Interview with Mae Moore | Funny World

February 2, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Interview with Mae Moore [20:24m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Great honor speaking with Mae Moore about her recording career, organic farming, and artwork! More about Mae Moore from her website:

Understandably, there will be those quick to include Mae Moore alongside such artists as Sarah McLaughlin, Joni Mitchell, and Diana Krall. Yet in many ways, the acclaimed Canadian singer/songwriter stands apart, with a musical vision that remains steadfastly her own. Mae’s soulful blend of rock, folk, and jazz carries a unique imprimatur, unencumbered by imitative links to others. That was true in the beginning of her career, and is true today.
Mapping the human heart has long been Mae Moore’s calling, and her many fans on both sides of the border prove she’s always been good at it. She got her start in the smoky folk clubs and coffeehouses of southern Ontario, later moving on to the thriving club scene of Vancouver, B.C. Her first big break as a songwriter came when she co-penned the lyrics to “Heaven In Your Eyes,” the 1985 hit for Loverboy from the “Top Gun” soundtrack.
A subsequent demo led to her first recording contract with CBS Records (later Epic/Sony) and her 1990 debut solo album Oceanview Motel. Released in Canada, the album spawned the hit single “I’ll Watch Over You.”
Juno nomination in 1991 - Most Promising Female Vocalist of the Year
From there, Mae left for Australia to record her follow-up album Bohemia (1992), the title track from which went on to Triple AAA and Modern Rock chart success in both Canada and the U.S.
Juno nomination in 1993 - Best Video for ‘Bohemia’ directed by Lynne Charlebois,
For her 1995 third album Dragonfly, Mae set up shop in her own home, recording the album in those comfortable confines. The single “Genuine” from that album led to a SOCAN Award for Most Played Radio Track. It was around then that Mae undertook the search for the daughter she’d given up for adoption many years earlier. In time, that search proved successful, and now she and her grown daughter are very close.

Mae turned in a 1999 self-titled Big Hip Records release, produced by Jann Arden, followed by a lovingly assembled retrospective album Mae Moore: Collected Works 1989-1999, released in 2000. It offered fans and critics a good look at her remarkable musical growth over the years. At the same time, Mae relocated again to British Columbia, to live in the quiet woods of Vancouver Island, not far from the capital city of Victoria.

To record ‘It’s A Funny World’, Mae once again felt there was no place like home. “It’s a wonderful atmosphere,” she says, “and far more personal.” Producer Joby Baker, a brilliant musician himself, took advantage of every conceivable instrument… including the kitchen floor! The songs for that album are, as Mae points out, “reflective of where I’d been in the years of living by myself. They’re about personal growth.” That growth was spurred by her artistic evolution. “I enjoy being a writer these days,” she says, “because I do have a lot of life experience and perspective. I always thought of myself as a songwriter first, setting a landscape for each song, seeing things the way a painter does.” A life long visual artist, Mae had her first solo show in the summer of 2007. Later that year she was awarded a SOCAN Classic Award for 100,000 radio plays for the song ‘Heaven in Your Eyes’, a song she co-wrote with John Dexter.

These days Mae sees greater need for the healing power of music. “More than ever we need to connect in community,” she says, “and not feel so isolated. Songwriters bring the world together. That’s also my mandate: helping people feel less alone. When she is not in the studio, Mae can be found alongside her husband Lester Quitzau, working their organic garden and heritage apple orchard, or tending their flock of motley , but much loved hens. Mae has gardened organically for 35 years and is most at peace when doing just that.

Posted by admin | Filed Under Pop, Folk, Jazz, MUSICIAN INTERVIEW, PODCAST

Aaron Goldberg | Sound Authors Radio

January 29, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Interview with Aaron Goldberg [15:44m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I had the honor of speaking with Aaron Goldberg, New York City jazz musician. More about him from his website:

For the Boston-born, New York-based Aaron Goldberg, Worlds is an encyclopedic circumnavigation of his ever-evolving musicality, which began with piano lessons at the age of seven. In high school Aaron got hooked on jazz by Bob Sinicrope of Milton Academy and continued his pursuit with saxophonist Jerry Bergonzi, two master educators. “At first improvisation was a mystery and a puzzle, but soon it became a profound inner and outer journey as life and music entwined.” After receiving awards from Berklee School of Music and DownBeat, Aaron left at age 17 for NYC. At the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music in 1991 he had his first taste of jazz in the big city, and at school he met many of his current contemporaries and friends, including Omer Avital, Brad Mehldau, Roy Hargrove, Ali Jackson and others.

