When I sit down to record a piano improvisation sometimes I just empty my head, play what I feel until I’ve said what I need to say. But sometimes I like to restrict myself to a specific motive, one of music’s oldest tricks, to create the piece.
You’ve already heard my “one note” meditation, as well as my exploration of the V-I progression. However, for this latest one, it’s all about octaves.
To create this each hand only plays octaves, so the harmonies never include more than two notes. The result is …

It usually around this time of year, where the coziness of winter hasn’t completely morphed into the gray loathing for the end of the cold, that I turn to my favorite of fruit bombs.
I usually don’t like fruit-forward wines, especially made from varietals like merlot, cabernet sauvignon, cabernet franc, pinot noir and syrah. Balance, backbone, a little spice, some earth, smoke, tannin, that’s usually what I want. But there’s one grape I believe does best when it’s used to make a deep fruit explosion in a glass, and that’s zinfandel. …

Last week I was invited to take part in Twitter Taste Live, an event sponsored by the Finger Lakes Wine Country where various wine bloggers around the country taste the same four Finger Lakes wines and share their notes on Twitter using a common hashtag, in this case #flxwine.
I spent the night with the event host, Lenn Thompson, who runs the New York Cork Report, a dynamite blog focused on New York Wines, and Michael Gorton, a Long Island native whose love of the local juice he documents on his …

After  much internal debate, I’ve decided to use this Web site to chronicle another passion of mine. At first I thought I’d keep this a place for my artistic expressions and once-in-a-while personal rants. But wine is personal to me, so its time I start adding my reviews here.
I’m a wine geek. It’s something that happened almost a decade ago, when after I just graduated college I decided to take a job in a wine shop, something simple that would give me plenty of time for writing. Before that, the …

So on a recent trip to Vermont I actually found a way to entertain myself at a local antique shop. Usually, when I’m dragged to these types of shops, I wander around, staring at the ceiling, hoping my wife or family doesn’t take too long. I just don’t have the antique bug. I take nothing away from people who love antiquing, but it bores the hell out of me.
So at this recent visit I started checking out the various plastic dolls and statuettes, specifically their faces. And the more I …