I’m a writer and editor living in Brooklyn, New York. Most of the time, whatever I’m up to, I’d rather be listening to live music or playing basketball. Just now, I’m immersed in work as a Katrina Media Fellow with the Open Society Institute, documenting the current crisis facing New Orleans musical culture. I’m also editor-at-large of Jazziz magazine, for which I was editor-in-chief from 1996-2000 (my monthly column, BluNotes, appears there). And though jazz is my specialty (if one can and should have such a thing), and Thelonious Monk the touchstone for that obsession, I tend to listen to all sorts of sounds — from Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks to John Zorn’s string trio music to 1950s field recordings of Central African Pygmies.
I suppose the African diaspora is one important thread to my musical tastes, though I’ve realized that only in retrospect. My writing about music appears in The Wall Street Journal, The Village Voice, Entertainment Weekly, and Salon.com, among other publications. I was a 2001-2 Fellow in the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University; our semester began one week before September 11th. The experience broadened my work, prompting me to chase stories about how music and culture connect to our social and political lives, and resulting in reporting about the effects of Bush administration policies on musical exchange between the U.S. and Cuba, The Festival of World Sacred Music in Fes, Morocco, and the “American-ness” of jazz (if I can get it together — technically, that is — some of this work will appear on this site). Mostly, I’ll use this site to share my lust for new and favorite sounds and my ongoing need to find, share, and explore the stories behind these sounds and the ideas they stimulate.