Can you share a bit about your upbringing and how it influenced your journey into music?
I grew up in a small town in rural Minnesota. There were no musicians in my family, but my mother loved listening to all kinds of things. Hence, I grew up listening to everything from Cuban drumming LPs to Calypso music to Japanese flute to the folk music of the 50s & 60s to Indian Ragas to Johnny Cash to western classical music.
My family life was…challenging. Two saving graces were nature—the forests, meadows, rivers, and lakes around me—and music. Both felt pure, true, and inviolable in a spiritual sense. I inherited a piano when I was about six years old and I just started playing it by ear. Eventually my grandmother noticed I was playing (something she had always wanted to do) and found me a piano teacher. It opened the floodgates of possibility—music was like breathing for me.
When did you first realize that music would play such a significant role in your life?
I knew the minute I first touched a piano that music was a calling, something powerful and mysterious and something I could cultivate—like a garden—that would, in turn cultivate whatever was true in me. But it wasn’t until I was 12 or 13 that I thought of myself as BEING a musician. Before then I don’t think I realized that could be an option!
What was the first piece of music you remember resonating deeply with you, and how did it shape your early connection to music?
The first music I remember hearing as a small child was my mother’s collection of drum music—Cuban jazz drumming, African drumming, then, too, Gene Krupa & Buddy Rich. I just remember being enthralled with the experience of pure rhythm. When I started to play piano by ear I would play whatever I heard on the radio—old hymns, country music—whatever was wafting through the air. I don’t think I questioned at the age of 6 how or why I could hear something and then play it; I had no point of reference for that experience. I just listened and I played. Later, once I started my classical training at the age of about 10 the first piece I studied that truly enraptured me was Claude Debussy’s Clair de Lune. It was the first time I can recall actually hearing light and having a somatic experience of tone color. As pianist now I am all about texture and tone color!
The title “We Are Luminous” is intriguing—what does “luminous” represent to you in this context?
Well, we live in a resonant universe—everything can be thought of as frequency. Light is a particular expression of frequency, as are sound waves. We can think ourselves as individual expressions of the cosmos refracted into our own particular rays of light. Even further, we can be the refractors of light as we each make our little offering to the whole of this universe. Music is resonance expressed through the organization of time (rhythm) and frequency (pitch—whether as melody or harmony). So my musical path is very much an expression of my evolution as a human being, trying to refine and expand my own resonance—my luminosity. I think the late, great David Lynch once talked about the purpose of our lives as being finding and refining our luminosity to share with world.
Further—it is not hard to build a case that our world is full of chaos and devastation, environmental calamity, war, disease, discord. But it is ALSO a beautiful world, full of kindness, compassion, and beauty. But before we can refract and radiate our own luminosity—we need to know it and affirm it. So in a way, We Are Luminous is an affirmation of our collective possibility!
How did the concept for the album evolve? Did it start as a clear vision, or did it reveal itself as you created it?
During the pandemic I started making extemporaneous videos of my improvisational explorations (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVQYanInuIo&list=PLTZ2GytEtYp_T9ULCZ4eL3XxfLmRJOmun). The mood would strike and i’d record and—if I liked it well enought—I’d post, creating an archive of my evolving improvisational lexicon. These videos are completely in-the-moment. A mood, a song lyric, something happening in the forest outside my window, an emotion—anything could be an inspiration to sit down and respond at the keyboard. In these videos you can sometimes hear my dog barking, or the cats playing with bells. One of them—Memories, Like Dreams in the Wind—was recorded during a major windstorm and power outage. The windchimes outside my window were madly ringing and ringing in the winds, and so I sat down to play a duet with them! (Those pandemic videos later led to the formation of my improvisational ensemble, Trio Improviso, which performs completely improvised music and also has an album in the works!)
While my training and the majority of my performance life has been as a classical pianist (and I DO love the repertoire and still perform with my classical ensemble, RASA 3-4-5), I was reminded how much I ADORE the process and experience of extemporaneous creation—thus the evolutionary trajectory of my personal, solo, and ensemble improvisations. I absolutely love the feeling of discerning an impulse, then taking it in, gestating it, developing it, and expressing it. I love the feeling of not knowing what’s going to happen, of exploring and finding themes and melodies and rhyhms and their interplay and just seeing where the road leads! There’s something totally mysterious and at the same time exhilarating about it.
So when I knew it was time to do this first solo album—it rather created itself. I had chosen a title, knowing the mood or overall experience or journey I wanted to create. A few of the tracks explore themes you can find in that YouTube playlist of my videos—themes that stuck with me and wanted, seemingly, to say more. But when I recorded I just sat down and played. I named the first track immediately after recording it. Then the impulse for the second arose, then the third, and so on. i think three of the tracks I started and didn’t feel the groove was grounded so started over. The album has 11 tracks; I recorded 12 but decided to remove one of them—it was based upon one of my videos and related to an experience I had after my mother died. When I did it in recording it just didn’t feel true to the experience, so I left it out.
