Listeners have often asked, listening to acoustic guitar recordings I’ve made, whether there are two guitars, or whether it is a guitar at all. They have heard Irish music, American folk, Caribbean rhythms, and the blues. Others have noticed a subtle French vibe, while comparing me to Nick Drake, Jose Gonzalez, Robert Thompson, and Paul Simon.
Maybe it is hard to put my music in a box because I was born to American parents in Paris; or because after a decidedly bourgeois childhood playing classical piano, I spent my 20s recording free-jazz musicians on Chicago’s west side; or because I moved cities a dozen times before settling in Berlin at age thirty.
Just before this move, I recorded my début album ‘My Poor Kingdom’ in my mom’s bedroom. It was my farewell to the USA, delievered on a blue note. My passion for African string music is already audible on these early recordings, long before I jammed backstage with Tinariwen and learned how they tune their guitars. Over the next seven years I played in several Berlin-based afrobeat projects, spent two months in Sénégal, and in collaboration with my wife Maike Novák released two EPs as Pallet of Leaves in a colorful global-folk style. Through my association with the Polyversal Souls and the Philophon label, I shared the stage with such luminaries of African music as Alemayehu Eshete, Stella Chiweshe and Lee Dodou, and in 2020 I released a solo EP, 'The Gift Village’.
Since then I have been slowly preparing the release of my first mature band recordings as a leader, featuring the great Ekow Alabi Savage on drums and many other first-class Berlin musicians. The first single to emerge from this process is the song ‘Mountain Goat’, a song co-written with Maike back in 2014, due out on April 11th 2024!