I Dreamed about You Last Night - CD

MY PRIMARY GOAL in this recording was to come to terms with my various musical lives. When I first began playing the guitar, I was attracted to the more improvised forms found in American blues, jazz and rock. I played the electric guitar and did bandstand work. Somewhere along the line I got bitten by the classical guitar bug and switched my interests to composition and mastering the standard solo guitar repertoire. Fast forward to a few years ago. I began to be curious about how I could combine my free improvisatory past with my disciplined compositional present; my electric past with my acoustic present. This recording is the blended result of improvised and scripted music.
Common Ground is a set of continuous variations (ciaccona) over a bass pattern that was quite common in Italian compositions from the baroque period. I Dreamed About You Last Night is based on a very small trick that most folk guitarists know well. Boppin' is an homage to the guitar playing I loved when I was 12 years old. Still Life in Wood and Wire is a free fantasy based on material from a popular song from 1963. The Philosopher and the Fly is a two movement mini-drama about the eventual meeting of a contemplative but increasingly agitated philosopher and an irritating fly who are occupying the same room. Like the title track, Magic Serenade is an improvised composition that was the result of another small discovery about the guitar. When traveling back to Portland via airplane, I discovered some very interesting properties in the loosened strings of my guitar. A Dog From Every Town explores to the relationship found in that tuning. Pentimento is my improved account of a very particular musical memory. Open Up Your Ears, written for David Starobin, is a short fantasy that features a few improvised side-trips.