This Sunday at 7pm in Brooklyn, I’m playing my first public in-person show since before the pandemic! I’m also releasing records next month with both Picard & Picard and thingNY, with accompanying shows in Philly and NYC. Plus, I’m going into the second year of a masters in city planning at Rutgers. Read on for more!
This Sunday’s show will feature new spatial acoustic works by thingNY band members Andrew, Gelsey, Isabel, and Paul alongside Pamela Z’s Twenty Answers, composed in 2007. Besides a couple private or invite-only performances, it’s my first in-person show since March 1, 2020. I’m looking forward to hopefully seeing some familiar (masked) faces in the crowd! Following thingNY’s set, Nick Brooke and “The Cabinet” will perform new Transcendental Etudes for physical vocalists and samples, in which some members of thingNY will take part.
In October, I’m looking forward to two album releases that have been a long time in the making! On Friday, October 21, my duo with Carlos Cotallo Solares, Picard & Picard, will release our first album, Hold Music for a Space Rescue, on Gold Bolus Recordings. The album is conceived as a set of music a futuristic space rescue company provides for a crashed space explorer to listen to while awaiting rescue. We created the music from improvisations over Zoom recorded in late 2020. To celebrate, we’ll perform an album release show in Philly on Thursday, October 20 on the longstanding Fire Museum Presents series at 2223 FISH, sharing the bill with Cecila Lopez/Joe Moffett duo & Ben Bennett/Michael Foster/Jacob Wick trio. Facebook event here.
On October 28, thingNY will release our recording of Rick Burkhardt’s musically and narratively ambitious Passover, which we premiered in 2018 and recorded in 2019. The album is our first on Innova Recordings, who along with American Composers Forum selected it to be released as part of their recent national call and new model. In part to celebrate the album release, we’ll be performing a set of new work on Saturday, October 29. We can’t announce the details yet, but save the date!
Meanwhile, I am days away from starting my second year pursuing a Master of City and Regional Planning degree at the Bloustein School at Rutgers University. The first year was challenging but rewarding – if you’d like a small sample of what I’ve been working on, I’ve featured a couple projects on my LinkedIn page. You can also read a profile of me featured on the Bloustein School site.
I am also finishing up my first paid position in the city planning field, an internship with the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission (DVRPC). My job there has been to develop a paper assessing the state of the practice of long-range planning among Metropolitan Planning Organizations. MPOs such as DVRPC are federally designated regional transportation planning agencies, and to inform my paper I interviewed staff at 14 of them. If you’d like a window into my time there, you can read a short profile of me DVRPC did on Instagram.
Further ahead, I have an exciting fellowship position at Rutgers this year, which will culminate in a spring 2023 internship in the NJ State Legislature! More on that later.
Greetings from my new home for the school year, in Highland Park, NJ,
Jeff