Photo courtesy of Reboot
Tell us about your tour vehicle.
No tour vehicle. Lots of flying.
My notable road story was getting arrested while on tour with The Sway Machinery in Mali. We were coming home from a late night show at a kind of juke joint by the river in Bamako. As foreigners out past midnight we were supposed to have identification papers with us. We didn’t know that. None of us had our passports because we had been advised not to carry them around. The whole band was taken in by some police officers at a checkpoint. The station was a cinder block shack with a corrugated tin roof with some young men out front playing video games on an old tv. The whole thing got resolved quickly. Our friend who had hooked us up with the show went and got the owner of the club and her boyfriend, who was an army officer, to come and vouch for us and we were let go immediately. They looked impossibly elegant walking into that dingy police station, him in his sharp uniform and her in a beautiful pressed wax fabric dress. They looked like they had just stepped off a movie set.
How do you eat cheaply and/or healthy while on tour?
I eat very little while traveling. Mostly coffee.
How many strings do you break in a typical year? How much does it cost to replace them?
I tend to break strings when I’m stressed. These days my stress is mostly from things other than music, so not many broken strings, keyn eynehora.
Where do you rehearse?
It’s been some years since I had my own rehearsal space. I used to rent a room in a house in Bushwick with some friends. That was a wonderful music house where we had shows sometimes and recording sessions.
Before that I rented another friend’s basement where I spent many hours holed up like some kind of post apocalyptic weirdo.
What was the title and a sample lyric from the first song that you wrote?
My first song was when I was 7. I set a poem my brother wrote. It started “I am lost. My soul is tossed.” I picked out the melody on the piano and wrote the notes down in a music notebook. It was really disjunct, weird leaps, hardly any stepwise motion. It didn’t sound much like a song.
Describe your first gig.
I started out playing on the street in New York when I was 12. The first time I played a creepy man offered me $50 to go home with him. I got street wise.
What was your last day job? What was your favorite day job?
In addition to being a musician, I’m an academic and author. I currently have two other jobs! I’m a Research Fellow at the Milken Center for Music of Jewish American Experience in the UCLA Ethnomusicology Department, and I’m the lead researcher at the Cantorial and Synagogue Music Archive, an initiative to collect, digitize and disseminate online the private music collections of elder cantors.
How has your music-related income changed over the past 5-10 years? What do you expect it to look like 5-10 years from now?
It varies from year to year. I was in graduate school for a few years and worked less. Now that I’m a doctor I’m back steady grinding.
What one thing do you know now that you had wished you knew when you started your career in music?
Music is the good time in life. It doesn’t make sense to let stress keep you from being present in the experience.