end we're it's a lot of fall all over the years but we've always had sort of two different iterations of the bands that we do one that was more the r and b and funk end of it and the other are for jazz performance but most of it when we do more recently everything else was a result composition yes beautiful would you like to begin a conversation with your music sure i think i'll start with tuner was actually inspired by a horse over tune this is called was a certain decision to make versus a staying in boston and somewhat of a jazz scene there and start to get going and doing what was really in the back of my mind which is that i want to settle in vermont and really raise a family here and make a go of it here so i joined the band peer pressure which is the thing that eventually kind of morphed into the group of funk band i mean there's been enough members that have been continuous throughout the time that there is a thread that's there for the entire thirty years and like many bands do the old blues men in kilimanjaro same sort of thing that you know very similar lineups but one was for blues and r and b in our case r and b soul and funk and the other band was for performance of a resume jazz stuff so there was i mean there and i think there are a certain amount of bands in vermont to do the same thing i think that the scene in vermont actually allows you to keep a band together much longer than it might if you were doing it in an urban situation because there are less things to pull people out of the situation that that you're trying to build so we've been very very fortunate to have that main core for thirty years and to work around that and do the other things we're doing i also teach high school full time at harvard union high school have an amazing program there but it's all connected because certainly everything that i do about playing informs what i do about teaching and eventually it starts working the other way one of the things that brought me to vermont originally friends from boston where i was and i did that for a number of years when i actually moved up with peer pressure became more difficult because we were always hired on july fourth to do other things like bristol but i try to sit in this year the fellow who was the drummer coming back from colorado every year to do this it was creasing more difficult he decided not to do it so we did this year with a group of young men just this year but we also had a group of kids from harwood who have a band together it was doing you know just all sorts of stuff but more on the rock end of it who sort of spelled us so we didn't have to play for the full four hours in the street dance afterwards and you know we were seventeen years old when we started that so there's been a circle the come around there that we you know we're starting to bring those kids in and so those are the things that i see as most important what i do here continuing to play the certainly the teaching and what happens at the high school and you know getting kids really out there and doing it and hopefully exposing them in the way that they should be to be able to perform and see other people doing it the way it should be done and be part of that but you have also been conducting this band oh yes in the jazz fest oh yes we didn't do it this year it was just we couldn't quite get it together there's always difficulties because the jazz festival happened at the same time as finals and they would start pulling kids out of school to mondays and finals time you know people you got to dance teach me to you to play all that kind of music and there was my first jazz teacher was a fellow by the name of jean ashton who's known in new york is cooper moore he plays with people like william parker in order to survive that that sort of  very very very free musician working in many different genres and he would have always tell me where he was playing so i would be able to see his performances and  no substitute for being able to go and see that happening and that was like the late sixty's certainly in college that was a big thing and some of the people that i had as teachers mainly coming to mind as one guy and modeling that you get from your teachers and playing with your teachers is something absolutely i believe in that you got to do that for q so you never find in the limitation with your mentors you know details on the way you wanted to be as a musician oh i had my behind kicked constantly it was you know it was scary some of the times you get on the bandstand and it's like all right what am i doing where you know one two three four the drum is kicking off and all these typos i'm like it can be very frightening i had the good fortune and i mean this is the kind of thing that can happen in vermont i got a call when i was in college from a guy who used on a club in waitsfield called the mill house and sonny stitt for two weeks and waits till vermont so i put a band together  with john ramsey was a friend of mine is now the head of the percussion department in berkeley and stunted every animal one of the top call bass players in the ark at that time they were like you know we're all younger twenty years old and played trail for two weeks and wait for vermont was sonny that was a schooling i mean you see he was he was something else and he just you know he just ran us ragged but it was cooling and he he was he was a total gentleman about it i mean to say he was rough on us but musically he was but that's in a way you have to call on every single aspect of your musicality to function and those are the types of things that do it i mean learn all you want to learn in school but until you do it on the job and actually are working with somebody who could really she doesn't work with charts written out as a yearling stuff a year which is of course the most musical way to do it but it's challenging sometimes because you've got to make some notes about what you're doing especially when you're over fifty  the ones that i was on were probably four or five that we did that day and some of them still it's also a joy division is playing some of the keyboard and some of the others i think those tracks were done elsewhere and that is also very good saxophone player to have her around as much as we did before i mean she's out everywhere now all the time and try to follow what she does you know musically it's really hard because it plays like everybody but she was here based in vermont for quite some time when we were doing  the eight or nine years of money nights at red square with a group of funk band she was there for a good part of that we had there was some i can't remember which one of the jazz festival gigs sort of blur forty the millennium to have that exposure so she was one of those that it was fun when she was like seventeen or eighteen and it's blew us away and you have to special the they can come five net does and also the end of the high ground yes we haven't i didn't we didn't years at higher ground this past year but we've done that quite a bit but yeah every year we do that kickoff and nectars and that's one of the that's always a fun night we drove that quite a bit the default and you also have an album as a piano trio yes called that i need to get some more printed up and get that out there but it's with myself and gave jarrett and john rivers and we just went in and it was three days of ours we went to the studio after having workers and just played live for three days and it was very much like the effect that you get on like the kind of blue album where you know you just everything is crystal lean and it just comes out right and you don't dare do another take because the first one was perfect vocalist and she works for berklee college of music right now she's managing a team which is administering their new online do their new online degree program my middle daughter lives in queens new york city is a great vocalist and an aspiring comedy writer here are one liners coming all the time and she's in queens and my youngest daughter nina who is a great vocalist and actress as well rebate dating bass players were very good so i could always have a bass player that was hired but now they're living in new york or boston it's a little bit more difficult to get the whole family together play that way maybe next year we can bring them here i hope so yeah we may get right with the show that we tried in the fourth of july this year but annie had to move so we couldn't quite get everybody here but i was my idea that would really like to do that at some point to have all three of them playing at the same time how you are reading something for down one something your daughter's i've not specifically as saying this is a composition about well no i you know i just forgot about this yes i did and in the master's program that i finished last august the the thesis as well as the written part of it was that i wrote three pieces for three of the women of my family and so i try i was going to do for them but it's like i couldn't i mean i'd say i was too much music to try to crank out so i do have a few things that are written specifically for a couple of my daughters yes and you tr couldn't because they're actually all arranged for our cat and one of them has no piano whatsoever it's just it's a bolero but that's very beautiful thing sure but i'll tell you what when i'm  one of the things that i'm doing is trying to get all that music together for a premier hopefully next jazz festival with an r tat and i've got to start organizing that now when i get there first recording on that i'll make sure t on what i'm doing at the time i say you don't know what love is doesn't want to my favorites i've always been partial to jazz messengers stuff and certainly my own and and when i'm working on it along came betty those tunes are things that i spent a lot of time in lush life is one of my favorites as well when i'm keeping up with it because it's a very you know you have to it's harmonically enough that if you're not really on it you could make a mistake very easily you know there's so many things that it goes back and forth i mean ellington if you look at his body of work any of those could be my favorites any time of solitude o a time and then come right back on it any point in time and it's just it's just remarkable so i love thank you he's in the last one of the show pay for this so thank you very much and though we want to say goodbye do you want you to come back so i will be