I spent about two hours at the piano, start to finish. The sound engineer just had to remove the three false starts and my vetoed track. Truly the music just seemed to come in through some window, played itself, and went on its way. It was a profound experience for me.
If this album were a journey, how would you describe the emotional path it takes the listener on?
I think the album rolls like a river through cycles of expansion and contraction, moving inward and then outward like breathing. It can also feel like a dreamstate—with images and emotions weaving and intersecting and diverting in unexpected ways. It also cycles through light and darkness, through densities and then dissolution but always comes back to a homeostasis place of deep peace. I wish I could say that I planned it that way but it really just seemed to take on its own pathway and momentum in the process, like a river rushing home to the sea.
How do you decide when a song is finished? Are you ever tempted to go back and refine it further?
I don’t think a song is ever “finished.” The nature of being a musician as that we never get “there!” No matter how I’ve developed my technique or my ear or my musical sensibilities, there’ll always be more possibility awaiting and more work to do. It’s like our consciousness—ever-expanding. When recording this album I just stayed out of my head and remained in my own feeling state and in every instance I reached a point where I experienced a visceral feeling that enough was enough Not that more couldn’t have been said—but this was one album made in one time and one place. If or when I revisit themes from any of my improvisations they’ll always be different. What is that saying…you can never step in exactly the same river twice! (Again, something I love about extemporaneous creation.) I’m not trying to cement a reality, but express something passing through my consciousness and through my heart in that moment. I’m an explorer, not a composer! There are a few notes in the album that, if I were to codify into musical notation I might eliminate. I could have asked the sound engineer to “fix” them. But I wanted this musical, meditative journey to be true to life and to the moment so I let each piece speak as it needed to speak. So from the perspective of expanding consciousness, there were no mistakes. Just honest expressions of the experience in the moment of creation.
Music often brings people together—how do you hope “We Are Luminous” connects with listeners?
We are here so briefly in this world and I don’t harbor any grand aspirations. I just want to make whatever offering is mine to make. My best hope would be that people could find in my music a tiny bit of illumination on the road home to their inner Selves. That the resonance of my music spark something beautiful within.
How do you deal with creative blocks, especially when working on something as significant as an album?
At any one time I am working on lots and lots of different music for different concerts and collaborations. Sometimes I don’t have time to sit down and noodle about and explore—and yes, sometimes I wonder if i’ll have anything else to say! But honestly I don’t worry about creative blocks. We are like multi-dimensional stoves with a million burners firing at once. Some things are at full boil in the front and other things are simmering or marinating. If something isn’t coming together, I walk away and trust that it will blow in through the right window when I need it!
Beyond music, what other passions or interests inspire your creativity?
I love words and also write poetry (Music is a language, with syntax and grammar unique to each idiom!). Photography, too, is a passion of mine. Poetry and photography, both, are like capturing and conveying a moment of truth in time—like steam-distilling a billion roses to capture their essence. I also have a home and a part-time life in India and will eventually split my time more evenly between India and the U.S. I am very influenced and inspired by Bharati culture, art, spirituality, and music. And the natural world is as captivating to me now as when I was a child. Wind, water, stone, ice, the infinite variety of flowers—it’s all very intoxicating and finds its way into both my music and my writing. I live on a deeply forested island in the Pacific Northwest with no shortage of inspiration in the natural surround!
If you could go back in time and give your younger self one piece of advice about the music industry or artistry, what would it be?
You know, I am still very naive about the industry. I didn’t play for a good 20 years due to a grievous injury in my 20s. Then life took over and I did other interesting things. I would never have believed music would not only come back to me but become my primary focus and expression in life. I sometimes call myself an “accidental pianist!” So I would tell my younger self—in music, as in life, be true to your heart. Do what’s yours to do, offer what’s yours to offer and don’t measure your worth or your joy by the opinions of others.
What’s next for you? Are there any upcoming projects, collaborations, or performances you’re excited about?
~I have upcoming concerts booked out for several months at a time, including with my Trio Improviso and am VERY excited about our forthcoming album, Etherium, ikely to be released in March. I have a lovely collaboration called CelloPiano with cellist and composer Gideon Freudmann which is just crazy good fun—some charts, some original music (including my own music for accordian!), and lots of playful, jazzy improvisation. I have been in a longterm, historically-informed Brahms project with violinist Tekla Cunningham; we will be performing more soon. I also direct musical ltheater and have a show starting up at the end of February and my RASA 3-4-5 will soon be selecting the next set of concert repertoire to dig into. This summer a friend from way back in my conservatory days is coming to visit and do a concert with me, which will be great fun! I’m thinking the next solo project will be a volume of poetry, and will likely record another solo album later in 2025 or early 2026. And who knows what surprises lay around the bend…
