First Decade

  "Better late than never," my high school gym teacher used say.

ca. November 23, 2015 at Peter Karl Studio in Brooklyn (earliest photo I could find of myself after moving to NYC)

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I officially moved to New York in late October 2015. I had moved out of the apartment I shared with Isaac Wilson and Ryan Sands in Jamaica Plain, MA during my last year at New England Conservatory in late August, then went to Beijing to spend about two months brushing up on my Mandarin at my aunt's place while also playing gigs and hanging out with the vibrant and friendly musicians on the scene. 

A lot has happened in the decade since. I've been thinking about what I could possibly write that would encapsulate the past ~3650 days, and a laundry list of accomplishments and milestones seems like the least useful for myself and for anyone reading this. Instead, maybe more interesting would be my general impression of my time here and how things have been turning out:

In broad terms, the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown that started in March 2020 almost perfectly bisected my past decade (about 4.5 years into my time in the city), and it really demarcated two eras of my life and my career while having unexpected, extended repercussions on my life afterward. 

Before the pandemic, I held onto a steady day job while increasing my activities in Beijing (including flying over every two months to lead the Blue Note China Jazz Orchestra, which is now a distant relic of my professional identity), and I thought I was gaining momentum with the trio I led with Walter Stinson and Matt Honor as well as a newly forming quartet with the addition of Dana Saul on piano. 

As soon as the lockdown happened, any thoughts of leaving my day job sooner evaporated until the prospect of steady musical work returned, and the China jazz era closed to me, obviously. As an indirect consequence of the pandemic, I started a weirdly obsessive dive into Charlie Parker's career (I had been thinking Bird more and more from listening to Phil Schaap's broadcasts at work), and the decade-long scope of his mature career was a comfortingly concrete and bounded slice of American history that gave me something to live in and inhabit while we were all isolated. 

I also started playing Dark Souls as an indirect result of the pandemic (roughly in September 2020) since I was spending a lot of time rehearsing with Matt and Walt in our little pod, which led me down a path of reconnecting with my childhood enthusiasm for the video game/interactive entertainment medium, and which I later explored and continue to explore with adapting video game soundtracks to the improvised/jazz small group format. 

Perhaps most importantly, I got my regular weekly gig at Lowlands coming out of the pandemic; I did two gigs in August 2021, and then John offered me the gig that continued weekly from September 2021 through August 2024 (now monthly), so well over 100 gigs or 200 plus sets of music over that period of time. I was able to workshop the music that became The Fate of the Tenor, Quartets, Lofi at Lowlands, and more recorded but as-yet unreleased music there, and I also just got to play with a lot of fantastic musicians and learn how to pace a set, how to play with loud drummers, and how to organize/arrange/compose a lot of music. 

Before the pandemic, I was willing to fly 12 hours to play across the world because I had no gigs in New York and nobody seemed interested in calling me to play; as soon as the lockdown ended, I had a weekly gig two blocks from my apartment where I could play whatever I wanted every week and develop my craft and vision as a composer and improviser. 

The end of the weekly gig at Lowlands in September 2024 got me thinking about the future: I didn't have a lot of sideman work, bandleading wasn't sustainable financially, I felt that I'd exhausted a lot of my musical ideas up to then, and I felt like I needed a change. I talked to Mark Turner over coffee in November 2024 for advice, which reconfirmed my impulse that I should try doing music full-time again. I turned in my notice in May 2025 and will be back to where I started (job-wise) 10 years ago starting in January 2026: unemployed, playing gigs, and trying to carve out a career as an improvising saxophonist.