As many of you know I am currently up north on vacation and recording with Holland Michigan based Guitarist Lee Heerspink over the next couple weeks for a record release later in the year. So far we’ve finished recording about half of the record and we’re quite please with the outcome. At this point the record seems to be seems to be unfolding into a groove oriented record with a whole lot of back-beat.

Yesterday we were able to put 5 tunes in the can Giving us a lot of freedom over the next week. First we recorded “Softly as a Morning Sunrise,” only the melody has been tweaked and superimposed over the changes from Wayne Shorter’s “Black Nile,” giving it it’s own fresh flavor. The second chart was an original composition of mine entitled, “Ray’s Blues,” dedicated to the late, way beyond great Ray Brown that features West Michigan’s own Charlie Hoates on Bass. The third is a simple rhythm changes calypso, fusing motives from “Oleo,” and “Cottontail,” to cleverly disorient the average jazz aficionado (something I think most of us have considered doing at one point or another). We also recorded an interesting version of my arrangement of the Herbie Hancock 80’s hit “Rockit,” that will also by appearing on my upcoming quintet record to be released in early 2009. The last tune is an original of Lee’s dedicated to a mutual friend John Rodriguez, which I am personally hoping will end up being the title track for the record entitled, “Pull Your Stinky Face.” This track consists of groove meats, Americana, meets just plain nasty!

More to come soon!

Children’s books author Antoinette Portis has recently written a delightfully creative pair of books entitled “Not a Stick,” and “Not a Box.” For me, these books, invoke a nostalgic look back to childhood where the simplest inanimate objects could be greater and more entertaining than latest Chinese-made poison toy; something that I think younger generations have lost growing up in western capitalist culture.Each page shows a illustration of the bunny either holding a stick or with a box on his head in a seemingly irrelevant pose. With the reader turns the page, they discover the imagination has turns the box into things like a burning building, a race car or a robot suit and the stick into a horse or in my favorite instance, a paint brush to paint Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night.