This site situates my music in the context of creative entrepreneurship, experimental solo trumpet playing, spirituality, and Judaism. My trumpet playing is a reflection of the different systems of knowledge I’ve become well-versed in over the years. As a performing artist, I exist within the paradigms and structures of the classical tradition, but I also draw way outside their lines. My music has led me to create events in the desert, parties in beach towns, and flash mobs; it has also led me to engage in conversations with elected officials to bring music to the political and civic spheres and to measurably deter violent crime. I work with composers to breathe the mysticism of ordinary life into being. And I enter and take others into states of heightened awareness and consciousness. Fundamentally, at the end of the day, my music is about bringing peace and justice to this world, much in alignment with the mitzvah of tikkun olam.
My music is geared toward liberating the mind and reducing suffering. Jean-Jacques Rousseau said that “[Humans] are born free, but everywhere are in chains.” Acknowledging this as a fact of our current existence on this planet, I have developed a creative vision over the past eight years of my professional life that traverses different communities with different lexica and worldviews. Some examples include the Spiritual/Self-Help/New Age circles (with an emphasis on mysticism, Buddhism, and meditation), the classical music community, Jewish communities, and academic communities. My aim is to find commonality within the diversity, with a goal of unity, transcendence of limiting beliefs and programmed conditioning, and freedom.
As a performer, I will be playing this type of music in a variety of settings over which I will have creative control that will enable me to express the vision I articulated. Past examples of my involvement in such endeavors included a concert for the Centennial of the National Parks at Crater Lake with the Britt Orchestra and securing funding and executing an artistic event in the middle of the SoCal desert. I’m just getting started. I endeavor to do between 5-6 of these projects a year in the coming years. Planned initiatives for this year and next include bringing brass ensembles to legislative assemblies, reducing gun violence through different forms and genres of music, and soloing with orchestras with the music of our time.
This website will keep you in the loop about those performances, as well as a blog with weekly posts about the knowledge I’m sinking my teeth into that’s informing my art. I read books that run the gamut from spirituality to science fiction to economics and monetary systems and beyond. Books like Tim Ferriss’ Tools of Titans, Charles Eisenstein’s Sacred Economics, and Lao Tzu’s Taoteching are all influencing me now. I’m planning to pick up a book about Judaism and contemporary culture soon as well.
Welcome to the new world of the urgency, value, and relevancy of purpose-driven music.