Fig. 1: 8‑eyes.

Tomorrow (Monday, May 17) my co-pianist David Kaplan and I take to the stage at Le Poisson Rouge to cele­brate the release of Shy and Mighty on Nonesuch. We will also be releas­ing a live tiger; please bring hamburger meat.

Doors open at 6:30; we go on at 7:30. There will be plenty of CD’s there, as well as much merriment.

Also I was thrilled to see Dan Johnson’s lovely review in my old hometown rag, the New Haven Advocate. If you’re not reading him, you should be; he speaks truth. Happy Sunday everybody.

Fig. 1: The FedEx man brought me this today.

Shy and Mighty’s long-awaited release from captiv­ity approaches. Next week Dave gets into town and we start rehears­ing for the May 17^th show. In the meantime, some pœple had some very nice things to say about the album. Quoth Alex Ross:

…the music achieves an unhur­ried grandeur that has rarely been felt in American music since John Adams came on the scene. The language is essen­tially Romantic, but progres­sions such as you might find in Chopin and Brahms are slowed down and elon­gated; it’s as if the contents of an imperial drawing room had been strewn along the side of a desert highway. Nothing is harder for a young composer than to find an indi­vid­ual voice. Andres is on his way: more mighty than shy, he sounds like himself.

Well I don’t know what to say! I’m blushing.

Then John Jurgensen at the Wall Street Journal examined my stoner-music influ­ences.

Le Poißon Rouge is doing a package deal where you can buy a ticket to the album release concert and the CD all-in-one and save, I don’t know, $5. Enough for ⅚ of a beer.

Epic photo of Owen Dalby playing Look Around You with Albany Symphony. Seen here switch­ing from viola to violin (in the space of one and a half bars). There are more photos from the show over at the Symphony’s Flickr page.

I hope to post an audio excerpt of the piece soon; in the meantime, you can hear the première of Crashing Through Fences with Ian Rosen­baum and Mindy Heinsohn playing glock­en­spiel, piccolo, and kick­drums. Over here now.