An Essay on Youth
liner notes to THE SENTIMENTAL REBEL I always felt that from when I was a young boy, I was predestined to be different. For a long time, I thought being different was a bad thing – until I became a musician. Sure, it’s a stereotype of musicians being the beatniks and hippies who preach about nirvana and relativity and loving each other. But there’s something about music that paradoxically expresses your love for what comes before you, and your own unique traits and wrinkles; the problem is, many people shy away from the latter. If there’s anything I’ve learned through music, it’s what to keep from your childhood and what to discard in order to still move forward in life. This jazz tone poem, The Sentimental Rebel , stems from contemplating my youth as an outsider in school, simply just being too weird for everyone – this even continued through college, when I started taking jazz on French horn much more seriously. The title stems from the rite of passage that is teenage reb...