In 1992 he returned to Boston and enrolled at Harvard College. While at Harvard, Aaron worked with a wide variety of artists from nearby Berklee and beyond, and won the International Association of Jazz Educators’ prestigious Clifford Brown/Stan Getz Fellowship award as well as first place in National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts Recognition and Talent Search in 1993. Soon he was discovered by vocalist and first lady of jazz Betty Carter and was a founding member of her historic Jazz Ahead program. He continued to perform at clubs around both New York and Boston, often commuting in the wee hours, and it was not long before he met Rogers and Harland. Aaron graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in 1996 with a degree in History and Science and a concentration in Mind, Brain and Behavior. On the weekends he held a long-time residence at Wally’s Cafe in Boston, and the fall after graduation he moved to Brooklyn.

Aaron wasted no time in the Big Apple. He quickly established himself as a stellar sideman, performing with a vast array of leaders including Al Foster, Nicholas Payton, Stefon Harris, Tom Harrell, Freddie Hubbard, Mark Turner, and others. In 1998 he joined the band of Joshua Redman, with whom he toured for 4 years and recorded two albums (Beyond, 2001 and Passage of Time, 2002).

Most recently, in addition to leading his telepathic trio Aaron has been touring and recording with young guitar guru Kurt Rosenwinkel. In 2005 he also toured South America with Madeleine Peyroux and spent 6 months performing with Wynton Marsalis in his quartet as well as with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra.

Aaron’s long and impressive list of recorded credits includes work with a diverse spectrum of artists ranging from Guillermo Klein to Terry Gibbs/Buddy DeFranco, as well as with fellow leaders of the next generation including John Ellis, Jimmy Greene and Eli Degibri. In 2004, Aaron produced and performed in Jazz for America’s Future, a fundraising concert for John Kerry’s presidential campaign that also featured Savion Glover, Brad Mehldau, Michael Brecker, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Christian McBride and others. He is currently the musical director of All Souls at Sundown, a jazz and poetry series at Manhattan’s All Souls Church. His first recording as a leader, Turning Point, was released on the J Curve imprint in 1999, followed by Unfolding in 2002. He’s also a member of the OAM Trio, which recorded Trilingual (1999) and Flow (2002) for the Fresh Sound/New Talent label, as well as two collaborations with saxophonist Mark Turner: an upcoming studio project and the acclaimed Live in Sevilla (2003) on Lola Records.

Posted by admin | Filed Under Jazz, MUSICIAN INTERVIEW, PODCAST

Interview with Mae Moore | Sound Authors Radio

January 25, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Dr. Kent: Welcome back to Sound Authors! It’s my honor to have on the show organic farmer and incredible acoustic musician Mae Moore. Her latest recording as far as I know is called It’s a Funny World, put out in 2002 and we’re going to talk with her and play a couple of songs from that. Welcome to the show Mae Moore.

Mae Moore: Hello Dr. Kent! How are you doing today?

Dr. Kent: I’m doing great! Do you have any newer albums than this one or is this it?

Mae Moore: I do have a newer one and that album came out in 2004. It’s called Oh My! I recorded it with my husband and its just two guitars and two voices in it and it was recorded on old school style eight-track one inch tape so it’s got that kind of warm quality to it.

Dr. Kent: What does it feel like to record with your husband?

Mae Moore: Well, as with every other thing there were challenges but it was so rewarding. We learned a lot about each other through the process and I’m really proud of this record. I think we worked really well together for that. It’s been great; it’s nice to be on the road with someone you love.

