The CD’s, PS1 and Hopeless Romantic, are comprised of sophisticated acoustic guitar finger-style instrumentals. The first, PS1, is a collaboration with my long-time friend and music partner Richard Saslow. We met in Berkeley, CA, in 1969 or 1970. He was the hot young funk-blues style electric guitarist and I was the somewhat younger acoustic finger-picker whiz. We had little musical ground in common but we each admired the others talent and jammed together from time to time.
We lost touch when I left for medical school in 1974 but in 1979 I moved to Los Angeles to do a residency in Emergency Medicine at UCLA. By then Richard, his wife at the time, and a few of our other musical friends had also moved to LA. We resumed our relationship, formed a short-lived band, and wrote and recorded the scores to a couple of surfing movies.
In 2001 we decided to make a record and PS1 is the result. It’s all instrumental, all original, and miles stylistically from where we were when we first met. The roots of our styles can still be heard, but they have evolved over the years into something more complex and subtle.
As time passed I became interested again in the music I grew up listening to as a child—things my parents would put on the HiFi after they put me to bed to help me fall asleep. Show tunes, Sinatra, and opera, mixed with Calypso, The Limelighters, and Burl Ives. An eclectic mix, but all perfectly musical.
I started tinkering with a few standards I liked, working up folk-jazz arrangements that maintained a finger-style feel but with jazzier voicings. Eventually I had enough material for another CD and Hopeless Romantic was the result. It is about fifty percent originals and fifty percent covers. Left to my own devices it might never have gotten done, but a good friend and well-known composer/arranger, Les Hooper, pretty much made me do it. It was recorded at his home studio in 2010.
I have no immediate plans for another CD but I do intend to make short video recordings of me playing various tunes, some from the CD’s, others not, as an addition to the music area of my web site.
