For my vacation reading I picked two new jazz memoirs: Henry Threadgill’s Easily Slip Into Another World: A Life in Music and Brad Mehldau’s Formation: Building a Personal Canon, Part One. Aesthetically worlds apart, both beautifully done. Mehldau’s book resonates on a far more personal level, and once I started…

Any day that I spend as a sub in a British secondary school classroom, I have reason to bring up where I’m from, New York City. The students of course want to know all about it, and conversation on that level tends to flow easily. One thing I don’t hear…

How was my first teaching experience as a US citizen living in the UK, you ask? Let’s just say that afterward, I had to speak to the administration and give a full incident report on the students who praised Hitler. Students, plural. There were two of them. It might be…

On Tuesday, September 11, 2001, I left home on the Upper West Side, boarded the 1/2/3 train at 96th and Broadway and headed to work downtown. I had a 9-to-5 job on Lafayette Street north of East 4th, just under two miles from WTC. It was the kind of job…

I understand the idea that watching upsetting political content can be harmful and unwise, that people need to practice self-care. But I also understand the view that we shouldn’t look away: that not watching can insulate and cut us off from reality. I thought about these two poles of argument…

In rural northeast Georgia, in the elementary school music classroom where I completed my student teaching internship in Spring 2022, there was a door to the main hallway but also another across the room that opened to the outside. I eyed that door every day. No one really had to…

When I was around six or seven years old, my grandmother told me that Arabs were monsters. I remember taking it rather literally: in my mind I imagined monsters, out there mingling among Jews, far away in the land of Israel. My grandmother was a New Deal Democrat, dyed…

Nothing you can make that can’t be made No one you can save that can’t be saved Nothing you can do, but you can learn how to be you in time It’s easy — Lennon & McCartney I. I don’t write music. Other than a few things I composed in music…

1. In this photo I’m in my late teens, playing at Gary’s Barley Corn on North Avenue in New Rochelle, NY. Gary’s was not even a performance venue, it was just a bar, long gone, where underage drinkers — and apparently underage bands — imbibed and…