Jazz for Joy is a small, seasonal project—designed for December, and left there.
In my early twenties, while trying to imagine a sustainable life as a jazz musician, I spent one November writing a book of Christmas arrangements for quintet. The charts were conceived in a straightforward two-horn, hard-bop idiom: concise, swing-forward, and practical. They’ve endured longer than I expected.
Each year, when the calendar turns, I return to that material for a small number of holiday performances. It’s a chance to play familiar melodies with care, clarity, and good time—without overstatement or reinvention.
The project has always been functional by design. It’s not exploratory, and it isn’t meant to evolve. It does one thing, once a year, and then recedes.
(Yes, the photos reflect an earlier version of me. The music remains the point.)
