiser for the Edison Jazz Festival’s work to create performance opportunities for local and regional musicians, we had NINE bands in TWO venues here in Kalamazoo. Made up of WMU students, WMU graduates, and local musicians, the artists […]