Thoughts

I inadvertently stumbled across some comments I wrote back in May of 2011 on a post over at Digital Music News called The Music Industry: It’s Becoming a Third World Country… written by Paul Resnikoff. After reading the original article and the subsequent comments again I realized that the points I made back then (seems […]

A couple days ago my friend Spekulation posted on Facebook that he was DJ’ing at a site called Turntable.fm. I had never heard of it, but I was intrigued and wanted to find out what he was talking about. So I clicked the link and was thrown down a deep rabbit hole! Turntable.fm is a […]

That’s right…I’m going to be a daddy! My wife and I found out recently that we’re going to have a baby girl. Poppy, as we’ve been calling her (because when we found out we were pregnant, the book said she was the size of a poppy seed), will be joining us in October. Even though […]

As the title of this blog suggests, I pride myself on being a working musician. This year marks my 10th anniversary of making a living through my music and I couldn’t be happier with how my life has turned out. When I quit my day job in 2001 I had no idea what my life […]

The Beauty of Collaboration

by Jason on January 29, 2011 · 7 comments

in Gigs, Thoughts

You know how sometimes you get a good idea, and you’re pretty sure it’s going to work well, and then it happens and works better than you could’ve ever imagined. I had just such an experience on Sunday when the Jason Parker Quartet joined author Karen Walrond on stage for a reading of her new […]

The year-end lists are flooding in, and the jazz blogosphere is replete with best-of’s. I know I’m a little late to the party, but as I did last year, I thought I would put my own spin on this yearly ritual and shine the spotlight on the amazing jazz talent we have right here in […]

I’ve been thinking about how precious our lives are recently. Many of us have a tendency to feel invincible when things are going well, but as soon as we hit a bump in the road we realize just how fragile life is. In these times, I am reminded that what really matters in life are […]

“If good art is to remain good medicine for the human spirit, it must remain firmly rooted in our relationships” – Gerrit Verstraete Recently on the Nextbop website, editor-in-chief Anthony Dean-Harris wrote a piece called “We Are All In The Music Business Now, Apparently”. In it, he talks about the recent increase in Kickstarter fan-funding […]

Evan Flory-Barnes is one of the most inspiring cats I know. His bass playing and musical depth are astounding, and he has an incredible ability to draw in the listener every time he plays. Sharing the stage with him for the last 3+ years has been a joy and has made me a better musician. […]

Josh Rawlings has been my dear friend and closest musical collaborator for many years now. I like to joke that he and I are a “MySpace romance”, because we met when I was trolling that site for bands to share bills with. It was 2006 when I asked Josh if his band Soul Kata would […]