Tone Glow 028.5: Alan Braufman
An interview with Alan Braufman for a special midweek issue
Alan Braufman
Alan Braufman is a jazz musician and composer who released the album Valley of Search in 1975. After 45 years, Braufman has returned with a new album under this name aptly titled The Fire Still Burns, which once again features his long-time friend, the pianist Cooper-Moore. Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Alan Braufman on the phone on August 18th, 2020 to discuss his childhood, the writing and recording process for his new album, his spirituality, and more.
Photo by Gabriela Bhaskar
Joshua Minsoo Kim: Hey Alan, how was your day?
Alan Braufman: (laughs). About the same as any other day these days. They all kind of blend together. Just trying to get some practicing in, staying close to the music bug. Performances are scarce. But yeah, that’s fine. How about you?
I’m okay. I’m a high school science teacher. We actually just started up this week.
Where are you?
I’m in the Chicagoland area, slightly north of Chicago. It’s been hectic trying to get all the technology in order and working. Of course if the students aren’t able to figure it out we have to walk them through that. It’s been kind of messy, these first couple of days just because… I don’t know, just the growing pains of trying to teach online and learning all of these systems.
So you do an online school, you’re not opening up then?
Yeah.
Good for you! (laughter).
Yeah. Really happy about that. That would have been… I would have had a very difficult decision to make if—
Yeah, I know.
I kind of wanted to actually start off by having you talk about your family when you were growing up. What’s the first memory that you have related to music?
I don’t know if I could tell you the first…
What comes to mind?
Many things come to mind. Just in general, my mom—my dad too, to some extent, but especially my mom—was a big jazz fan. It was always on in the house. It’s what I grew up listening to from when I was born pretty much. I assume they were playing it when I was 1 or 2, but I don’t remember that. My earliest memory was probably… I have a distinct memory of listening to the records that she brought home of Mingus, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Coltrane. And then she brought home an Eric Dolphy album, Out There. I was probably 12 or something, and it was just so different from all the other stuff that caught my attention—in a good way! I think that album piqued my interest in finding and listening to music myself, instead of listening to whatever she’d bring home (laughs).
Did you pick up an instrument of your own volition or did your parents want you to play something?
Well, they wanted me to play but if I didn’t want to play they wouldn’t have forced me, but I also wanted to play. When I was eight I started clarinet, and I was fortunate that the school I was going to—just a local public school—had a pretty good music teacher there, and a good music program. I got some decent lessons when I was little.
That’s good. Do you remember your teacher's name?
I do! Mr. Title (laughs).
How do you spell that?
Just like you think, T-I-T-L-E.
Wow, I’ve never seen that name before.
Yeah, it’s a very unusual name. (laughter).
When I think about the experience I’ve had with music teachers, I sometimes think about the things they taught me beyond just being able to read sheet music, or being able to understand theory—things that maybe went deeper and stuck with me along the way. Do you think there was anything that that music teacher you had early on ingrained in you, that kept you going on with playing music in general?
You know, I don’t think so at all! (laughs). He just taught me, “This is how you blow, this is the fingering!” (laughter). All the deeper stuff I think I found myself. Going through elementary school, junior high, high school, I never felt like I had any mentor teach me things. All the deeper things I discovered for myself at that age.
Do you recall, and I guess this is hard to find an example of in retrospect, but can you give an example of a “deeper thing” you picked up?
Well, just listen to the music! In the mid to late ’60s I’m a teenager and, you know, Coltrane put out A Love Supreme in 1965, and I guess one could have just listened to the music at face value, but all the spiritual things that he talked about in his poem on the album: I heard it! It was in the music!
I listened to Albert Ayler at the same time, and the very first time I listened to him play the saxophone was on Spiritual Unity—the ESP Disk album—I heard it, and I said, “Wow, that’s just noise!” It was all this squeaking and everything (laughs). I had actually taped this program that was going to be about modern, new music that was not played much on the radio. I taped it and listened to it sometime in the evening, and all of a sudden I just got it. In all that squeaking there was all this joy and pain and exultation and revolution. It had all that in it and it just kind of hit me like a wall. After that, I listened to things in a different way.
