So in 2019 I found an old arch top guitar hanging BY A HOOK in an old junk shop. The back and face split in several places, the back coming off and the sides misshapen. That hook through the headstock and deep pits in the ebony fretboard should have told me to walk away. But the inlay in the fretboard was unique, and I’m a fan of English history… so the name, while unfamiliar as a brand name made me wonder… $35 later and it came home with me. The neck was the width of a baseball bat’s business end, and mysteries clattering came from its inner depths.
I hung it on my office wall and promised I would have a go at gluing it back together. I did a bit of research and discovered this guitar was a 1930s Cromwell. It was a “house guitar” made for merchant shops by Gibson. Cheaper and less refined then their more expensive Gibson brethren, house guitars filled out stock and made for attainable starter guitars.
They often shared designs and materials, but had less time spent on them in refining those materials.
Anyway, then I took Nick Lenski’s luthier class, and figured maybe I could do more than simply glue the guitar together again. Showing it to Nick and fellow Luthier Steve Sauve got some great ideas and inspired me to open the Cromwell up and see about a rebuild…
But then I really got a wild hair and decided to rebuild it into something more than a luthier practice project….
I have built several amps and electrics over the years. Always slapping or branding the name “Roeboy!” on the final product as my signature. But what if I started making an effort to rework unplayable and destroyed instruments into new and wonderful instruments? Thus was born the “&” project. The ampersand signifying a combining of things new and old to reuse, repurpose, and most importantly make music with.
So here is the guitar from before to now… it’s been a fun challenge!
Growing up my family celebrated Christmas with all the trimmings, but my wife and I raised our kids in her faith – Judaism. Every year I had one christmas tradition, however, the reading of Dylan Thomas’ A Child’s Christmas in Wales. Sometimes I would read it to the kids, sometimes just my wife and I would read it together, and other years we roped in a larger group to share in the reading. This past year, with Covid and everything, the family couldn’t get together. So I recorded it and shared it with everyone.
In the early months of 2018 I announced to my colleagues at CUNY that I would be stepping down from my position as Associate Professor and return to graduate school. The goal was to get my PhD while exploring my interests in futurism and its potential role in higher ed. On February 16th, 2021 I presented the following video at my comprehensive exam, which was warmly received along with the literature review and mini-study which accompanied it. I was accepted as a PhD candidate as a result, and I share here the film, which explains my motivations, my research, and my findings to date.
January 2019 Session with the Convo Combo (Rob Kovacs, Pat Perkinson, & myself) covering Ornette Coleman’s ‘Turnaround.’ Here’s a little video I threw together using Rubin Henriquez’s wonderful photographs from that afternoon.
In 1994, after the loss of my adopted parents, I stumbled into a discovery that would change my life forever. Within two days of making an exploratory phone call to an adoptee hotline, I discovered my birth family. In them I found answers to questions I had never really dared to ask, and I was soon discovering commonalities that I had never expected to exist.
Ten years later, armed only with a small hobbyist’s video camera, I began recording interviews with family members from both my adopted and birth families. I stitched together these interviews into a stirring exploration of family, a modern-day quilt, which tells this story, the story of my birt parents, and the subsequent reunion that has taken place.
In 2012 I was honored to be chosen as the CASE New York Professor of the Year. Folks from the local NYC NBC affiliate came up to the Bronx and interviewed me for a short segment
