This is a piece I composed and played.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
It is Zen composition: a painting of us, the travelers, the transient, the moment.
Zen arts have traditionally been rooted in Eastern vehicles: tea ceremony, brush painting, haiku, archery. We can now make the Zen arts our own. We can express them in our own culture and time.
I am grateful for my training at the Zen Arts Center which became Zen Mountain Monastery. I was able to study with John Daido Loori, Roshi and the lineage of visual arts teachers from which he descends. I put this learning together with my own training in music and my experiences playing with many musicians in the avant garde and modal Jazz tradition. I was luck enough to play with some seminal players like Carl Berger, and musicians in the Ornette Coleman band like Don Cherry and David Eisenson. I learned a great deal from playing with all of them.