It's been an interesting year and despite the pandemic, I was able to make a lot of cool music in 2021. Here's a little recap of some fun things I did this year. Shoutout to all the amazing musicians I worked with this year and to my students for keeping me inspired!
Alter Cocker: A Yiddish Word for an Old Curmudgeonly Person
I've always felt like an old curmudgeon even when I was a young child. Maybe all Jewish children feel this way, I'm not sure. I wanted to write a piece that celebrated the old curmudgeon in all of us.
I filmed this on the beach in Puerto Rico dressed up like an old man, playing shirtless on a palm tree, making dumb faces, and despite how ridiculous I looked and acted, I still ended up becoming friends with a 92 year old Holocaust survivor who saw me playing and came over to chat.
So that's the power of music...or maybe the power of being a bald and hairy cello player.
If you can believe it, this was my final project for my first year of my master's degree at New Jersey City University in the new NJCU Multi-Style Strings program headed by the extremely talented Martha Mooke.
Much love and respect to my colleagues Jennifer Frantz and Xavi Garcia Morató for doing such a fantastic job and having a great sense of humor!
Thank you to my wonderful wife, Minh, for doing the videography and Kaia for cooperating while her father made a fool of himself.
Listen in for some fun old people sayings in both English and Spanish. My favorite is, "Go Shit In Your Hat," which is something that my Grandma Roz would yell at someone who honked at her while she was driving.
Enjoy and embrace your inner alter cocker.
I wanted to share with you a video playlist of my musical collaborations from this turbulent COVID year: A COVID Music Retrospective.
But first - a little backstory.
My birthday is March 13, which coincidentally was the last day before lockdown in my town of Teaneck, NJ in 2020.
That day I had a small jam session at my house and by the time people were leaving, I was getting notice that my town was going into quarantine.
I was supposed to be playing a wedding gig in 2 days, but called the contractor and told him I couldn't do it.
A year later and I just celebrated my birthday in Puerto Rico while hiding out here for the winter.
This ordinarily wouldn't have been possible, but given that there are no gigs to play and everything is online, we decided we could at least go to a beautiful place where we could be outside.
When the pandemic started, I decided to offer some free workshops on improvisation using my new books, String Jams, to try boost some morale.
People signed up so fast I had to add more.
I was so happy that people were genuinely interested in the topic and that I had an outlet to focus on other than the doom and gloom of the virus.
Then my wife suggested that I collaborate with some of my Vietnamese musician friends (we lived in Vietnam from 2018 - 2019).
That spawned a number of collaborations with Vietnamese, Scottish, Puerto Rican, and American artists that I'm really proud of.
For me, the music has a wide variety of feelings and moods: joy, sorrow, contemplation, anger.
What do you hear?
Not to get all sappy, but music has always given me a sense of purpose, and boy did I need it after such a difficult year.
I hope these videos inspire you to write your own music and do your own collaborations.
COVID sucks, but it did help me create some cool music, so I guess that's looking at the bright side?
Let's hope things continue to get better.