Hello from the Big Apple. It's always good to be here, where I've spent more of my life than anywhere else, exactly 17 years (I moved to New York in August 1983 at age 22 to start my professional life as a musician and left to take a faculty position at the University of Michigan in August 2000). Of course I still spend a lot of time in New York (and remain a member of Local 802) and I enjoy my relationship now with the city more than ever. Usually I am here for no more than a week at a time, as is the case on this visit. I still feel very much at home here and know my way around Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens (never really did know the Bronx and certainly not Staten Island)...and just about the time the stress of dealing with the city starts to grind me down a bit, it's time to go home to South Carolina. So basically I feel that I'm getting the best of what New York has to offer in limited doses, which is a good policy to follow. But it helps to have lived here so long so that you really know how to get the most out of your time and how to avoid as many hassles as possible.

Oh yes, I almost forgot...there is a reason for my being here. This Friday evening, Nov. 11, at 7:30 PM, I'll be playing a solo recital at St. Peter's Church at 346 W. 20th St., in the Chelsea neighborhood. The program is one I have done a few times in the last year or so, in Columbia, Ann Arbor, and Milwaukee; it features Maurice Ravel's lusciously beautiful piano suite, Miroirs, composed one hundred years ago. Rather than playing the five movements of the piece together as is traditionally done, in this program I pair each of the Ravel movements with a short modern piano work written in the last twenty-five years, in each case something that to me evokes an association with its "mirror" Ravel piece. If you'd like to read a better description of what I'm talking about, here is a review of this program from my performance of it last June in Milwaukee.

The concert is only $10 at the door and it's a short program. I'll open with an early Mozart sonata, K. 282, and then the "Ravel-Plus" will follow, with no intermission. All told, you'll be out of there by 8:45 and can have a nice dinner in one of Chelsea's many marvelous restaurants. So if you are reading this in New York, or planning to be in the city Friday night, please come on by.

What a lovely afternoon it was yesterday! My wife Lynn and I spent it picnicking with wonderful friends at Sesquicentennial State Park, and a more delightful and relaxing way to spend a warm fall day I cannot imagine. To my friends from other parts of the country who wonder how I'm enjoying life "down south," I have a simple phrase with which to answer: "November 6th...82 degrees."

"Sesqui" is one of the jewels of Columbia. At least one of our friends had never been there in spite of living in town for several years, and another had only been once a long time ago, so we were happy to be able to turn them on to one of our favorite places in the area. We love the hiking trail around the lake, and yesterday for the first time we rented canoes and puttered about the lake, under a big sky. Recently Sesqui opened a dog park on the grounds (with membership fee) which I understand is becoming very popular with dog owners in the burgeoning northeast part of the city.

For our picnic, I had reserved one of the picnic shelters using the online reservation system that has recently been implemented. You can reserve campsites, the fancier state park cabins, or even picnic shelters and day use facilities using the system, and I thought the system worked very well.

Last night at the Visulite Theatre in Charlotte I attended a show by Project/Object, a band dedicated to performing the music of Frank Zappa and led by two veterans of some of Zappa's best ensembles, Ike Willis and Napoleon Murphy Brock. I'd been looking forward to that for some time, being the Zappa freak that I am. Those who know me know that Zappa occupies pride of place in my own personal pantheon of musical iconoclast heroes, a group that also includes Charles Ives, Glenn Gould, and Harry Partch, just to name a few.

I was only able to stay for the first set unfortunately, but it was a great joy to hear some the classics of the Zappa oeuvre live. Zappaphiles, you can imagine the smile on my face as the band launched into its concert with committed performances of "Zoot Allures," "Montana," and "Cheepnis." Overall, though, the performance as a whole was a decidedly mixed bag. Anytime Napoleon Murphy Brock was onstage singing or playing sax, the rise in overall energy level was palpable. That's wasn't just due to his physical onstage antics, but rather, it's because he's still got some power in that voice that made some of the cuts on classic albums like "Roxy & Elsewhere" so distinctive.