As I get older, I think about these pivotal albums or artists that I listened to and how they shaped the way I think about music. So you had Coltrane, you had Ayler—
There’s so much in the ’60s! The interesting thing about that music—it was called avant-garde, or the new thing, at the time—is that it wasn’t just like bebop, you know Charlie Parker was the king, and if you’re a bebop player you were greatly influenced by the Bird. How could you not be? But music in the ’60s, you can listen to Don Cherry, and he is just so different. Even from John Coltrane, even though they played together, Coltrane was so different from Eric Dolphy. Put in Cecil Taylor, but then you have Andrew Hill—and there is nothing like Cecil Taylor, you know? This was just so rich a time, you could listen to so many different styles. It was just individual expressions, it wasn’t like one person that hogged it all!
Obviously you’ve listened to jazz and it has deeply inspired you. You even mentioned the Coltrane poem. I’m wondering, when you create music, are you inspired by things other than music, whether it be just life in general? And if so, what are those things?
I think that… well, I was going to say all of us, but I guess I should just speak for myself—everything influences a political situation. It’s kind of horrible right now, but spirituality is timeless, it will always be with you if you want it. Any individual emotions I could find with Alber Ayler—the pain, exultation, joy—that’s the beauty of music to me, I don’t have to think of a specific, like…
I’ve never written a piece of music where I’ve said, “This is a protest song about something I feel deeply about politically.” I guess I could, but to me that’s almost like program music, which is fine if that’s what people want to do, but I’m not into that. I feel that music expresses something that I can’t really put into words, that’s why I’m doing it with music. If I could put it into words, maybe that would be a better way to do it.
That makes sense. Do you then, for the songs that you’ve made, do you usually come up with the title after you record it and make it?
Not necessarily after I record it because I don’t record everything I write (laughs). Names are always tough for me. I’ve had pieces written for a few years before I could find a name for them. Of course, if I’m recording I’d just have to pick a name and that’d be that. But if I’m not recording, I don’t have to name it yet! But I do have a tough time finding names for a piece. Maybe that’s because I’m not thinking of any specific thing… sometimes I’ll say, “It sounds a little bit like this, so I’ll name it this.”
L-R: Phil Morrison, Bob Gullotti, and Alan Braufman playing at a wedding on December 29, 1973 in Cambridge, Massachusetts
It’s really nice to hear you talking about music being able to express something that you couldn’t do with words. I feel that’s why a lot of people get into music, and it’s so powerful when it can serve that purpose. Was there a specific moment when you realized that music was something you really needed in order to express?
Yeah! I can actually remember, I don’t know if it really answers the question directly, but there was a moment when I was about 15—there were only two things I was ever really excited about in life. Actually, if you only have two things you’re excited about in life that’s plenty! But they were baseball and music. I was actually quite a good baseball player, I was in little league and all that. I wanted to be a baseball player, and that’s just your fantasy when you are 13, 14 years old (laughs). Music was the other fantasy. To me, they both seemed equally as impossible, or possible, I don’t know.
The first album I actually saved up money from doing chores to buy myself was Andrew Hill’s Point of Departure—
Ooh, nice. Classic!
Yeah, beautiful album. With Eric Dolphy, Joe Henderson, Kenny Dorham. When I listened to that I said, “This is what I want to do.” The baseball is fun, but this is it. I don’t think I even played that much baseball after that.
Oh wow!
Yeah (laughs).
Were your parents very supportive of that?
Yeah, they were! They would have been supportive of whatever it was I did.
That’s good. I read in the Wire feature that came recently how you were living with a slew of people, one of them being Cooper-Moore, back in the ’70s.
Yeah, we were up in Boston and I was going to Berklee College of music there. I was up in Boston between 1970-1973. I was playing with Cooper-Moore up there some—not for many gigs, but he used to have these regular sessions at his house and I would go to them regularly. David S. Ware would play the tenor at most of those. We all moved down together to 501 Canal Street, a building that Cooper-Moore found way on the west side by the Holland Tunnel. It was five floors, and in the storefront on the ground floor we would practice there 24/7, and we would put on concerts down there on the weekends.
I moved onto the second floor with David Ware and Cooper-Moore moved into the third. Chris Amberger, a bass player, was on the fourth floor. The fifth floor seemed to be the drummer floor—Jimmy Hopps was there for a while, and then he moved out and Tom Bruno also moved in with his band down there.