Dr. Kent: One of my favorite songs I see is on that album. It’s Tom Waites’ Hold On, which I think is a masterful piece of writing.

Mae Moore: Oh that’s such a great tune. He is a masterful writer; he’s certainly one of my favorites.

Dr. Kent: You’ve been in the industry for a long time now, you’re a self acclaimed organic gardener now what are you up to?

Mae Moore: Well I’m taking a bit of a hiatus from music and I’ve been focusing on painting, I’m a painter. In fact I started out as a visual artist before I got into music after I got out of high school and went to college I studied art and I kind of kept battling it all through my musical career and I’ve taken a vow not to fly after reading George Mambiat’s book Heat a couple of years ago so that kind of limits my touring ability to where I can drive and the train possibilities; I can do that. But the music is on hold; I’m painting a lot and I’m heavy into the gardening, organic gardening, I love it.

Dr. Kent: So talk about your painting a little bit. Do you just paint? Do you do other kind of media?

Mae Moore: No its mainly acrylic on canvas is what I do and there’s a few examples of that on my website.

Dr. Kent: I’m looking right now, it’s gorgeous.

Mae Moore: Oh thank you very much. I love the outdoors and so landscape art really I’m attracted to so that’s kind of what I do. I also find gardening a creative outlet as well and very rewarding.

Dr. Kent: I wish I could put one of your paintings on the air here but since we’re a purely audio program let me play a track. We’ve got two tracks, one of them is called Bohemia and this was a success back when? Tell me about the song.

Mae Moore: Okay well that song Bohemia was off the album Bohemia and I recorded that in Australia in 1992 and I believe it came out in the US in 1993 on Tri Star Sony and I did a little bit of touring down the east coast there, new York and new jersey and a bunch of places and on the west coast and I really enjoyed that. That album that was a bit of a departure for me because my background is more folk based. I grew up in, my father was at one time was a professional jazz musician so jazz is what I’d grown up with and so folk and jazz are my two preferred musical genres.

So Bohemia was a bit of a departure in that it was a little bit more produced and I teamed up with Steve Kilby from the Australian band I met at church and their big single was Under the Milky Way; I forget what year that was but he added a really good atmosphere and element to my music that I hadn’t explored before. The song Bohemia is really funny, its one of those things. You hear about people when inspiration hits and it certainly did for me that day, Bohemia was written in about 15 minutes and I just felt like a conduit just there holding the pencil in the style of Steinbeck and the words just came out. I was at a crossroads in my life and it was a song that really helped me through what I was going through at the time.

Dr. Kent: Well here’s Bohemia and we’ll listen to this and talk to you in a few minutes. I’ll play the whole track.

Mae Moore: Thank you.

[ Music 01:24:53 – 01:29:02 ]

Dr. Kent: That was a great song called Bohemia by Mae Moore and that was put out in 1992 I guess and went up to number 26 on Canada’s charts. What did that feel like in the 90s to be sort of at the top of the music world there?

Mae Moore: Well it was interesting. I’m a fairly introverted person and I really had to learn how to get out there and become a larger machine and certainly the people that were my band mates and my management at the time were really good at making me feel comfortable. I’ve since learned to be comfortable but at that time I wasn’t comfortable performing. I’ve always thought of myself as a songwriter first; and that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a born performer so some of these things you have to learn but it was very exciting. I got to see a lot of the world and that was wonderful.

Dr. Kent: How about your occasional forays into music these days; the concerts, things like that. Are they more of a hobby for you now? Do you still feel that you’re still tied into the world of music or have you completely left and went into art and all of that?

Mae Moore: No I’m still keeping one foot in the realm of music because I do love it, although it’s very different now than what it was when I first got my big break and had a major record deal. Things are very different for me these days but I’m choosing now, I don’t feel so desperate to get out there and perform and play my music so I’m kind of choosing gigs that I like to do. One gig that comes to mind was last summer playing for the Organic Islands Music Festival in Victoria, British Columbia, right close to where I live and the entire stage and sound system was powered by solar.

