#7…WITH A BULLET! (“Heavy Rotation” on WFMU!)

While ego-surfing (aka “typing your own name into Google” aka “avoiding grading 20 Freshman Music Theory exams”) I discovered that my album Acidic Jazz, Malicious Mash-ups was on WFMU’s heavy rotation list for jazz albums!

THANKS WFMU!!!! (And, I ADORE WFMU’s Beware the Blog – a music blog curated by people who freaking love music. THESE ARE OUR PEOPLE.)

Now, I consider airplay for this album to be no small feat, considering that the music of Acidic Jazz, Malicious Mash-ups is, on the whole…unpleasant and weird. (In my opinion, unpleasant and weird but also INTERESTING.)

(True story: This album prompted one of my wife’s aunties to ask if I had been smoking “the wacky tobaccy.”)

(For the record: No. This weirdness is generated without external stimulants.)

So that’s cool. This was my first big promotional endeavor, sending out many copies for review. (It figures I would do this for the *least* accessible music I have ever made.)

It’s also cool because this album was also weirdly divisive. Well, “divisive” seems like a strong word – desegregation was divisive. Martin Luther’s 99 Theses was divisive. When I say “divisive,” I mean that among my freaky jazzbo friends and online music nerd friends, the reaction to this album was mostly befuddlement, bemusement, with occasional, small pockets of rabid enthusiasm.

I stand by this album, I still dig it. It’s a preposterous blend of “remixing,” jazz, and avante garde music. It’s taking jazz standards (Tin Pan Alley tunes, even) and transmogrifying them into bitonality and rhythmic ambiguity. Hearing hear the melody to Blue Room sung by Chet Baker and then answered by Miles’ trumpet – in a completely different key and tempo – never gets old, to me at least.

And I love that it was categorized as jazz by WFMU – in some ways it goes against everything jazz is: there’s no improvisation, there’s no group interplay, it’s a very electronic treatment of a very organic music. In other ways, it’s a homage to that amazing music, which I perform, study, and love so so much.

Boomeranging the love right back to WFMU – if you dig my music, you might dig the shows my music was played on: