excellent cellist Aaron Coffin, and perhaps others as well for the March concert
Influences
Chronologically: Protestant hymnals, Girl Scout songs, old 78's of Beethoven's symphonies and The Nutcracker and Peter and the Wolf, Broadway musicals, Russian folksongs, Handel/Mozart/etc via church choir, The Beatles, Medieval and Renaissance polyphony, the French Impressionist composers, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Joni Mitchell, Jefferson Airplane, Pink Floyd, Michael Hedges, all the folks at the annual Deer Creek Fiddlers Conventions, all the folks across the years at Patches 15 Below Coffeehouse, Rick Rubarth, Yes, Sting, Talking Heads, everybody on Windham Hill, Enya, Paul Winter Consort, early MTV, film scores in general, Glass and Reich, Dead Can Dance, Deep Forest, Elly Ameling, Tori Amos, ani difranco, Sarah McLachlin, Bjork, Paschal Younge and his African Drumming Ensemble, Ohio's Summit Songwriters group, Luar na Lubre, Andy McKee, Z. Randall Stroope, and probably a hundred other famous bands or singers or composers I should be specifically naming but am forgetting, and now the UNCA and Reuter Singer choruses, and the many fine musicians of Asheville, along with the fine (and often free) venues that make live music such a constant, here.
Sounds Like
early Joni Mitchell or Wildflowers-era Judy Collins in a way, but with infusions and infiltrations from ALL the above-listed influences liable to turn up at any measure!
I'm still playing the same 1966 Yamaha 180 acoustic guitar I bought from Tim LeBrun at the Bukka White party in Baltimore after my first guitar got stolen in '71. This guitar has kept me company through my entire adult life. It has traveled with me from coast to coast, across the decades, as I have gigged solo, and in rock bands, country bands, my sweet "Heliotrope" band, "bread and butter" gigs like Baltimore's Steak and Ale three nights a week in '73, big gigs like Sunfest in Oklahoma in the eighties, classy gigs like the opening of Johns Hopkins' Glass Pavilion in the nineties, silly gigs like the "pontoon party boats" out on an Ozark lake, countless campfires, college radio shows, long-gone coffeehouses, lullabyes - to my daughter and others I have loved...
...INFLUENCES... I still think that, musically speaking, those early years, up until about '76, might've been the most interesting years of all... If you've never heard the first four Joni Mitchell albums or the Judy Collins Wildflowers album with the Josh Rifkin arrangements or the Jefferson-Airplane-era Grace Slick or the Mother-Earth-era Tracy Nelson, go listen. Even from this much farther downstream, and even though I constantly seek out new music, something in me still hearkens back to the echoes of what those women seemed to say to me at that time.
...WORK... Ever since the sixties I've mainly worked as an accompanist/composer for ballet and modern dance, in academic settings, playing improvisationally on piano and percussion and guitar while using my voice as a wordless melodic line for the dancers. For a number of years, my focus shifted to synthesizer and other electronics, but I have since settled back into an acoustic preference. I've also worked as a college classroom music teacher many years, a horse trainer, a warehouse worker, a goat farm care-taker, and an array of other interesting little jobs. I write, a lot, but writing has never yet been my "work."
...MUSICAL EDUCATION... I hold an advanced degree in music composition. I compose for everything from large choral ensembles to improvisational experimental groups. I love (and love to teach) both the theory and the history of music. I have been fascinated by almost every kind of music, ever since my church-hymn-singing childhood days. I still "see" the scores of Mozart, Handel, etc in my head whenever I happen to hear them playing. I still can't help mentally analyzing the chord progressions as I sing in the community chorus. But the one thing that has kept weaving ceaselessly through the entire fabric of my long life is the simple physically-satisfying directness of singing my songs with guitar. Whatever else I do, I seem to always BE a singer/songwriter.
...GEOGRAPHICALLY... Maryland was my home for most of my life, but now I have come to these mountains of Western North Carolina, where the remarkable little city of Asheville keeps me endlessly entertained, and the rivers and trails (which I had always camped among, in summers) now welcome me every time I step out my door and lift up my eyes.
