February 9th, 2011 at 15:29 by Andrew

Man passes out in the chip aisle

Pic­ture Unrelated

Today my good friend Cather­ine DeBroder and I started writ­ing horo­scopes. I’ve been want­ing to do this for a while, and I was just the right mix of hun­gover, caf­feinated and men­tally unsta­ble to pull it off. I think we’re going to do this every week, so stay tuned. For the record: I’m an Aquar­ius and Cather­ine is a Libra.

Aries
“The Ram” in Hel­lenis­tic tra­di­tion, you’re doing a great job of buck­ing around, Aries. Be on the hunt for some­one who can add more fuel to your cre­ative fire, and then do them. You’re going to be in love! Tread lightly on your cre­ative ideas, you don’t han­dle rejec­tion well, and you’re bound to hear some unfa­vor­able opin­ions of your cre­ations. — C.

Tau­rus
You were such an ass­hole last night. I mean, really what kind of prick does that? Shit­ting into a con­dom is for the bed­room, not the kitchen. Don’t you know any­thing? But I can’t really be mad. You’re just so cute in that uni­form. Now, it’s time for you to get to work. Crime doesn’t stop itself you know. — A.

Gem­ini
Divide and con­quer is an excel­lent apho­rism for you to think about. To con­quer your­self, divide into two pieces (which you are so good at any­way) and throw away the half with that unsightly foot­ball sized goi­ter. — A.

Can­cer
Uuh­h­h­hhh Can­cer. I shud­der at the word. Let go of your anx­i­eties that are truly a mere waste of brain space and start liv­ing your life.  Wanna come to Mardi Gras with me? Your birth­day is this sum­mer. It’s going to be a hot one so cool it down by tak­ing some hikes, swims, baths with loved ones, you know. Be cog­nizant of social sit­u­a­tions this month, don’t strike up con­ver­sa­tions with peo­ple who you may sus­pect don’t want you to waste their time. You’re remark­ably good at read­ing peo­ple,  put it to good use. You’re not as good as Libra, how­ever, so ask their advice. You will be enlight­ened my friend. — C.

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January 20th, 2011 at 16:32 by Andrew

A few months ago I was play­ing piano at a house party in West Asheville (the noto­ri­ous Mon­tana House) with Reese. We were trad­ing places at the piano bench and mix­ing it up with some four-handed stuff and really just hav­ing a blast play­ing and enter­tain­ing the folks that crowded around the sway­ing, rock­ing old upright. We beat that piano to a pulp for five hours, and my old friends Mike Belleme and his girl­friend Kris­ten were there for much of it.

A few weeks later, Mike asked me to be a part of a skate video fea­tur­ing the skaters of Asheville’s PUSH Skate Shop that he was going to be in. He’d filmed all his parts and there was a rough edit but no music yet. Inspired by the music that he had heard Reese and I play, he asked me to play the sound­track. So we met over at World Cof­fee, where they have a beat up old Wurl­itzer spinet in the back, RJ Hess (the film­maker) set up some record­ing equip­ment and I impro­vised some music while I watched the rough cut. I treated it like I was play­ing to a silent film, try­ing to accen­tu­ate action. After about six takes and some great ideas from Mike, the above is what we got. Damn it was fun. Mike said we made his­tory — he didn’t think any skater had ever had a live piano track before.

In exchange for musick­ing his video, Mike took some pro­fes­sional head-shots of me. Here they are:

I even got a shout out in the Moun­tainX. Kind of weird see­ing my name listed next to the Rolling Stones. I love a good col­lab­o­ra­tion, and though the out­put is unique, what made it work was not. Can’t wait til the next project.

December 20th, 2010 at 09:00 by Andrew

There’s a new club open­ing up in Asheville, the Arcade Asheville, in the loca­tion of the old and much mourned Joli Rouge and they are plan­ning to have rag­ing dance par­ties every Fri­day night. For a dance party to rage, you need the right DJs and they landed the best in town. By best, I mean with the best taste and widest appeal. They got Mar­ley and my good friend Par. I’ve worked for Par’s for­mer project, Under One Beat Pro­duc­tions, and designed lots of posters and other doc­u­ments for them. So he called me up and said he found the best image ever to use as the basis for a poster. And he’s right, this pho­to­graph is dope. Super dope. It inspired this design.

