When I was in high school, marijuana was just making its way into American suburbs. It was fairly easy to get and it became a defining part of our adolescent culture. It tended to divide our peer group into kids who got drunk on the weekends and those who experimented with pot. I was both an early adopter and (in short order) a reformed abstainer. (Unlike Bill Clinton, I did inhale.)

Right now the allure of “prompt-based” music creation is almost irresistible. It has further “democratized” the field of songwriting. You no longer need to know anything about music theory, lyric writing, playing an instrument or singing in order to write a song! It has rapidly progressed from the level of parlor trick to a technology that is changing the music-streaming industry.

This is all preface to the fact that “The Hemlock and the Cross” represents a new type of collaboration befitting the times: between a human being (me) and several AI agents.

I wrote “I Drive a Volkswagen” aka “The Volkswagen Song” in 1973 to amuse friends at parties with novelty tunes I wrote specifically for my accordion, Chuck Noble. It starts with a musical quote from the German folk song about unrequited love (“Du, du liegst mir im Herzen”: “You are in my heart”) and zooms downhill from there.

I got word of the fire immediately after it happened in early Spring, 2014. I was taking a Gift of Jazz class called The New Standard taught by Greg Tanner Harris, where I was tasked with creating another piece of music. My heart wasn’t really into it this time, but a melancholic tune kept coming to my fingers at the piano. It reflected for me the rise and fall of fortunes, the nostalgic memories of childhood lost to the fire, but also the sense of hope my parents held onto as they recreated a new life on the lake.

I had the rare privilege of playing piano on my own tune, the only amateur on stage with the group of skilled, professional musicians. It was one of those rare nights when live jazz can unexpectedly transcend the commonplace. Maybe it was the exotic nature of the instrumentation, the complex rhythms, or Greg Harris’s impromptu and masterful direction, but it was an extraordinary night for me, for the musicians who brought the piece to life, and the audience who enthusiastically embraced the performance.

I first fell in love with this ballad of unrequited love when it appeared on Carla Sciaky’s album, To Meet You, in 1982. Carla was a member of the much loved Denver ensemble, The Mother Folkers; I had just moved to Boulder in the late ‘70s and was mesmerized by this tune and Carla’s high soprano voice.

When I…wrote the tune, my younger sister, Lee, was currently waging a courageous fight against an aggressive form of breast cancer. Even though she was not a big jazz fan herself (she leaned more towards country and classic rock), it felt right to dedicate the tune to her as “Sister-Lee.” I wrote a melody that I felt reflected both her strength and beauty.

Sometimes songs take repeated listening to fully appreciate; others you fall in love with immediately for their catchy melody or turn of phase. This one has both. The melody is so sweet it can be rendered beautifully with as simple an instrument as a tin whistle and the lyrics draw you in too. Who is this “canny gaun” man and who wouldn’t want to meet a guy “you don’t meet everyday”?

[Rachel Carson] is a shining example of what individuals can do when they stand up for what’s right against the prevailing currents of history.

The inspiration for my piece was the recent passing of a dear family friend, Olly Visser, who died in 2016 at the age of 91.

"Forbidden Roots" is a musical homage to the many thousands of Sephardic "Crypto-Jews" who settled in the New World. I imagine that some members of that flood of converted Spanish Jews helped create the traditions that we now call "latin" jazz. I’ve characterized my composition—something between son montuño and Klezmer—as “Spanish tinge with a Hebrew hinge.”

I suspect anyone hearing Three Doctors for the first time might assume that it was written during the COVID pandemic. Actually, the idea for the song predates that calamity by five years.

My original tune was inspired by Art Blakey’s oft-quoted words of wisdom about jazz: “Music is supposed to wash away the dust of everyday life…That’s what jazz is about.”

“L’Effed Overs”—renamed for this studio update—is as appropriately titled as any of my songs. Of all the ditties I penned in the 1970s, this one scrapes the bottom of the barrel.

My wife and I had just moved back to South Boulder. Sitting at the piano in my basement music room at the foot of two mesas inspired me.

I wrote “Bad Breeze” in 1978 as a novelty song. At the time I was studying the blues idiom on guitar and had an encyclopedia of blues lyrics, many of them rich with sexual innuendo.

My song is a musical reminder that growing older doesn’t have to be lamented; in fact, there are certain experiences in life that can only be appreciated with the accumulation of years. It is a philosophy my wife and I have both embraced.

This was the first time I had attempted to write and score anything for this large a group of musicians. I felt that the most I could hope for were some very crude representations of angels, which is how I arrived at the title for the piece.

“The Hunter Gracchus” (1917)…[is] the tale of a 25-year old hunter, who is pursuing antelope in the Black Forest in Germany in the 4th century. While trailing a particular chamois, he falls down a precipice, cracks open his head on the rocks and dies. The boatsman, who is sent to ferry him to the next world, misses a critical turn, which leaves Gracchus adrift in the same boat for 1,500 years, half dead and half alive (a characteristically dark, Kafkaesque scenario).