About this project

I am happy to be able to offer my band's only "live" recording to you through ArtistShare and this Live Project. We recorded Days of Wine and Roses during a week-long engagement at the Jazz Standard in New York, January 2000. For 5 years, the CD was only available in a gift package with 2 bottles of Maria Schneider Riesling, and then we re-released it here. Sorry, no wine included anymore. You have to go to a wine store for that now – and it is still made for those that wish to look.

The album showcases mostly arrangements and older music of mine. I love this album because it captures the life and energy the band has when playing a live gig. I think you'll agree, it is very different from all of our studio recordings. David Baker, the recording engineer to whom this "re-issued" album is dedicated, did a masterful job capturing the sound of the band and the feel of the room "live to two-track."

As a participant you will experience a little of the tours we did of Europe and the US back in 2005, experiencing everything through photo galleries, video, and audio journals. I captured as much as I could – our bus stuck on a mountain in Barcelona, our panic before a concert when Air France lost our music and luggage, guys joking around backstage. It's a whole lot of fun.

We did this project long before most musicians were sharing "behind-the-scenes" content. It was 2005, and ArtistShare had already long broken ground with this concept as the first crowd-funding site, and was absolutely on the cutting edge of making documentation like this possible. It's fun now to see what we were doing when half the world didn't even have dial-up internet yet (thus, please understand that these videos were made lo-res for dial-up modems).

Tours are always eventful, and here, my stress becomes your entertainment! I hope you'll enjoy this project.