Fig. 1: 8-eyes.

Tomorrow (Monday, May 17) my co-pianist David Kaplan and I take to the stage at Le Poisson Rouge to celebrate the release of Shy and Mighty on Nonesuch. We will also be releasing a live tiger; please bring hamburger meat.

Doors open at 6:30; we go on at 7:30. There will be plenty of CD’s there, as well as much merriment.

Also I was thrilled to see Dan Johnson’s lovely review in my old hometown rag, the New Haven Advocate. If you’re not reading him, you should be; he speaks truth. Happy Sunday everybody.

Fig. 1: The FedEx man brought me this today.

Shy and Mighty’s long-awaited release from captivity approaches. Next week Dave gets into town and we start rehearsing for the May 17th show. In the meantime, some pœple had some very nice things to say about the album. Quoth Alex Ross:

…the music achieves an unhurried grandeur that has rarely been felt in American music since John Adams came on the scene. The language is essentially Romantic, but progressions such as you might find in Chopin and Brahms are slowed down and elongated; it’s as if the contents of an imperial drawing room had been strewn along the side of a desert highway. Nothing is harder for a young composer than to find an individual voice. Andres is on his way: more mighty than shy, he sounds like himself.

Well I don’t know what to say! I’m blushing.

Then John Jurgensen at the Wall Street Journal examined my stoner-music influences.

Le Poißon Rouge is doing a package deal where you can buy a ticket to the album release concert and the CD all-in-one and save, I don’t know, $5. Enough for ⅚ of a beer.

Epic photo of Owen Dalby playing Look Around You with Albany Symphony. Seen here switching from viola to violin (in the space of one and a half bars). There are more photos from the show over at the Symphony’s Flickr page.

I hope to post an audio excerpt of the piece soon; in the meantime, you can hear the première of Crashing Through Fences with Ian Rosenbaum and Mindy Heinsohn playing glockenspiel, piccolo, and kickdrums. Over here now.