Dr. Kent: Oh wow.

Mae Moore: That was kind of exciting, yeah! That’s a big deal for us on the west coast of Canada here because it’s pretty much rain forest unlike California or someplace like that where it’s sunny a lot.

Dr. Kent: I guess they had a rain date then?

Mae Moore: Yeah, we had some deal with some higher power.

Dr. Kent: So I’d like to listen to one more song and this is off of I believe your latest acoustic re-release of a lot of the older music. This is called Funny World. Tell me about this acoustic album that you put out in 2002.

Mae Moore: This album in particular I feel very, very close to. I think its best described and it best captures me as I see myself. I got to work with an incredible producer by the name of Toby Baker and we just recorded it in my house. I was living in a little tree house in the forest and we brought in all the equipment and he and I just went to work at producing it. It’s a really phonically great sounding record.

I was kind of living by myself with my cat and it was very introspective. But I did go back and I did re-record some of the songs on this record that I had recorded on previous albums, just give them an update on who I am now and I love this record. I’m sad that it’s only available digitally, there’s no more press copies. I had a bit of a thing with the record company that put out the album.

Dr. Kent: Well we’re excited to listen to a track from it and its been such an honor chatting with you; all your music is wonderful and anyone who loves Tom Waites and puts that influence into their music deserves my utmost respect. That and of course the sound of your voice and of the atmospheric instruments and all that. It’s so spectacular to hear a little bit behind that.

Mae Moore: Well thank you, the pleasure was all mine. I appreciate your interest in my music and I thank you.

Dr. Kent: Of course we can refer some people to go to your website and there’s a couple pieces of art up there and I guess it’s got some updates on what you’re doing at maemoore.com.

Mae Moore: Thank you very much.

Dr. Kent: Have a wonderful year this year. We’re going to play a track from the album called Funny World.

[ Music 01:34:36 – 01:39:19 ]

Dr. Kent: That was Mae Moore and what a beautiful song. It’s a funny world; maemoore.com is where you can check her out. It was an honor speaking with her and with all of our guests today. Be safe, choose a good book and have a great week.

Posted by admin | Filed Under TRANSCRIPTS, Pop, Folk, Jazz, MUSICIAN INTERVIEW, PODCAST

Interview with Aaron Goldberg | Sound Authors Radio

January 18, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Dr. Kent: Welcome back to Sound Authors! On the last segment of every show we feature a musician, an author of sound and I’ve got a wonderful piano player on the show today. His name is Aaron Goldberg and we’ll listen to a track from his new album in a minute. Welcome to the show Aaron Goldberg.

Aaron Goldberg: For sure.

Dr. Kent: Talk about the jazz world in New York City for a minute. Is it a hard life?

Aaron Goldberg: Well it’s a rewarding life; I think every job has its positives and its negatives. The positives of being a jazz musician in New York are huge and in particular you are surrounded by some of the greatest musicians in the world. All flock to this city in order to meet each other and make connections and play with good people when they can and of course the history of New York is the history of jazz and jazz is the history of New York, so you’re kind of in the center of the universe as far as your art form goes. Every day there’s something new, that’s another positive aspect, you never know what’s going to happen tomorrow, a month from now, or a year from now.

The phone rings and I’m asked to get on a plane and go to Japan tomorrow. But yeah, the downside is you don’t even know where you’ll be tomorrow or a month from now or a year from now so in that respect the up and down side are one in the same, it just depends on your perspective on it. Can you adapt to the job or not? At this point after doing it for ten, 15 years professionally, it’s something that I enjoy. The uncertainly of it I enjoy.

Dr. Kent: As a jazz piano player there’s so many directions that different players have gone. From playing with an ensemble, playing solo, who are your mentors growing up? Did you listen to Coletrain and the sinful piano that played with Coletrain? Did you listen to Chick Korea and the fast fingers? What was your favorite piano?

