I am available to:
- teach accordion lessons
- teach my workshop "How to Improvise in Middle-Eastern and Eastern European Music"
- play at your wedding, party, or funeral
- compose a score for your film
Contact me for details.
Ashes In Order
Ashes in Order is a new project with Shane Perlowin, the guitarist for Ahleuchatistas. We initially got together after discovering a mutual interest in Steve Reich and playing pulse and drone music. Shane showed me some of the avant-unclassifiable compositions he was working on and we developed those into long, multi-movement pieces. Then I booked a wedding gig for us, and due to scheduling conflicts, I had about a week to teach him my repertoire of Eastern European music--a sort of Balkan boot camp, if you will. So the result is a band that is equally comfortable playing genre hopping improv pulsing noise freakout music as we are playing horas at your cousin Dimitru's wedding.
Song for Courtney is a song that Shane wrote for his wife, Courtney Chappell, and this is a recording of the song's debut at their wedding.
Matacaballo
Matacaballo is a trio led by Miriam Allen, who has her roots in Americana, but has spent enough time in Latin America to skillfully play Cuban crooner songs and to write Mariachi songs about love gone sour. Natalya Weinstein -- the granddaughter Argentinian Klezmer musician David Weinstein -- is a classically trained violinist who moved to Asheville to pursue her interest in bluegrass and alt-country. All of which is to say that we're not too concerned with sticking to one particular style of music.
Soora Gameela
Soora Gameela is a trio consisting of Joe Burkett on bass, Gwendolyn on percussion, and myself on accordion and rababba. The name is Egyptian slang-y Arabic for "beautiful picture", which describes the band's aesthetic fairly well; the music has a hauntingly cinematic quality, and we often use Middle Eastern scales, rhythms, and instruments.
Film Scores
4:4 is a collaboration with photographer/designer Lisa Shenouda, a series of four short films of abstract imagery associated with each season. I am currently working with documentary filmmaker Rebecca MacNeice to score some of her small and feature length projects. And in March of 2007, I joined 47th Hour Films to participate in the 48 Hour Film Project.