My new piece for alto sax and piano, Breathless, will be performed tonight by Jai Jeffries and Todd Rewoldt at Steel Wig Music.  It’s an album release party for On the Verge now out on Composers Concordance Records.

Composers Concordance Records has released “On the Verge“!

My piece On the Verge is included and yeah, they named the album after it so… it must be good. It’s scored for alto saxophone, electric guitar and piano.  Check it Out! 

Todd Rewoldt – alto sax, Jai Jeffryes – piano Duo  –  Comcon0103
With music by
1.  A Woman Alone, But Not Lonely – Kitty Brazelton
2.  Bach and the Nanny-Goat Bassoonist II – Gene Pritsker
3.  Altima: Three Sketches  – Eugene W. McBride
4.  Fogged In – Jane Getter
5.  When will You Dry Our Eyes? – Gilbert Galindo
6.  On the Verge – Seth Boustead

I’ve been inducted into the Newcity Magazine Music 45 Hall of Fame!  Woo-hoo!

I am overwhelmed by this incredible honor.  Check out the whole list here.

The CheckOut is finally opening!  After more than two years of dreaming of this moment, it is finally real.  We’re celebrating the opening with a very ambitious festival and tonight is opening night!

Tonight’s concert features the Amos Gillespie Quartet performing music ACM commissioned inspired by the Uptown neighborhood. I wrote a new piece called My Uptown in three movements and I can’t wait to hear this wonderful ensemble perform it.

I have lived and worked in Uptown for many years and this piece is highly personal for me.

September 12, 7:30 PM
The CheckOut
4116 N. Clark St.

The CheckOut’s opening festival continues with a very cool concert combining conversations about Studs Terkel’s magnum opus Working with performances of music ACM commissioned inspired by that same book.

My piece “Hardly Working” will be performed by the Black Oak Ensemble. They rock. Do not miss this concert.

September 17, 7:30 PM

4116 N. Clark St. Chicago

“You may sometimes notice when you sit on the back porch after dinner that there are other back porches with people on them,” says Ben Hecht at the opening of his short story Grass Figures.

He then goes on to notice that wherever he goes and whatever he does there are the inevitable other people also there, also doing the same thing: shopping, lying on the grass, going to the theater, you name it.

In a flash of solipsistic insight he decides that the whole city is a “vast, broken mirror giving him back garbled images of himself.” He then thinks if he can figure out what it is he’s doing with his life then by extension he’ll know what other people are doing with theirs and maybe find the secret to everything.

But he isn’t doing anything with his life but waiting he says, and so that must be what everyone is doing: waiting.  Life is “a few years of suspended animation,” and nothing more. But there’s no story in that, better forget it.

Hecht was a young man in Chicago when he wrote those words. Despite his pessimistic tone, (which would only get worse in later years reaching its peak in his screenplay for the original Scarface) Hecht wanted nothing more at this time than to unlock the secret of people.

He had an uncanny ear for dialogue and for writing people of all backgrounds exactly as they actually talked.  His first major project was to convince his editor at the Daily News to let him write very short stories inspired by people he saw on the streets of Chicago.  They ran in the paper every day for a year and have since been collected as 1001 Afternoons in Chicago.

Back in 2014 ACM collaborated with Strawdog Theater to adapt six of the very best of these stories into a radio play for voices and music.  My colleague Amos Gillespie and I wrote the music and I’m really excited to announce that we’ve finally made a digital release of the album.  I’m truly not sure what took us so long to do this.

I’m very proud of how this turned out and hope you can give it a listen! Just click on the image below.

In Italo Calvino’s short story The Light Years, the narrator is a primordial immortal who spans time and space.  Even so, he has a few concerns.  One of which is surveillance.  One day he notices that an unknown entity has hung a sign on a galaxy a hundred million light years away that says simply “I saw you.”

By multiplying the distance times the speed of light, the narrator is able to look up the exact day in question in his diary and finds that in fact there was something he did that day that he’s not at all proud of. In fact it’s something he wants to hide. Soon, just a few tens of millions of years later, he begins to see other signs also saying “I saw you.”

The story is from 1965 and it’s part of a collection called Cosmicomics in which Calvino took a scientific fact, often very new findings from quantum mechanics, and created an inventive story around it.  In this case the fact concerns the expansion of the universe.

As the galaxies get farther and farther apart, the narrator is increasingly unable to clarify his good intentions with response signs until communication ceases altogether and he’s left knowing that for some people in the universe he’ll only be that one bad thing he wishes he hadn’t done.

Other stories concern the speed of light, the formation of the universe, the appearance of colors and probably the best-known of the stories, a love triangle from the time when the moon and Earth were so close together you could easily step from one to the other.

In between other projects for the last couple of years I’ve been writing a large-scale chamber piece inspired by many of these stories.  It’s about halfway done now and I’m hoping to boogie and get the last few pieces done in time to record it this fall for a release in early 2023.  In the meantime though I’ve been lucky enough that every movement I’ve finished so far has been performed somewhere.

Next up is, you guessed it, The Light Years, which will be premiered this Sunday at the Queens New Music Festival by the RAM Players.  Calvino’s story is light and funny and meant as a joke but I can’t help but wonder what he would have thought of social media.

My piece is a reaction to the many emotions living our lives in public can elicit: anxiety, joy, melancholy and obsession which is represented by a hard driving toy piano part.

Well, it’s a real piano instructed to be played like a toy piano which is not the same thing but, as Calvino, (and Carl Sagan for that matter,) would be quick to point out, they do both come from star stuff. So, there’s that.

This piece was originally commissioned by the Ear Taxi Festival in Chicago in 2016.  The festival coincided with the 100th anniversary of the publication of Carl Sandburg’s Chicago Poems collection so I decided to set one of those poems.

Many of them are homages to a muscular, urban city but I found one that almost like a haiku.  Called Nocturne in a Deserted Brickyard, it’s a different kind of poem.  Still, meditative. The image is of moonlight reflecting onto a small pool of water in a brickyard at night after the laborers have long since gone home.  I was smitten.

The piece was premiered twice as part of the festival and then sat on the proverbial shelf for six years. Until now!  Random Access Music will be performing the work twice this upcoming weekend.  Once on April 30 at Culture Lab in Queens and then the following night at the National Opera Center in Manhattan.

The Wurtz-Berger duo will give a reprise performance of my piece Hot Streak for piano and cello at the legendary Green Mill Tavern in Chicago on Sunday, May 1st at 4:00 PM.

Of the many things that were canceled way back in the spring of 2020 the one I most regretted having to miss was the New York Times Crossword Puzzle Tournament.  I had been thinking about participating for years but had finally actually registered and was all set to compete.

But it was canceled and then the following year they held it digitally but I somehow never got the invite and only found out about it after the fact like a schnook.  But this year I’m going!

Look at all those wonderful nerds doing crossword puzzles! Doesn’t it warm your heart? On April 1st and, should I demonstrate sufficient skill to advance, April 2nd and 3rd, I will enter the hallowed deluxe conference center at the Marriott Hotel in Stamford, Connecticut to take my rightful place among them.  And I shall conquer.

It’s going to be a heady weekend. In addition to solving six puzzles a day, we will be treated to a ton of special programs including a palindrome fight, a Wordle contest featuring remarks by Wordle creator and newly-minted millionaire Josh Wardle and last but not least a new musical written and performed by Yale students called Word Nerd which honestly I will probably skip.

Thankfully there don’t seem to be any events involving puns.  I have to admit that my only trepidation in going to this thing is a fear of spending my weekend with a bunch of punsters.  I draw the line at puns you see.

Anyway, wish me luck!