Sadly, time has not been quite so kind to Ike Willis' voice, which was once electrifying in Zappa's groups of the late 70's and early 80's. That's when I heard the band for the only time live, on the Pier in New York in 1984. The high notes and sustaining power are now no longer there. Willis acted as lead vocalist most of the time in this current band, but that mostly consists of him doing the former Zappa vocal parts, many of which were always semi-sprechstimme (half-spoken, half-sung) to begin with. In these, too, one missed the arch snarkiness of Zappa's delivery. Willis just seems like too nice a guy, whereas Zappa's ingrained assholishness gave the lyrics an inimitable pungency. (For more on Zappa's less-than-cuddly personality, I recommend Barry Miles' recent biography, highly flawed but very informative nevertheless and indispensible for true admirers of the music)

Other than Brock and Willis, the other Zappa veteran appearing last night was Denny Walley on slide guitar, who is guesting with Project/Object on certain dates. The rest of the lineup was filled by younger players on guitar, bass, keyboards, and drums. After a sort of sagging middle of the set, the band finished it strongly with excellent performances of "Hot-Plate Heaven at the Green Hotel" (with a searing guitar solo by Andre Cholmondeley) and "Cosmik Debris." It was a wonderful evening in the sense that everyone in the club, from those onstage to the 100 or so in the audience, was there to celebrate the memory of one remarkable creative artist and his astonishing imagination. At the same time, the memories of live performances or the ongoing reminder of the recorded legacy are inescapable. The music is there in outline, but Zappa is not there to refine the sound so that the polyrhythmic intricacies of "Montana" or those " zinger" fills in "Cheepnis" are clearly heard. I know it's unfair to compare Project/Object to the best of Zappa's own ensembles, but I'm sure comparisons, fair or not, are in the back of most listeners' minds. This basically sounded like a good rock band (a very good one, mind you) playing Zappa music. Maybe the keyboard needed to be mixed higher, I don't know (I would say that, wouldn't I?). Even the solid togetherness of this group merely made me long for the almost-ridiculous, preternatural exactitude displayed by Zappa's bands in the 70's and 80's. Again, there's no Zappa around to insist on repeated rehearsals for this band in the midst of their 36-shows-in-42-nights tour (yes, he did do that in the old days).

In spite of everything, if you love Zappa's music, go hear this band if and when you can. I'd have to say last night at the Visulite was, on the whole, a celebratory evening. This tour will only be in the south a few more days, with shows at Stella Blue in Asheville Nov. 4 and at JJ Cagney's in Savannah on Nov. 5. Then you have to go north to hear them, and this tour ends late November. But hopefully they'll put future tours together. Someday I'll make another blog entry just on Zappa and his music, and why so many classical musicians and important contemporary music groups like Germany's Ensemble Modern are passionate about it.

I came across this item today in the NY Times and had to laugh. Apparently there is a new internet radio station for pets, dogcatradio.com, supposed to be soothing radio for pets suffering from separation anxiety when their owners are away from the house. Usually my dog Ruby is happy if I just leave C-Span on, but she did pull off and chew some fabric from the base of our sofa a couple of weeks ago when they were broadcasting a talk by the head of the Al-Jazeera TV network. Not sure what that means.

If you love chamber music, here is an unabashed plug for some concerts I'll be involved with this Tuesday, Nov. 1 in Charlotte. Alan Black, the principal cellist of the Charlotte Symphony, has been curating a great chamber music series at St. Peter's Episcopal Church in downtown, sorry, "Uptown" Charlotte for several years now. Usually players from the Symphony are involved, but often Alan brings in performing artists from farther afield in both Carolinas. The concerts take place the first Tuesday of every month, a lunchtime concert at noon and an after-work performance of the same program at 5:30 PM.

This coming Tuesday Alan and I will be joined by violinist Calin Lupanu, the marvelous concertmaster of the CSO, for a piano trio by Haydn and the Schumann D minor trio, Op. 63. The Schumann is just an amazing piece. It's truly Romantic music, when that meant being revolutionary and aesthetically groundbreaking. The trio inhabits a world far removed from that of the Piano Quartet and Quintet; it's much more unruly at times, a little wild. And yet, Schumann's recent (at that time) study of counterpoint shows from the very first two bars of the work all the way to the finish. It's a bold experiment in using the tools of the past to forge a radically new music.

Best of all, these concerts at St. Peter's are free! Please come join us and hear some extraordinary music. I'll close with this quote from Robert Schumann in a letter to his wife Clara in 1838: "I am affected by everything that goes on in the world ... politics, literature and people, and then I long to express my feelings and find an outlet for them in music ... everything extraordinary that happens impresses me, and impels me to express it in music."