501 Canal Street in the early ’70s
I know you have a close friendship with Cooper-Moore. Do you mind sharing a memory that you have with him from that time? Is there anything that sticks out?
Independence day, 1976—the 200th anniversary of July 4th. A bit west of where the World Trade Center had been built was a huge empty plot of empty land where nothing had been built yet. We went down and watched the fireworks, and we could see the Statue of Liberty in the distance. That was fun (laughter). You’re probably asking a more musical question though.
Either is fine! I’m okay with any memory.
(laughs). I don’t know about memories other than just playing the music. Cooper-Moore is a powerful player, and he taught me how to be a powerful player just in order to have to keep up.
Just having to keep up with his energy and playing?
Yeah.
That makes sense. Do you see a stark difference throughout the years as a result of having performed with Cooper-Moore? When you listen to Valley of Search now, do you feel like you’re a different player now?
Well I haven’t actually listened to it since we recorded it back then (laughs), in its entirely at least—
Oh wow, is there a reason you haven’t listened to it?
Probably because once I record something, I’m not that interested in listening to it anymore. It’s partially because you have to listen to it a lot, you have to mix it and this and that. The newer album had a much more formal mixing session than Valley of Search did, but by the time you’ve done all that, you’ve already heard it, you already know what it is—I don’t need to hear it again.
But I do remember how I played them—I hope I'm a stronger player now! I’ve been practicing a lot, and 45 years have gone by! (laughs) So I think I am a stronger player, and my writing is a bit more streamlined. I’ve learned to edit myself a little better, to get directly to the point.
Can you pinpoint one thing that you’ve specifically learned in the past, say, 10 years of playing that you didn’t pick up on decades before that?
Since the ’90s I’ve been in Salt Lake City. Around five years ago—around 2015—I got the bug again to write and play. I’d been doing a bunch, I had to stop being a musician. I was working a lot in Salt Lake. I didn’t have to to get a day job or anything like that, but I didn’t feel particularly inspired for many years. I started practicing a lot more and writing my own music, which is a good thing because it’s like being able to work out stuff away from the minor leagues—not to put down the music in Salt Lake, there are certainly good musicians here. But playing in New York, you gotta have it together. So I was able to get some things together, and when the opportunity came—when Valley of Search got reissued—the opportunity came to do a new one, and then I was ready.
Valley of Search was reissued primarily because of your nephew, right?
Yeah, Nabil Ayers. He has his own record company, The Control Group. We reissued it on that. It’s funny how it worked out. It was pretty encouraging to see the response to Valley of Search. I hadn’t realized that people still listened to it some. It was actually a collectors item on eBay—I had no idea!
When he proposed the idea of doing another album, I said that I had been writing a lot of stuff but I didn’t really want to go in the same direction with the new one. He said okay, and I started recording for this. I just opened my mind and said, “I’ll see what hits me.” The inspiration came fairly easily and quickly. I felt like I was just finding these tunes on the new album rather than sitting down and writing them they just came out in their entirety—not that they’re that complex. I’m used to writing something, editing it a bunch, taking out bars, changing this, changing that—these tunes just came out as you hear ‘em! (laughter).
Were you listening to specific jazz artists at this time, or were you trying to avoid listening to anything?
I wasn’t trying to avoid listening to things, but I wasn’t listening to as much. I just went into my own head and said, “what direction is this gonna go?”
I was connecting the dots with your nephew. I knew he worked at 4AD—
He still does, yeah!
Naturally the connection is with The National, and I saw that you guys were recording in their studio.
Right.
When I saw the video trailer for the album I was like, “Wait, I recognize this building.”
(laughter). Yeah. We took a picture of the building outside in the evening after we recorded, and took the same picture that’s what you see on The National cover.
Oh, nice (laughter).
Which is, you know, the band playing inside the studio.
It’s interesting to me how you had songs you had written that weren’t recorded yet, but decided to go with new ones for The Fire Still Burns. If you were to record music again, do you feel like you’d make new music or would you record stuff you’ve already written?
I think I’d want to go in the same direction, to find these new things. There are a few things I can try to include in what I’ve already written, but generally, although I’d like for much of what I have written to be recorded, I don’t think I’d go back and record that stuff. My neighbor can record it (laughs).
