I once asked Yusef Lateef what he practiced. He replied: “I try to discover things that I had not known before.”
Somewhere In The Upstream is a piece for my trio, featuring incredible collaborators Chris Tordini and Dan Weiss. I dedicated this music to Yusef, a very important teacher of mine. (You can read about my perspective on Lateef in the Preface I wrote for his 2005 Songbook publication.) This piece is a “scorestream,” my term for algorithmic, networked compositions that are displayed dynamically on computer screens for improvisers to interpret. I had a wonderful experience performing and recording this piece with the trio in June, supported in part by a project award from New Music USA. In addition to playing at iBeam in Brooklyn, we had a very special concert in western MA on the Pioneer Valley Jazz Shares series. My friend Glenn Siegel organized a pre-concert interview/conversation about Yusef, and wrote a beautiful blog post about our concert.