Been try­ing to beef up the ol’ port­fo­lio lately, and this was just the sort of project I was look­ing for.

Speak­ing of that, you should check out my port­fo­lio.

December 3rd, 2010 at 19:33 by Andrew

Asheville Beat Tape Photo

Some­times you’re just in the right place at the right time.

I was sit­ting over at Izzy’s sev­eral days ago lap­top­ping away, occa­sion­ally tak­ing my pulse to see if I needed fur­ther espres­sos when my old friend Mike McBride of Sonmi Suite walked in. Mike was there meet­ing a local group of elec­tronic pro­duc­ers, beat mak­ers and DJs that had just col­lab­o­rated on Asheville Beat Tape, a project he was involved with through Skew Records. There was about 15 of these guys that had got­ten together and some­how all made time out of their busy sched­ules for a photo-op, but there were two prob­lems. 1) No cam­era. 2) No pho­tog­ra­pher. “Well, I’ve got my Canon Rebel with me,” says I, “I’ll take the photo, though I’m far from a pro.” Twenty min­utes later we’re on the roof of a park­ing deck shoot­ing pho­tos. The light was poor, so I herded them into a stair­well and got onto the land­ing above and that’s where the above shot came from.

Pho­tog­ra­phy is a new hobby of mine, but early results are promis­ing. It was really fun to do, and I didn’t mind doing a favor for a friend and help­ing to make some­thing cool hap­pen for every­one. I’m going to keep it up.

You should lis­ten to the music they made. 100% local and organic. Plus, it’s a free down­load.

UPDATED: Moun­tain Xpress, the Asheville Citizen-Times and Ashve­gas all cov­ered this as well. I feel special.

June 22nd, 2010 at 11:48 by Andrew

Play­ing music has been part of my life since I was ten years old, nearly 17 years ago. For the first eight years I received piano lessons, as so many peo­ple do around that age. My first teacher (Carol Fern of Fen­ton, NC) gave me a good strict foun­da­tion and instilled good basics of the­ory and hand posi­tion. My sec­ond teacher was awful, I was only with her a cou­ple months. My third teacher was Pam McNeil, who gave me what I really needed — not just knowl­edge of how to play music, but the pas­sion to use that knowl­edge and seek more. Pam knew she wasn’t work­ing with the next Horowitz or Ashke­nazy, so she didn’t treat me like one. She allowed my inter­ests to come out and always had my tastes in mind when she chose a new piece for me to learn, or asked what I wanted to learn. I give her a lot of credit for show­ing me how to love music, not just mechan­i­cally crank it out. I cer­tainly wasn’t always a great stu­dent, but find­ing pas­sion in music is invalu­able. Thanks again, Pam, for everything.

But Pam stopped teach­ing and I entered the world of work and school and hav­ing a social life and music became less impor­tant for a while. My grand­par­ents bought me a piano so I always had some­thing to play, but I’m sorry to say there was a cou­ple of years where I didn’t reg­u­larly knock the dust off of it. Around this time, a new guy moved to town. Now, you have to real­ize some­thing here. I was 19 years old, liv­ing in a small town (pop. 1,800) and I didn’t know any one else like me. I was the weird kid who wore a fedora and an old top­coat and played the piano at the cof­fee­house for peo­ple dou­ble and triple my age. Sure, my skills really didn’t sur­pass the level of a few par­lor tricks and man­gled Beethoven sonatas inter­spersed with Star Wars themes, but that was my shtick, and it was my shtick. One day I hear about this guy who moved into town, a few years older than me. I hear he wears a fedora and plays the mean­est piano any­one had seen in this town. I’m think­ing, “Who is this guy? This is my town and this is my shtick! How dare he!” After a cou­ple weeks of rep­u­ta­tion pre­ced­ing him, I finally met him and saw him bust out a cou­ple of tunes and whoa, I was blown away. I’d never seen any­body play piano like that. I think he played the Tiger Rag. His left hand was a blur and his right hand always knew where the melody should go. I imme­di­ately decided that we were going to be friends. That’s how I met Reese Gray.

