Terrence McDonald reported a few weeks ago that the plans in the works for three new residential towers in Journal Square have been approved by the city. Perhaps you aren’t queasy about this. You may feel instead that congestion is the price to pay for Jersey City’s emergence as a regional powerhouse. Or maybe you’re okay with the towers but […]
Author Archives: tris
The Well-Tempered Overlord
When I was a young person taking piano lessons, dutifully and klutzily doing my scales and listening to Keith Emerson in my spare time, I always hoped that one day I’d play synthesizers on an album like this one. But I didn’t think I ever would. I didn’t think I’d be good enough. Most childhood hopes […]
A question of swagger
No song from the first three Tris McCall albums has a music video. Jay and I made a clip for “Sugar Nobody Wants” from the fourth album, but I never publicized it, and everything about it is intentionally understated. I like it a lot — it’s footage of Jersey City and Bayonne shot from Jay’s […]
My town is an embarrassment
I hope everybody in Jersey City who makes art got the message loud and clear yesterday. Should you be naive enough to contract with the municipal government on a public project, the city reserves the right to alter your work without your consent. A citizen who finds your painting offensive can push the city to deface […]
Starlight, twenty years later
To me, at least, the pick of these songs that David unearthed from 1997 is “Life By Starlight.” It’s exactly the sort of number I overvalue — midtempo, repetitive, diatonic, ominous, etc. — and I still dig that kind of thing. I can see why Scott Miller didn’t like it: it violates all the compositional […]
Memory Lane, part 1
David Schreiber has been aiding a personal-archeological project of mine: he’s been digitally encoding discs of songs I sent him twenty years ago. I had no idea he even had them. I must have made them on my Tascam four-track and sent them to David in Florida. That’s way better than a time capsule. A […]
Further clarification
Were we cynical, I wonder, when we made those social-utility arguments for the arts in the mid-00s? Did we only make them because we believed that our political opponents understood nothing but dollars and cents? Our position on 111 First Street was that the arts center was a public good, and an early driver of […]
Getting ready for Saturday
In many ways it’s relaxing to be a sideman: there are a million and one things the main performer is responsible for on the night of the show, and you’re off the hook for all of them. You head to the club, hang with your bandmates before you go on, get set up and choose your sounds, play, […]
Just to clarify
Jim Testa was nice enough to profile me for the Journal this week, even though I don’t have anything new to share with people who like my music. He interviewed me to advance this weekend’s Parker Kindred benefit at Pianos. I’m doing a set with a rock group I’m calling the Contested Convention, which sounds fresh-ish, but […]
Player pianos
My first trip to 158 Ludlow Street had nothing to do with music. I went there to see a weird alt-theater performance that I remember zilch about. For a short time around the turn of the millennium, 158 Ludlow was kinda-sorta an underground playhouse, and our friend Brad, who’d founded the North American Cultural Laboratory in […]