Suite for Jules was commissioned and premiered by the acclaimed Schulhoff Duo for the San Francisco Chamber Music Festival in January of 2008. The piece had its choreographic premiere by Melanie Aceto Contemporary Dance at the Heidelberg New Music Festival in April of that same year. As a composer and jazz pianist, my compositions are influenced by a number of popular musical idioms such as rock, funk, jazz, and hip-hop. For instance, the first movement of Suite for Jules, titled “Cutting Contest” pays homage to two of the most important stride piano players in Harlem during the 1920’s: “Jelly Roll” Morton and “Fats” Waller. The middle movement, Reach is an exploration into phrasing and intent held together by a single interval (the space between two pitches). This interval, (a major seventh) not only pervades the entire fabric of the movement, but the entire composition -- providing coherence through disparate compositional worlds often marked by such derivative elements as blues and rock. At several moments in the composition, the music gives the impression that “arrival” is imminent, yet the sonorities purposely fall short of resolving their tension near the end of the composition – perhaps leaving the listener with the impressions that the harmonic and dynamic climax of the piece was never fully realized. The Rationing of the Artichokes is the last installment of Suite for Jules and makes use of several rock elements including a quotation near the end of the Irish rock group, My Bloody Valentine.
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