Third Album, Kites and Strings, to be Released on October 16, 2020!

I'm so happy to announce that my third album as a leader, Kites and Strings, is set to be released on October 16!  This album is the debut of my new sextet, the Nebula Project, and features mostly original compositions (with a few eclectic arrangements thrown in - Neil Young, Leonard Bernstein and a Bulgarian traditional song).  It is also the first album where you can hear me playing both piano and accordion!  Listen and learn more about the album here, or continue reading below for some videos and personal thoughts.

The journey of this album is a long one - it started ten years ago in my last year of high school, when I completed the first larger ensemble version of one of the tracks on the album, Bright Above Us, and it includes compositions, arrangements and re-arrangements written across this whole span of time.  It is an album that merges my deep love of both jazz and world music styles, and features many of my favorite musicians in New York City.  This includes my long-time regular touring trio with Marty Jaffe on bass and Ben Zweig on drums, as well as the incredible Wayne Tucker on trumpet, Jasper Dutz on sax and bass clarinet and Rafael Rosa on guitar.  It also features special guest appearances by Jake Chapman on vibraphone, Sam Chess on trombone and fellow pianist Jeremy Corren performing on two of the tracks that I play accordion on.  Watching these musicians bring my music to life was such a special experience - after so many years waiting to record these compositions, I felt that I could finally express them in the way I imagined them.  Since then, I've been working with my brother Dev Avidon who recorded, mixed and mastered the whole project so incredibly beautifully and guided it through the entire process to completion, and my mom who took the gorgeous cover and back photos and imagined the art for the whole project.  I'm really proud of the work that went into this album, and I hope you'll all have a chance to listen to it soon!

If you want to hear a preview of the album, click on the link above.  I'm also including four Youtube videos taken by Kevin Jiang at our most recent live performance at the Kitano.  These videos feature many of the musicians that are on the album and two of the songs (Somewhere and Laughing on the Inside) that are on the album.  Thank you so much to everyone who has supported this project and I can't wait to share this music with all of you live.