He opened up the world of early jazz to me, got me lis­ten­ing to greats like Jelly Roll Mor­ton and Louis Arm­strong, Bix Bei­der­becke, J. P. John­son, King Oliver, Wingy Manone, Spike Jones, the Hoosier Hot-shots, so much more. And man, I really dug that music. Some peo­ple call it Dix­ieland, Hot Jazz, Tra­di­tional Jazz, or just Trad Jazz. It wasn’t like the ele­va­tor, Barnes & Noble jazz, the Kroger jazz or John Tesh that you hear so often but can’t whis­tle a sin­gle bar of after hear­ing it your whole life. It had power and youth, spon­tane­ity and vigor, melan­choly and pas­sion, played by humans using all their human­ity. But mostly, it was just fun. That’s how I got into 1920s jazz.

Reese got me off the sheet music, but first he found some writ­ten copies of tunes that he thought I should learn. W. C. Handy’s Mem­phis Blues was the first one he showed me. After I’d got­ten the hang of the first cou­ple sec­tions I played it for him and he picked up his banjo-uke and tried to play along. Now, I’d never played ensem­ble in any fash­ion and had no clue how. I played a few bars and he stopped me. My rhythm was so bad he couldn’t play along with me at all. So he made me tap my feet when I played. Taught me the impor­tance of rhythm. Pretty sim­ple, but it was the miss­ing ele­ment I needed. After a few years, my sense of rhythm increased, while I’m still work­ing at it, I’m steady enough to play with folks. Mean­while, instead of impro­vis­ing being a side act, impro­vi­sa­tion became the main attrac­tion. That’s how I started to become an ear musician.

With my new skills, music became more and more impor­tant to me. I used it to purge emo­tions that I couldn’t talk about, or didn’t have any­one to talk to about. I used it when I needed a way to be angry but not destruc­tive. I used it to purge unre­quited pas­sion. I used it to stim­u­late my mind. I used it to feed my inner human.

Or did the music use me? Psh — semantics.

Back in Jan­u­ary, the Fire­cracker Jazz Band was in need of a piano player because Reese was leav­ing town for a cou­ple months. With trep­i­da­tion, I accepted. With about two weeks notice to learn 30 songs, I stepped up to the plate and prac­ticed hard. After two rehearsals with the band I had my first real, pro­fes­sional expe­ri­ence play­ing music with them on Valentine’s Day, 2010. Took me almost 17 years to get there, but man was it worth it. I was ner­vous all that day, but as soon as I stepped up to the piano I knew I was where I was sup­posed to be. Since Valentine’s Day, I’ve played around 25 gigs total, and every one I play is a hell of a lot of fun, but play­ing May 14 at The Orange Peel was the high­light so far. The Peel was nearly packed as we opened for the very tal­ented Car­olina Choco­late Drops. The sound booth recorded our show. You can lis­ten to it below. (Turn up your speak­ers — the gain is low.)

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Down­load the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Play­ing music has been the best, most fun, most ful­fill­ing thing I’ve done with the ener­gies of my life. Thanks to all who helped me along the way, who made me love the music, who vouched for an ama­teur, who believed that I had music in me that had to come out. And to those that didn’t believe in me, you too pushed me for­ward to prove you wrong.

June 10th, 2010 at 10:40 by Andrew

Gran­ite soul sar­coph­a­gus
my heart wor­ries like
a Pekingese but­ter­fly.

January 24th, 2010 at 15:27 by Andrew

As promised, though a cou­ple days late, I’m post­ing the lat­est UNC-Asheville Human­i­ties 324 lec­ture from this week. The topic was The Enlight­en­ment, and you can read the lec­ture out­line [pdf]. Dr. Rizzo was the speaker. We watched some clips of a movie about this guy to the left, Olau­dah Equiano.

For the com­plete pod­cast series, check this post: http://blog.afletcher.net/2010/01/humanities-324-lecture-podcast/