My first Artistshare blog entry

My first artistshare blog – welcome! It’s a hectic time of year for me right now. I finished recording my latest CD for Justin Time (distributed additionally through this very Artistshare site and scheduled for a July 15/05 release) a couple of weeks ago, culminating a several-month period of reevaluations and new approaches to my craft and “business-of-one”. As people who have followed my career or know me personally are aware, I have certainly always tried to be as proactive as possible about my career, a fact which I suppose in part culminated in my being asked by Down Beat to write a series of columns I titled “Living Jazz” these past several years, in which I talk about what it really means to be “living the life” of a a jazz musician, with all of the attendant ups and downs.

But I must admit that there was a period over the past year where even I with my typical optimism had to question whether the manner in which I was going about my career made sense any more. Clearly, with the upsurge in popularity of the “illegal” peer to peer networks and then ultimately the current ascendancy of ITunes, a paradigm shift was in the air, one in which record labels, at least those labels operating in exactly the same manner as they have as in the past, had become increasingly irrelevant. At the same time, I wasn’t ready to entirely abandon the label (Justin Time) that had nurtured my career, and that had been quite supportive of me over the past 10 years. So I decided on a middle ground. Justin Time would fund the new recording, but it would be distributed in conjunction with Artistshare. This would allow me in a sense the best of both worlds – some label backing and presence in retails stores, but also an opportunity to take advantage of the new technologies that Artistshare excels at and, in the presence, interact more directly with fans. This website, then, is the culmination, in a way, of many years of thought about the way I should attempt to promote and present myself and my music and ideas to the public – I truly hope you’ll like the results!

As I was saying, I finished my latest CD a couple of weeks ago, and was delighted that my brother Shaw flew down for the occasion and was able to record the entire session, essentially, on videotape – watch out for excerpts of the actual performances from the upcoming CD which I’ll be putting up as part of my Artistshare Project Experience and various Participant Offers. Concurrent with this recording was my wife’s and my move, from one section of Queens, NY to another, something which admittedly is going on even as I type, with my wife at home frantically packing boxes as I type this a little too comfortably in a Starbucks, on break from a gig I’m doing here in midtown Manhattan.

So lots of activity over the next few days, much of which I look forward to documenting as part of my Artistshare experience, including the mixing and mastering of the CD, the presentation of different behind the scenes documentation of the process of making it thus far, and several more Participant Offers I plan to launch including one for the composer/pianist/musician’s out there involving video lessons. I’m very excited to be part of the Artistshare experience, and really hope you’ll enjoy – and continue to come along for - the ride as well.