Back in the saddle

My apologies for the relative radio silence on this page as of late. I’ve undergone some pretty dramatic life changes over the past few months which have required me to focus most (or sometimes all) of my attention on my family. While I do not usually post highly personal information in this forum, I make an exception here - about 8 weeks ago, my wife and I welcomed a beautiful, healthy baby boy into the world. We are overjoyed to have him in our lives (middle-of-the-night feedings and all), but unfortunately that joy has been matched by an equal amount of sorrow; four days after our son was born, my mother passed away after a long and courageous battle with cancer. Two days later, my last living grandparent - my Zaydie - passed away at the age of 93.

I took some time off in the immediate aftermath from gigging and teaching in order both to grieve and to bond with our son. After a few weeks, I began going back to work - rehearsing, playing gigs and the like - but I refrained from doing any kind of self-promotion during that time, including almost nothing on social media. Besides being too tired to post in a coherent manner, it just didn’t seem like the right time to say “look at me, look at my cool life”. I’m not swearing off social media, and I’ll be back to it in good time, it just didn’t feel like the right thing to do with everything else that was going on.

In any case, part of my reason for writing this is to let the world know that I am, indeed, back to work and have some exciting things in the pipeline. Wicked Frozen is winding down its off-Broadway run with three more shows at the St. Luke’s Theater, so if you were thinking about grabbing tickets, now is the time. Coming up I also have the annual winter holiday concert with Uncommon Chord, a 10-person vocal jazz ensemble that I’ve conducted for the past five years. We’ll be at the Triad on Saturday the 16th for a 7 PM show that is coming together really nicely. And as always, there is more in the offing.

Thanks as always for reading and checking in on my various projects. See you somewhere down the line.