I’ve been recording my own music for about 12 years now,  so I’m still figuring this shit out.

This past spring, while giving a workshop at the University of Hamburg, I compared the process of making my own work to tending a garden. As pretentious as that might sound, it’s the visual image that always pops into my head when I’m asked how I balance being a freelance musician trying to pay the bills with producing my own music. You plant some things, neglect others, pull out a few weeds, and occasionally something grows that you weren’t expecting.

Truth be told, I’m not getting any younger. I’ve been a freelance drummer for 27 years. Yikes! I moved from St. Louis to New York City in 2001 to pursue a career as a jazz drummer, primarily, and for the first few years that was more or less the plan. But the waters started opening up elsewhere when I began recording some of my own music off in the corner, often alone or during downtime between tours.

It was around 2005 when I discovered an album by the band Talk Talk called Laughing Stock, along with a handful of Harold Budd recordings produced by Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno. I became obsessed with the sonic worlds these artists had created, and at the same time, a little confounded by the fact that I was becoming immersed in music that was adjacent to what I was (barely) making a living playing on the road at the time.

It’s funny, because around that time some of my friends jumped the jazz ship, and a few of them pulled me along. I began playing with indie bands and ambient ensembles around New York, and it almost felt as though I was hiding this from my friends who were still working exclusively within the more purist jazz community. Something just wasn’t quite right about it all. Most of these bands felt like groups made up of jazz expats, and although it was a new hat of sorts, I felt the need to voice my musical opinions in a broader way than just from behind the drum set.

In 2014, I decided to take some demos and turn these little bedroom tracks into a record of some sort. The name Late Bloomer felt like a fitting moniker, because this was the beginning of a new part of the conversation for me.

That record featured David Moore, a friend of mine from my college days at The New School, and the composer and bandleader behind the ambient ensemble Bing & Ruth. Without really knowing it at the time, the music was drawing on krautrock, a term I’m not particularly fond of, but one that speaks to the way we approached making loop-based music: often jamming for far too long over a simple drone, letting things unfold, and then editing later in post.

I sat with the album for about two years, deliberating over what to do with it. In 2016, my partner, visual artist Tracy Maurice, asked if she could use the song “Canal” for a short film she was working on for a festival in Brooklyn. Seeing her work in tandem with what I thought to be a little ditty of a tune (it is) fueled something in me. Shortly after the festival, she offered to do the album artwork and design if I’d consider releasing the rest of it. Pretty good deal 😊

The result was a run of 50 handmade CDs that Tracy and I assembled in our apartment in Crown Heights, then dispersed to friends around New York. I now had the bug to keep making stuff.

The short film caught the attention of a roommate of ours at the time, who was programming experimental work at Lincoln Center. She offered us the opportunity to develop the film into a full-length performance. This opportunity, along with a sublet in Montréal, eventually turned into a multimedia project titled Preservation. The piece premiered at Lincoln Center in early 2017, and to our surprise, was a success. Later that year, with the help of my friend Colin Killalea, we started recording the music we had performed, eventually finishing an album’s worth of material by the fall of 2019. Again, this was a very DIY release. There was no label, and honestly, no time to promote the thing, as I was mainly on tour and teaching during those years.

Fast-forward to early 2020. The pandemic hit. Thankfully, I still had a remote teaching job, but all of the touring I had on the books had been cut off, which, in all honesty, was an interesting shift for me. With A LOT of extra time on my hands, I decided to take up the solo music-making endeavor again with a bit more gusto. I felt zero pressure. I just had more time to dig in, and I was having a ball working alone. It was sort of like, “What else am I going to do?”

Eventually, thanks to modern tech, a couple of nice synths I’d acquired over the years, a bit too much natural wine, and some patient neighbors, I layered my way through an album titled We’re All Improvisers Now, my first solo album. Well, my second, depending on how you look at it 🙂

a melancholic jog

When normal-ish life got back on track in 2022, I was eager to make another record, but this time I wanted to be in a room with a band. Fair enough! Charlotte Greve and Simon Jermyn, my old homies and bandmates, came up from NYC, and a young pianist, Edwin De Goeij, rounded out the quartet. We spent one day together as a full band, and in 2024 and 2025, I released two albums, one studio and one live (compiled from a series of shows we played over those years), on Toronto’s Elastic Recordings, under the title and band name Dance Music for All Occasions.

In 2025, I met the curator of the then-incredible Brooklyn venue Owl Music Parlor. He told me they’d be closing their doors at the end of the year and wanted to have me down to play a handful of times before they closed up shop. Obviously, I was honored. The first couple of performances were with the Dance Music for All Occasions band, and for the final one, I decided to try out a new format. I’ve always loved the trio model.

I asked two very dear friends to join me. Charlotte Greve, whom I’ve known since 2004 and who had become the lead melodic voice on Dance Music for All Occasions, was an obvious choice. My friend Luke Marantz, whom I met in Dallas when he was in high school and who plays an assortment of keyboards and piano, felt like the perfect third piece of the puzzle. I knew they’d be comfortable playing around with various spaceship setups onstage.

In the lead-up to the gig, I discovered an album by German drummer and producer Harald Grosskopf that informed some of the loops and time-based arpeggiators we’d play along with on a few of the tunes. Brooklyn-based pianist and composer Eliot Krimsky, also a longtime collaborator and friend, heard the set and quickly jogged over to me when we finished, suggesting I record the group. Over the next few months, I started writing more “tunes” with Charlotte and Luke in mind, and asked Eliot to help me produce the album. By January 2026, I had enough material to make some kind of record with this crew.

We booked two days at Studio Mixart in Montréal, an environment that feels a bit like a second home to me. I wanted everyone to feel free to do their thing without getting too bogged down by the multi-instrumental spaceships we all had set up at our respective stations in the studio’s main live room. I also invited a few guests to join the core group: Montréal bassist Jonathan Arseneau, Manuel Schmiedel, who also happens to be Charlotte’s partner, on organ and keyboards, and Sarah Rossy on vocals. Finally, as on Dance Music for All Occasions, I asked my friend Martin Ditcham (Talk Talk, Sade) to add some percussion.

About half of the album is improvised. Eliot and I chose some ambient pieces I’d recorded over the past few years to use as backdrops for these improvisations, but they ended up becoming more or less a thread throughout the album, almost working like palate cleansers between the composed material. At least, that’s the road we took 😊

The album title simply happened to be the name of the band when we played our only show together at the Owl the previous year. It’s an ode to my love of jogging and exploring cities I’ve had the luxury of visiting as a touring artist.

The album was mixed by Pietro Amato, who loves to experiment with all sorts of fun sonic ideas during the mixing process, but always with the utmost sense of musicality. What I love about this album is that we captured everything in essentially two days, then zoomed out during the mixing process and did our best to tie it all together into a somewhat bizarre sonic palette.

I’ll release the introduction to the album, “Pace Yourself,” on Friday, November 6. Not so much as a traditional single, but more like the warm-up to a jog. The album will be available December 4 and is a collaboration between my imprint, Curated Reality, and my good friends at Elastic Recordings.

-Tommy Crane, November 2026