"Forbidden Roots" is a musical homage to the many thousands of Sephardic "Crypto-Jews" who settled in the New World. I imagine that some members of that flood of converted Spanish Jews helped create the traditions that we now call "latin" jazz. I’ve characterized my composition—something between son montuño and Klezmer—as “Spanish tinge with a Hebrew hinge.”

I suspect anyone hearing Three Doctors for the first time might assume that it was written during the COVID pandemic. Actually, the idea for the song predates that calamity by five years.

My original tune was inspired by Art Blakey’s oft-quoted words of wisdom about jazz: “Music is supposed to wash away the dust of everyday life…That’s what jazz is about.”

“L’Effed Overs”—renamed for this studio update—is as appropriately titled as any of my songs. Of all the ditties I penned in the 1970s, this one scrapes the bottom of the barrel.

My wife and I had just moved back to South Boulder. Sitting at the piano in my basement music room at the foot of two mesas inspired me.

I wrote “Bad Breeze” in 1978 as a novelty song. At the time I was studying the blues idiom on guitar and had an encyclopedia of blues lyrics, many of them rich with sexual innuendo.

My song is a musical reminder that growing older doesn’t have to be lamented; in fact, there are certain experiences in life that can only be appreciated with the accumulation of years. It is a philosophy my wife and I have both embraced.

This was the first time I had attempted to write and score anything for this large a group of musicians. I felt that the most I could hope for were some very crude representations of angels, which is how I arrived at the title for the piece.

“The Hunter Gracchus” (1917)…[is] the tale of a 25-year old hunter, who is pursuing antelope in the Black Forest in Germany in the 4th century. While trailing a particular chamois, he falls down a precipice, cracks open his head on the rocks and dies. The boatsman, who is sent to ferry him to the next world, misses a critical turn, which leaves Gracchus adrift in the same boat for 1,500 years, half dead and half alive (a characteristically dark, Kafkaesque scenario).

How much are we willing to commit to a relationship if we’re not sure it will last, especially if we’ve been hurt in love before? And what do we expect in return? If we’re constantly guarded in our feelings, what do our promises really mean? I wrote “All Things Spoken” in 1979 with all these questions in mind.

The underlying mood of “Mirror Pond” is “contemplative.” I wanted my piece to be filled with the sense of wonder one experiences when seeing something new and beautiful for the first time. At the same time I wanted to imply a tinge of melancholy that comes from being a long way from home, immersed in a different culture.

I first encountered the song through Bessie Smith’s masterful performance. Bessie Smith made everything sound bluesy even when it wasn’t technically a “blues,” and this one is just such a song. I’ve always loved it for its clever, story-like lyrics, its concatenated interrogatives (where-when-why/who-when-what), and its striking bridge.

My friend and I did have a (very) short, flirtatious conversation with a waitress on Bourbon Street, … who said she planned on tagging the hyphenated name of Margaret Mead to her own last name (maiden or married we never discovered), and who disappeared into the night without a word, as mysterious as one might expect from a place of marvelous curiosities like New Orleans.

This year, I’ll fill the cup (and I won’t say “when”) to respectfully toast the man who is, in my opinion, the wittiest musical satirist of our time.

I have big ears, both literally and figuratively. The former I blame on genetics. The latter I’ve intentionally cultivated over the years by listening to as wide a range of music as I can—with a few notable exceptions.

For my original tune, “Too Big To Fail,” I was able to meld several interests: my love of Bebop, my long-standing attraction to novelty songs, and my obsession with current events…

This song is a ballad in the traditional sense: it tells the story of a significant (but unsung) event in history, in this case the first train robbery by the notorious James gang.

This song represents the confluence of two interests of mine: world travel and the study of word roots and etymology.

The breakup song is so common in pop music that it probably qualifies as its own genre.

I wrote “Woodcutter’s Children” in 1984 as an obvious allusion to the Brothers Grimm…