PJGMUSIC.COM

So, it’s been a pretty busy time. I am preparing for a move to a new home for starters. Always exciting. Can’t you just feel my excitement? Yeah, didn’t think so. It’s a subtle sensation. It’ll be a lot of work, but after the dust clears, it should be a good thing.  But the actual process of moving is never really fun, is it?

I am currently back in California for a few days, sitting in the guest room of my longtime friend and bandmate Jeff Diehm’s house. I’m here for rehearsals with our band The Last Dance and also to do a short set with Jeff’s solo project Autumn Cannibals which I highly recommend. The Last Dance and Autumn Cannibals will be performing at DragonCon in Atlanta on September 2nd.

Over the last couple of weeks, months, whatever it’s been since I last blogged, I did music for a local producer named Robert Kaufmann who is putting together a video music program to be called “The Rock Channel”.  I did the intro/credit music for it and will be posting a snippet of that very soon.  I also did music for a promotional video for an organization that I am a member of called IFASA   IFASA stands for The Independent Film Assoc. of Southern Arizona and is an organization dedicated to promoting the Arizona film industry.   You can see and hear the video here.

After my move is done, it should be right about the time for me to start work on 2 film scores. I will be working on Director/Special Makeup FX Artist Michael Peterson’s Ashes Of Seraphim and on Tyee Matthew’s “High School Hell”

Eventually, I also hope to continue working towards getting my certificate of completion from a U.K. based media composition course called Music For The Media that I have been working on and off on for a couple of years.  MFTM is a real-world composition course dedicated to helping both beginning and experienced composers learn more about composing in a variety of media situations, everything from commercials and corporate training videos to film and animation work.  It’s run and tutored by actual working composers and is a great way to learn about this field and why it takes more than just the ability to play or even write music well to navigate it.  Highly recommended!

Wow.  I think that about covers things.  Now it’s time for lunch!

I don’t know Mr. Schumacher personally, but am an admirer of his work with artists I admire such as Calexico and Neko Case. And the music world recently lost a more well known name to cancer: 7 time Grammy winner Roger Nichols, best known for his work with Steely Dan and a pioneer in sampling and digital recording. Despite being a world renowned producer and engineer of some of the biggest albums in music history, Mr. Nichol’s fight with cancer has pretty much left his family penniless. Even though Craig Schumacher has some health insurance, he is looking at a huge bill in the end, further complicated by the fact that his cancer treatments will make it impossible for him to work for large periods of time. While he may survive his cancer physically, who knows whether he will survive in financially.

These tragic events highlight a huge problem in America. Without getting into the politics of it, I think people really need to consider the fact that so many people in this country fall through the cracks in our current medical system. Not just poor people or “lazy” people who don’t work, but many of the artists and musicians you and I admire and look up to are at risk of losing everything if they happen to become ill. When you dedicate your life to becoming a professional musician you take many risks. You risk spending most of your life struggling to make a living, you risk your life and health on the road playing in smoky bars and eating sub-par food and you basically give up on things that many Americans take for granted: For most musicians there is no pension plan, no employer sponsored health plan, very little even in the way of Social Security benefits for your retirement years unless you also have some kind of corporate day job on the side.

I hope you will join me in taking a moment to reflect on this and think about how you can play a role in bringing some necessary changes in this country. This is after all, America. The worlds largest superpower. The country that put a man on the moon and made it possible for average people around the world to own automobiles and fly in planes. Is the idea that no American should have to go bankrupt when he or she gets sick really that farfetched?!

I have recently begun an association with the Tucson AZ production company Image Alchemy Productions.

IAP’s first self-produced film is called “Ashes Of Seraphim“, and I recently completed the music for the teaser which you can watch on my Video/Music In Context page.

I will be helping out with location audio and will be scoring the film which has an expected release date for sometime in the summer of 2011. You can also listen to the music by itself on my film music page.

I recently finished the music to a short independent film called “Deseo”.  I also held a boom pole and recorded dialog for the first time ever!  Definitely a learning experience.  Click here to listen to the theme/credit music.

In the next few weeks I will be making a few changes to the page, mostly the music I have done for indie films that is spread around the site and putting it in a new film music page to make navigation a bit easier.

You can watch the Spillapalooza mini-documentary I helped out with recently here. It features interviews with the folks behind the event, performance footage from some of Tucson’s local talent and I did the intro and end credit music.

A while back , a local musician named Kevin Henderson organized a benefit concert called Spillapalooza to raise awareness about the BP Oil Spill.  He hired my wife to help photograph & document the event and she is in the process of editing the footage.

I had a piece of music that I was playing around with and decided to offer it to her to use for intro and credit music and it worked out nicely. Only about 20 seconds of the piece will get used, but I am posting the entire clip on my music page. It needed a title and WhaleSong seemed to fit, so that’s what I’m calling it for the time being.

You can listen to the song here and I will post a link to the video when it is finished as well.

Today I finished adding music to the main music page. If you follow the music link, you can choose from an assortment of categories to hear some of the pieces I have composed over the years for everything from indie films to corporate videos and websites.

This is the new version of my website which I will be updating over the next few days with music, news, contact information and more.  I hope you enjoy it and welcome comments and suggestions for making the website good looking and easy to navigate.