What does your average day look like? Can you walk me through what a typical day looks like for you?
Today, during the pandemic, or during normal times? (laughs).
During normal times.
You know, it’s a funny thing, thinking about it now. My day during the pandemic may not be that different from a normal one. I’m not the most social person. I like to go out and see my friends play, and this and that. I’m missing performing, I’m missing that, but other than that my typical day: I get up, I practice, sometimes I have an idea I work on, I do some writing. I’m into running, so I run. I don’t run as much as I used to, because the age caught up a little bit. I haven’t been running marathons anymore.
When I got to Utah I got really into running. It was sort of a replacement to stay sane, because I wasn’t as excited about music. I think that replaced it. Now it’s come back the other way.
What about running and marathons appeal to you?
That’s very hard to say because going out for long runs or even short runs that are training runs, they’ll be murderous—speed work and all that. I never look forward to doing them. But once I’m done I feel so good. It’s a mystery why I run so much. There’s so much pain in it, but there’s so much satisfaction. I don’t know what drives me to the pain or to the satisfaction, but it keeps me in shape I guess.
Is that your experience at all with playing jazz?
No, I never dread it! (laughter). I’ve never dreaded playing music.
I think I may have misheard earlier, did you say you like to hear your son perform? Did you say you have a son?
Yeah I have two sons, I don’t know if I’ve mentioned them though.
Do they play music at all?
No, neither of them is a musician. Actually, one of them, when he was about six or seven, I highly suspected he had perfect pitch because he sang a song that he liked one day, and the next day he’d sing it again and he’d sing in the same key. That was true of whatever he sang. I remember saying to my wife, “Hey, you know, Will is showing some very worrisome signs of musical talent” (laughter). I was just kidding. But he became a professional figure skater.
A professional figure skater?
Yeah.
Wow! What’s his name, if you don’t mind sharing?
Will Michael.
Will Michael. Wow.
He didn’t get to the Olympics, he was headed in that direction but he decided to just skate for money and go and play shows and things.
Nice. What has the reaction been like from your family and from your band members after the revitalization of Valley of Search?
What was everybody’s reaction?
I guess your family and your band members. Like what did Cooper-Moore think?
I never asked him. I don’t know if my family expressed much either. They might have said, “Oh, that’s nice!” (laughter). They’re supportive, but they don’t get too excited. Which is fine, I don’t look for that.
It’s similar for my family too, if I ever do anything, or if something happens to me that I think is kind of cool, their reaction is kind of muted—which doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t care, but it’s just sort of how they respond.
Yeah, exactly (laughs).
Is your wife a musician at all?
No. She’s the one with the normal job (laughter). You’ve gotta have one of them in the family. It helps.
How did you two meet, if you don’t mind me asking?
She was a friend of my sister’s. My sister introduced us, and we kind of hit it off.
What jobs did you have as an adult? I’m not really clear what you were doing in terms of a career after you were playing music in your 20s and 30s.
I’ll take you through the stories. In the ’80s I recorded an album that I produced and financed myself. It was a bit more of a commercially accessible album, but I didn’t do it for that reason. I did the album because that’s what I was hearing at the time, that’s the album I wanted to make. I sent it out to different companies. You did the usual thing, a few weeks later you call the company for an answer. You tell them who you were, I’d say, “This is Alan Braufman, I sent you this tape.” What always happens is that the receptionist would pronounce the name wrong, so I’d have to spell it again, and then she’d get it wrong again, and it would take five minutes to get to the name. So I decided the next one I’d send out would just have my middle name as the last, as Alan Michael. So they liked it and they signed it and released it under the name Alan Michael.
Oh! I didn’t know you had another album! What was that album called?
Ah, nice!
You can find some tracks on YouTube or SoundCloud or whatever. I’m actually quite happy with that album. I wouldn’t mind rereleasing that someday. And then, the 90s: I moved to Utah. I basically became—for the first time rally—a working musician. I was playing regular gigs, like weddings, and I would say bar mitzvahs but there aren’t many bar mitzvahs in Utah (laughter). I wasn’t excited about doing those gigs, but if you’re making a living playing music, there’s nothing to complain about.
And then about 5 years ago the inspiration hit me and I started making music I was excited about again.
