Home » Member Page

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.

My Articles

Contact Me

Get more of a good thing!

Our weekly newsletter highlights our top stories, our special offers, and upcoming jazz events near you.