Aaron Goldberg: That’s a good question. I do jazz not only as a fan but as a student when I was younger so I like everybody that I listen to but I have my early favorite but those are probably arbitrary based on who I happen to go to first and of course with most of the piano players that play Miles Davis, such as Red Garland, Gene Kelly, then later Herbie Hancock, Chic Corea, Bill Evans, all these guys were great accompanist as well as great soloists and that’s something that’s important to me. I’ve always played in bands; I rarely play solo so that’s hugely important for me. I’m always inspired by playing with great musicians so I support them the best way I can the same way the guys in my band support me in the best way they can and we learn to make each other sound good and as a result the music is always a greater sum of its parts and that’s another beautiful aspect of what we do.

Dr. Kent: You have a great quote from Winton Marseilles on your site. He a lot of times sort of people go to him to ask where jazz is going and where it’s come from. And then there are a lot of folks that have different ideas about it. What’s your take on where jazz is now and what’s allowed, what’s not allowed or how you would put it?

Aaron Goldberg: Everything is allowed, that’s the good thing about jazz. Every rule is a breakable rule and its not that we exist in a world of structure. I mean we’re guided by the same principles the guides all of western music and all of African and much of eastern music too to rhythm and harmonies so we’re living in the same world of unwritten rules of everyone else and then there are sort of genre based or stylistic based principles that have been laid down. Jazz is a language, has its grammar, has its great eloquent speakers everyone studies or imitates when starting out. So they set I’d say guidelines if not rules and you make your personal choice to follow or not follow them.

It’s not a conscious choice but a matter of taste and finding your individual voice and hopefully to get it out organically through experience after playing with people over a long period of time. So in that respect I think that everyone has their own opinion about where jazz is headed. From what I can see sitting in the middle of this era, the jazz universe is headed in all directions at once. You have people combining jazz with ethnic music from their homeland or from their favorite foreign land. You have people that are going back and studying jazz traditions that were forgotten from the early part of the 20th century. You have people trying to be forward thinking and avant-garde in their refusal to speak the traditional jazz language and possibly have people that are continuing every little current in that jazz language, every branch of the jazz tree is being extended simultaneously by someone.

You have regional music like great Scandinavian jazz musicians and they would consider Scandinavian jazz. You have people playing Indian jazz, Latin jazz from Cuba, which is different than Latin jazz from Puerto Rico which is different from Brazilian jazz. So you have all these tendencies going on and you can find them all, one little strand of each f them in New York City. I don’t know, I’m interested in sort of pursuing what feels right to me and I try not to have a particular ideology about it. I just try to follow my heart and experience and let it lead me where it will.

Dr. Kent: You had an interesting education history. I was a jazz bass player in college and then kind of dropped it but I did a little bit of studying. How did you take sitting with great musicians along with studying jazz, along with all the rest of it? I mean, how does that work on a student, on a young person?

Aaron Goldberg: I’m not sure I fully understood the question but what was unique about my experience is I spent a period of time in music school studying only jazz for a year and after that I left and went to the Arts College and studied philosophy and psychology and entered a completely different world. At the same time, I was sort of living a double life through college. Spending my weekends playing with some of the best musicians at clubs around Boston and trying to stay in touch with everyone. I kind of had the privilege that was very rare and feel fortunate to have been able to live these two lives simultaneously and juggle all my responsibilities with differing degrees of success at different times.

It’s to be a student of jazz is like a lifelong goal. Every professional jazz musician is both a student and teacher of jazz, which is beautiful and you sense that humility in even the great masters. And I had a chance to play with some of them, there’s some correlation to how great someone is and how humble they are about it. So I’m trying to just pass along what I know now that I’m teaching and there’s not a tradition of jazz teaching per se. Every teacher has to make up his own method. I had a few good teachers but had a lot of students not as fortunate and they were led astray at an early age and it’s hard to get back on the right path. Now that I teach it I treat it as a job being similar to a doctor. Diagnose the problem, prescribe some medicine and let the student find their own way.

Dr. Kent: Well, we’ve been speaking to Aaron Goldberg, the jazz doctor. His latest album is a wonderful one. We’re going to play a track fro that in a minute here and the track is Oems Blues. Talk about that track and the others on the album.

