lies like truth

Of the many singing experiences I've had to date, the one I participated in last night at Stanford's Memorial Church was among the most visceral, and is likely to be an experience I remember with fondness for a long, long time. I was part of the ensemble involved in Stanford music scholar Jesse Rodin's Digital Josquin Project. The Project revolved around a series of workshops and final concert in which we performed late works by the 15th - 16th century Franco-Flemish composer Josquin des Prez behind a specially commissioned music lectern … [Read more...]

The frontier of the digital music-making space is an interesting place. At an event last night in The Mission, I got to muck about with a bunch of unusual digital musical instruments. One of my favorites was The Jambox (pictured left with my friend Nat demonstrating) which is a console covered in postage stamp-sized rubber squares which you can push in different sequences to create bass lines, melodies and rhythm parts. It's best played by two people as it's hard to keep all the different lines going with one pair of hands. Another fun … [Read more...]

The long-sketchy Tenderloin / mid-market area of San Francisco is under an intense period of renewal right now. Twitter's decision to set up shop in the area along with the development efforts of the region's biggest theatre company, ACT, has been helping to kickstart life in the neighborhood. Smaller businesses are popping up like trendy bakeries, candy shops and coffee stores. And more long standing arts organizations, such as The Exit Theatre and The Cutting Ball Theatre have helped to keep the neighborhood thrumming in a positive … [Read more...]

One of the more surreal evenings that I've spent in my many years in San Francisco was spent on Saturday night at a lavish corporate party at San Francisco City Hall. The party was thrown by a tech company called Computers and Structures Inc (CSI) which I'd never heard of before. CSI is a structural and earthquake engineering software firm based in Berkeley, California. It's headed up by a very flamboyant, fun-lovin,' lady-admirin' structural engineer by the name of Ashraf Habibullah.  Now normally I don't go to these kinds of events. … [Read more...]

I've been really busy with a fascinating project happening at Stanford under the auspices of Renaissance music scholar Jesse Rodin. It's a marvelously organic amalgam of old-meets-new. Jesse, an expert on the great Franco-Flemish composer Josquin des Prez (ca. 1450 - 1521), is bringing together a few Stanford singers -- undergrad and grad students, plus yours truly -- to perform a bunch of late works by the composer at a concert in Memorial Church on the Stanford campus this coming Saturday. Jesse's Boston-based professional vocal ensemble, … [Read more...]

Julie Marie Myatt's play The Happy Ones which is now running in a production directed by Jonathan Moscone at the Magic Theatre, treads long-trampled theatre ground in its examination of the meaning and emptiness of the so-called "American Dream." What makes this rather far-fetched drama interesting is that it views the US from a more global viewpoint than the many navel-gazing dramas that tend to populate the American Dream playwriting genre. Like the genre's ur-text, Death of a Salesman, The Happy Ones also follows the fortunes of a … [Read more...]

People often tell me I have "a nice voice." So in pursuit of new career avenues after my lovely two-year fellowship run at Stanford comes to an end in June, I decided to look into a possible future as a voiceover professional for commercials, e-books, video games etc. I don't see this as a full-time possibility. But it could be fun and potentially lucrative to get the occasional voiceover job. A colleague at KALW put me in touch with Elaine Clark, an expert in the field, who has been running a voiceover studio, Voice One, in San Francisco … [Read more...]

I’m at Atlanta airport awaiting my delayed flibght back to San Francisco after a whirlwind week of performances, meetings, parties, long drives and random encounters that have left me precious little time to blog. Here are a few scattered impressions of things I did on my travels from Atlanta (which I already covered here and here) to Louisville, KY and Nashville, TN. Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame: En route to Louisville, I fed my basketball fetish with a visit to the world’s only temple to women’s basketball. It was a Tuesday … [Read more...]

My Ebenezer Church experience in Atlanta last weekend which I blogged about a few days ago was nicely balanced by a wonderful Passover celebration with the family of my friend Seth Samuel, an Atlanta native who now lives in the Bay Area and produces VoiceBox, the following day. Seth is one of nine siblings. With his parents (Melissa and Don), eight of the nine Samuel children, half of Seth's sister Lily's ultimate frisbee team, and me, it was a large and lively table. Seth's mother, the formidable Melissa Fay Greene (a well-respected … [Read more...]

I attempted to undertake a bit of ethnographic research for my book about singing culture in the United States by visiting Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church on Palm Sunday. The church where both Martin Luther King and his father preached is a warm, friendly and obviously deeply historical place that ultimately revealed more about spoken word than song culture to me. There wasn't a spare inch of pew left in the house by 11.30 am when the service was in full swing. I think there were about 2,000 people present, but I'm not sure about the … [Read more...]