About
Bio
Self-promotion is the part of professional music I'm least comfortable with. It's always been an awkward process for me. The most offensive component has always been the bio. Musicians, artists, and everyone else trying to compete for the limited leisure-time attention of America's distractible public all find themselves, willingly or reluctantly, having to write self-congratulatory bios lauding their own prodigious talent, notable associations and historic achievements. To make it palatable, the standard form is for bios to be written in the third person. Here, I will try to account for who I am in a way for which I'm not ashamed to take credit.
I was born in New Rochelle, New York. My mother, an Israeli émigré, moved to the United States with her family to support the musical ambitions of her eldest sister, a piano prodigy. Shortly after my arrival, she retired from law, taking up real estate to have a greater role in my childhood. My father, a corporate lawyer, fed me a steady diet of karate, legal knowledge via the socratic method, and lessons on how properly to assemble a New York chocolate egg cream.
From an early age I had what people have tended to label 'obsessive' tendencies. I had an unusual ability to focus on one thing that captivated me accompanied by an unusual inability to pay attention to anything else. I was always consumed by one project or another, usually something constructive in the sense that I could produce tangible results. As concerns activities, my earliest obsessions were Jujitsu and then baseball. By eighth grade, however, everything had taken a backseat to music. Music, I found, combined the discipline of sports, the intellectual rigor of academia, and the euphoria of creation that I had associated with building models, making movies, and other childhood diversions.
I was good at the saxophone but not prodigiously so. Technical facility, rhythm, and good ears were all skills cultivated over time. If I was a natural at anything it was theory. By the age of thirteen, jazz emerged as my chosen vocation. I spent most of high school playing, listening to, and writing music, often derelict in my responsibilities to school and non-musical extracurricular activities. Despite this neglect, my test scores put me in decent shape senior year. Applying both to conservatories and secular universities, I chose the reactionary route, matriculating at Tufts University.
Tufts presented me with a very different idea of formal education. In my experience, school always stymied any attempt to chase after anything passionately and deeply. In high school, even when I fell in love with a topic within the curriculum, I found that the system discouraged deeper study, forcing even the most energetic students to hold themselves back. Fortunately, at Tufts, I was able to explore mathematics, economics, and writing in depth, diving into music after and between classes. Additionally, I met and roomed with Joshua Herman, a curious fellow who deserves some credit for a contributing to my thought process in most things I play or write. At the end of the year, despite forging several close bonds with students and teachers, I transferred to Columbia University so that I could pursue musical aspirations in NY while continuing to indulge my academic interests.
At Columbia I continued to find academic bliss. Even when I clashed with my environment, the experience was intellectually rewarding. Confident that school presented an opportunity, not a nuisance, I finally allowed myself to explore several fields that I had admired from afar but never meaningfully engaged. Chief among them were computer science, literature and philosophy. On a whim, I taught myself intro to programming in Java in a week and enrolled Object Oriented programming in the summer following Sophomore year. Recursion, data structures, object oriented design heuristics all consumed hours of my thought. While once I had conceived of everything in the world in terms of music, now I started parsing the world around me into pseudocode, thinking about how I might model everything I encountered. Continuing to take computer science courses alongside my regular course-load for the next year, I excelled; I even considered applying for a double degree with the Fu Foundation for Engineering and Applied Sciences.
At the same time, I began to play much more, focusing increasingly on original compositions. Playing both in Columbia's music program, at a weekly jazz event that I organized, and outside gigs at jazz clubs and schools including the Knitting Factory and Clark University, I had an unprecedented opportunity to workshop new compositions and develop my skills as a saxophonist, writer, and leader.
Then, in the summer following Junior year, I fell sick. At first it was just a nagging stomach problem. Eventually, during senior year, I lost all the energy that used to propel me through tireless nights of adrenaline-driven work. Computer science had to depart the landscape of my academic life so that I could finish my Joint-Degree in Mathematics and Economics. All of a sudden, where once I would absorb everything effortlessly, I started getting lost in lectures. By the end of senior year I was limping through academically, lucky to graduate with honors.
After graduation I don't remember much. I know I stopped playing music. Then I stopped listening to music. I still had a will to learn, and managed to teach myself a few new programming languages, finding employment at the New York Observer as back-end web software developer. But eventually the problems overwhelmed my ability to compensate. A persistent eye pain gave way to memory problems and pretty soon I was struggling to carry even the simplest conversations.
Blood work, brain scans and myriad other procedures claimed my body for several months while I held out a faint hope that I might eventually reclaim my mind. Finally, answers started to trickle in. Doctors couldn't agree on what the proper nomenclature was. Either way, the consensus was that my immune system had identified my brain as a pathogen, requiring the application of high-dose corticosteroids and immunosuppressive therapy. While the diagnosis itself provided little relief, treatment did. As recently as May 2008, I feared the saxophone because I could not remember how to put the instrument together. Suddenly, a month later, I was able to play my first gigs in nearly 8 months.
Now I am attempting both to sort through and recover from the experience that altered my life. Increasingly lucid, I'm able to devote most of my time to intellectual and musical rehabilitation. Soon, I expect to resume performing on a regular schedule.
About the Site
I believe strongly in the use of the internet to expose and share many aspects of the artistic process. With this site, I aim to share my music, multimedia projects, my writing, what I'm practicing, and my other diversions, including software projects.