Coffee Music

I have a couple of hours to kill after an early morning rehearsal, so I’m outside of a busy downtown neighborhood café sipping a mocha and lightly plucking the strings of my little tenor acoustic guitar. The streetcar rolls by. The couple at the table next to me laughs and jokes. An infant cries from one of the open apartment windows down the block. The heeled shoes of a businessman click on the pavement as he hurries up the block. The café door opens to the hiss of the espresso machine and a mellow Thelonius Monk. The deliciously dark and enticing aroma of today’s new blend from the mountains of Central America wafts out and I breathe deeply to draw it all in. Sure enough my semi-random plucking has transformed into a new and unexpected harmony, and the next thing I know that rich fountain of sensory stimulation has inspired a song. I take another sip of my mocha. What a way to kill a couple of hours…

Music exists in a space. It doesn't come out of a vacuum. The world around me is my inspiration. I create music by merely adding to the environment –mixing my own sounds with the music of the myriad other things happening all around me. Each new environment that I experience has it’s own ‘soundscape’ -its own unique rhythm and ambience, and inspires in its own unique way. That was my concept in creating my CD -M-.

Samantha and I met a couple a few weeks back when I was playing some tunes outside our local coffee house Cooper's. We were chatting about music (he plays and writes as well) and I gave him a promo of my CD. I was mentioning the concept behind the production. He had the idea, 'Well what if you applied this concept to the coffee house experience?' (something along those lines anyway). I thought it was a great idea so I wrote this up the other day and sent it to him.