Aaron Goldberg: Oem’s Blues is basically a newer, faster version of an older tune called Nows Blues, which is the acronym of the verse and somebody at Microsoft heard it before the CD came out and decided they wanted to include it in their windows Vista software which is going out in millions of copies all over the world. That makes it great; I got a check in the mail for that. I was about to cash the check and got another call from Microsoft saying hold on a second, don’t cash the check, there’s a little problem. The leader of China will not allow us to release our new windows vista software in china because of your song called Nows Blues and they don’t like the title. So we have a choice; remove the song and tear up the check or you can keep the song and give it a new title. So I just flipped the acronym and it originally referred to a fellow jazz musician. We had a band together called OAM Trio. So I turned the acronym back to what it originally was. Now it’s called Oams Blues.

Dr. Kent: That’s amazing, well what a story from Aaron Goldberg and lets listen to Oems Blues from his latest album Worlds. Thanks so much for chatting with me.

Aaron Goldberg: Thanks so much.

Dr. Kent: We can check him out on the web at aarongoldberg.com. Here’s that tune from Aarons latest album, come on back after.

[Music]

Dr. Kent: That’s an amazing tune from Aaron Goldberg called Oams Blues and its been an honor speaking with several authors and with Aaron today. Have a safe week and until 2009, I will talk to you soon.

Posted by admin | Filed Under TRANSCRIPTS, Jazz, MUSICIAN INTERVIEW, PODCAST

Interview with Ken Peplowski | Sound Authors Radio

January 11, 2009 | Leave a Comment

[Music]

Dr. Kent: What a great tune by Ken Peplowski. That’s just a little bit from his song called If This Isn’t Love, and what a sound! Rarely do we have a chance to hear a clarinet sound like that. My grandfather who I’ve never met, my mother’s father, was in the big bands back in the 30s and the early 40s and he loved the sound of Benny Goodman and there’s definitely Benny Goodman in some of this. It’s a sound that we all love. I have Ken Peplowski on the show with me. Am I saying your name correctly?

Ken Peplowski: Yes you are, yep.

Dr. Kent: not bad, I’m impressed with myself.

Ken Peplowski: Me too actually.

Dr. Kent: Tell me about the clarinet.

Ken Peplowski: Well it’s an instrument that my friend

Dr. Kent: You can also tell me why you’re surprised that I said your name correctly.

Ken Peplowski: Okay, I’ll reveal all to you. My friend Frank West, the great saxophonist, refers to the clarinet as an instrument that was invented by five people who never met. Which is what it feels like because it’s a difficult instrument and I play tenor saxophone also but I take special pride in the clarinet as my first instrument. It requires a little more love and attention than the saxophone does so all of us clarinetists have kind of a little society that we’re very proud of and my name.

I was impressed because I’ve had every variation on my name, including by my first press of any kind at all, I was I think eleven years old and my brother was 13 and we had a polish polka band in Cleveland, Ohio. We played a job at the local library and our picture got in the local newspaper and it was the first in a long series of misspellings of my last name – it was Ted and Ken Reflowski. So I mean if you look at it, it’s very easy to pronounce but people have all kinds of trouble with it.

Dr. Kent: It is apparently one of the most crazy instruments to play. I know from my own clarinet playing colleagues and friends that they have about 6,000 reeds everywhere. Talk about how crazy the clarinet is.

Ken Peplowski: Yeah, well that’s the bane of our existence is the reeds and the problem is the more people that play a woodwind instrument like that, the less they can allow the cane to age properly so you might go through a box of ten or 20 reeds to find one that plays.

Dr. Kent: Wow.

Ken Peplowski: It’s a constant search for the right thing. Sometimes they’re kind of off the mark and some are too soft, some are too hard, so it’s an endless search for reeds. And then when you get a good one, sometimes it can last a month or two months and also with that instrument you do have to stay on top of it. if you put it down for a couple of days you feel it when you pick it up again as its what we call an ombiture, you hold your lips and your mouth around the mouthpiece it’s a tighter ambiture than say a saxophone would be and much more rigid and controlled than you would have on a saxophone. So a lot of those muscles just go right away.

Dr. Kent: So now listening to your music, there’s always a seriousness to good jazz and I know you also play some avant-garde jazz. But now the fun in Dixieland, somehow it creeps into all of your music; or is that part of the clarinet beauty that you can make it sound so fun?

Ken Peplowski: Well I’m glad you said that and look, to me, you’ve got to convey the joy of creating music to people you play for, whether you’re playing a sad piece of music or a lighter piece of music. You have to convey your passion for that music to them otherwise you kind of lost the whole point of performing in public. And I think that some people unfortunately that happens a lot of times in jazz music and classical music. I always say this and I say it to my wife too, if I listen to a jazz performance that seems in a way where they take themselves too seriously and then they treat everything like it’s under glass and it’s a museum piece, I inevitably turn to my wife and say, “You know what? I understand why some people find jazz boring because sometimes it is.” And it doesn’t have to be that way ever.

There’s a lot of great difficult music that was presented with that sense of fun as you put it. Coleman is a classic example. I think he’s got a great sense of melody and joy in his playing and he’s an avant-garde saxophonist but I feel that same way with John Coletrain, with Benny Goodman, with Duke Ellington, but they all had a way of reaching out to the audience and pulling them in with them and that’s what I strive for anyways. If I like something, I’m not so much a composer as an interpreter of other people’s works. So if I like a piece of music, then its fun for me to draw the audience in and say hey, check this out. Here’s my take on this song that I like. Come along with me, that’s what I’m trying to do.

Dr. Kent: And you’ve got an album I see that came out in Europe called Happy Together. Can you tell me more about what recordings of yours are available right now?

Ken Peplowski: I’m doing a lot of different records for different labels now. I’ve done a bunch for this great Japanese label called Venus Records and they’re real audiophiles. They sound great. I’ve got three records out already for them and this is actually an interesting project that the producer came up with. I did a record called When You Wish Upon A Star that’s two different CDs and it’s the same songs, the same 11 songs, but I did one version on tenor sax and one on clarinet. So I gave them different treatments, different arrangements, even changed keys. So kind of how I would treat those songs on each instrument.

Dr. Kent: You’ve got one out called Memories of You?

Ken Peplowski: Yeah, that’s also on the Venus label and it’s a lot of great standards that I love and recorded with some of those guys I love to play with in New York. A pianist named Ken Rosenthal and I have one coming out soon again for that label that I’m real happy with. So those are the latest releases that I’ve done and I’ve got one that I’m going to be putting out myself too which is a little more not avant-garde but leaning a little more towards freer jazz. I did it mostly with bass, drums and fifes on a couple tracks. I get into some different things; I actually cover a George Harrison song on and I do a Professor Longhair. You know that great old New Orleans rum and coca-cola. My version of his version of rum and coca-cola.

Dr. Kent: Cool! Well your website is kenpeplowski.com and hopefully we’ll see some info up there about the new records?

Ken Peplowski: Yes, it will all be up there soon. They can find everything too on the usual websites where you can buy CDs.

Dr. Kent: Absolutely, if we just Google you.

Ken Peplowski: That’s correct; the beauty of the internet.

Dr. Kent: For musicians there’s nothing better. Well I love your music; your clarinet playing is extraordinary and thank you so much for chatting with me.

Ken Peplowski: Thanks very much, it’s been a pleasure talking to you.

Dr. Kent: Now we’re going to listen to If This Isn’t Love, we’re going to listen to the whole track out here and it’s by Ken Peplowski; visit his website at kenpeplowski.com or at amazon.com. So listen to a little bit with me.

[Music]

Dr. Kent: That was the amazing sound of the clarinet. Man, what a tune. Thanks for tuning in to sound authors today; it’s a beautiful, crisp, pre-winter day out here in New York. Be safe and we’ll talk to you the next time.

Posted by admin | Filed Under TRANSCRIPTS, Jazz, MUSICIAN INTERVIEW, PODCAST

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