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Ty Cumbie
About Me
After helping Laurence deliver papers one cold weekend afternoon, I offered to review
a CD by Warren Smith they'd been listening to on the van's CD player. I worked very
hard on it, fussing over every sentence and even plundering my thesaurus to come up
with such treasures as melissonance. Next thing I know, I'm a regular.
I'm also a musician. I've studied jazz guitar with Ed MacEachen, guitar and music
theory with Raoul Bjorkenheim, and composition with Gerry Hemingway. I lead an
improvising jazz trio, City Tunnel #3, featuring Adam Lane on bass and Lukas Ligeti
on drums, which sometimes expands to a quartet, the Color Now, with everybody's
free jazz hero, the indefatigable and omnipresent Daniel Carter added. I am co-
curator, with Lukas Ligeti and James Ilgenfritz, of a weekly music series in Manhattan
called Free Zone (www.freezoneny.org). Now for the name dropping: I have performed
with, in addition to the aforementioned, tabla master Samir Chatterjee, trumpeter Roy
Campbell, saxophonists Sabir Mateen and Gianni Gebbia, drummer (and dispenser of
melissonance) Warren Smith, and improvising conductor Butch Morris, among many
others perhaps not famous enough to impress casual readers but who nonetheless I
hope are not offended at not being mentioned.