Are you still playing gigs like that now?
Well, not right now (laughs). But yeah, up until everything shut down.
It makes sense that when you play these gigs that they’re not the most exciting thing, but has there ever been an opportunity where you were able to do something a little less straightforward, or an opportunity where you enjoyed the experience a lot, that brought to mind memories of playing back in the day?
I had gigs that were fun, some gigs were! They weren’t all tedious. Yeah, there were some gigs that I was very happy to be doing. Other ones I would just do to make some money, but I’m happy doing that instead of doing anything else at all. Not doing anything else gave me all the time to practice.
Was there any particular gig that was memorable for any reason?
There is no particular gig, or any single night. There was a gig that lasted about four years every Thursday night just playing standards. It wasn’t my gig, it was this trumpet player’s, but for four years one day a week we would get together to play anything he wanted. It was nice to play the standard jazz repertoire regularly.
What are your favorite standards to play, and to hear, if those two things are different?
I don’t necessarily have favorite tunes per se. “You Don’t Know What Love Is” is a beautiful tune—well it’s more beautiful when Coltrane plays it, you know? (laughter). So it kind of depends on who’s playing it. There are some that I am more comfortable playing the changes on than others, but they all have their unique challenges. I don’t necessarily have many favorites in that idiom. There’s a lot—I don’t know, I can probably give you some: “All the Things You Are” is nice, “Moment’s Notice”, “Alone Together.”
I wanted to ask about The Fire Still Burns session. When you guys are playing—obviously you reunited with Cooper-Moore—I’m not really familiar, what is your relationship with the other members who are playing: Ken [Filiano], Andrew [Drury] and James [Brandon Lewis]?
When Valley of Search got reissued and I had those two concerts in 2018—they were on back-to-back nights, one was at The Greene Space on Varick street in Manhattan. The other was in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, at National Sawdust. Both were very well attended and well-received. When setting up for those, I knew I wanted to play with Cooper-Moore, but I asked him who he wanted to play with on bass and drums. He recommended Andrew Drury and Ken Filiano, which—I’m so happy he recommended them (laughs). With James Brandon Lewis on tenor, at first I didn’t have another horn. I was the only one, I didn’t need another horn, but I love James’s playing. Another thing is that everyone in the band gets along very well personally, you know, there is nobody crazy (laughs). You’ll find that in a lot of great bands there is one person who is just crazy, one person who’s nuts!
But it was cool, everything was so personally easy with this band. I love James personally, and I love his playing, so I said, “Let’s add a tenor to this.” And it worked so well, and when it came time to do The Fire Still Burns I just said, “Let’s just keep this same band together.”
I’m really happy that the relationship between all the band members is nice. With the group of musicians in Valley of Search, was someone crazy in that?
(laughs). I wouldn’t say anybody was crazy. There was more eccentricity in that, but not in that way. If somebody is crazy, that can be a good thing! I don’t necessarily mean it as a good thing, but there were some people that I wanted to work with, they were too, you know…
Ah. Obviously now we’re in a pandemic. Let’s say hypothetically the pandemic ended, and as you said your day-to-day isn’t very different nowadays, but what sort of stuff would you want to be doing, music or otherwise, if you didn’t have to worry about everything going on?
I definitely miss playing live, performing. When I say things aren’t that different, I mean the basic part of the day, getting up, taking a run, practice a bunch, have a few private students over Zoom. But I do really miss playing, that’s a big loss. And I do hope that that comes back when we get past this.
Would you be playing with the musicians that—well I guess you’re in Salt Lake.
I am in Salt Lake. I’m a bit trapped here right now. If I were to go to New York—the last four or five years I’ve been in New York quite a bit, going four or five times a year for two weeks here, two weeks there, playing some and hanging out. If I went to New York right now, being from sort of a hot spot, I’d have to quarantine in a hotel for two weeks. Once I do that, I don’t know if all my friends are even going to want me to come over. So I kind of feel like I’m stuck here, but that’s okay. When it’s over, I’ll get out of here (laughter).
Do you have any words of advice for musicians who are younger?
Hmm, advice for musicians. Well…
This can be about anything, it can be very specific, specific for those who play saxophone, or for anyone in general.
The reason I’m hesitant to say something is not because I don’t have any ideas, but my ideas all sound like cliches, and I don’t want to repeat something that has already been said, but listen to your heart, try to find your own voice. For saxophone players, or for me, what was instrumental to finding something anywhere close to my own voice was the sound, the tone—that’s everything to me.
Saxophone in particular has so much range, anywhere from Paul Desmond to myself—not to compare myself to Paul Desmond (laughter), I’m just saying that that’s a long distance between sounds coming from the same instrument. If you look at the flute, there are better flute sounds than others, but you know… (laughter). Try to hear your sound in your head at an early stage, and just go for it, try to find it. It’s been a lifelong pursuit for me. I don’t feel like I've ever succeeded in doing that. I get close to playing the sound I hear, and I’m still getting closer!
With this new album, were there any new songs—and I know the album is structured as suites—but is there any song you feel comes closest to capturing the sound you heard in your head?
If you’re talking about tone, I’d have to be getting that tone on every tune, so no. (laughter). I do have songs that I like more than others, like my personal favorites.
What are they?
“Home” I like a lot. “Home” is interesting, that was when I was going back to New York to play those concerts for Valley of Search in 2018. I realized the music was over 40 years old and that I should bring some new music to play there. But also, we were invited to play through the whole album, so there wasn’t going to be that much time for all of us to learn and perform new music. So I decided to write something new. I sat down at the piano and just noodled around, hoping an idea would come, and 20 minutes later, the tune was written. Like I said before, it just came out in its entirety, like in one breath. I feel like it was a sound that I knew, it was somewhere out there, and I brought it home. “Home”, that’s the name of it too, but I called it “Home” also because I was going back to New York to play it.
Were any of the pieces challenging for you to write or record, or was everything pretty smooth?
The whole practice, I felt kind of blessed in one way or another. I don’t want to get mystical about it. Maybe it was all just luck. But things just went smoothly, there were so many things that could have gone wrong at any point. I think I’m a little bit better now than I was some years ago with musicianship, expressing what the tunes are about. And also I had these musicians who you don’t have to say much to. As a matter of fact, the less I say the better because they get it.
The tunes came easy to write. Even when we had about a week and a half out from the recording session, we had two tunes that were unfinished. Normally I’d be freaking out, saying, “Wow, a week and a half! Am I gonna get an idea?” But I was just relaxed. Everything else came easy too. By the time of the end of the recording session I had them. We had to get it done in one day, and had there been any major problems getting the right takes we wanted, it would’ve been easy to run out the clock and say, “We didn’t get it,” but we got everything we wanted. Everything worked itself out, everything was very smooth.
That’s good. It seemed like it was that way, just from what you’re talking about and the fact that the recording session wasn’t very long at all.
Yeah. Once we were set up, we finished it in 8 hours. Not including mixing of course, but just in terms of recording.
Something you mentioned very early on in this interview, and even just hearing you say “blessed” just now—are you a spiritual person at all?
I would consider myself so. I feel like to say, “I am a spiritual person”— I would never say that. But the spiritual aspect of life means a lot to me (laughter).
In what ways does that manifest, that spiritual aspect of your life?
When I say “spiritual,” I’m not talking in a sectarian sense. I was a strange kid. When I was 10 years old I was trying to have these conversations with my parents about God, “Is God in heaven? What’s going on there?” And they were not religious in any way, which I’m glad for because I believe that kept my mind opened to spirituality—I could have closed off quite quickly with a dose of traditional religion.
But anyway, it seems that when something is given to you in life, whatever that may be, it is not only polite to say thank you, it feels good to say thank you if you mean it. So the spirituality is basically saying, “Thank you for everything. Thank you for life. Thank you to the Creator for living.” That whole attitude generally will affect how you relate to other people. It makes you more generous, more giving. I don’t know how much better to put it than that.
No, that’s great. It’s an important and good thing, especially with how it’s impacting your life and relationships in a positive way. I don’t have any more questions now, but do you by chance mind sharing photos that I can use? I know there’s the press photo going around for this specific album cycle, but if you have any other photos of you when you were younger, as a kid, or even from the 70s when you were recording Valley of Search—
Yeah, I can ask Nabil to send some things. He’s got some great pictures from when he was like four years old where we are playing saxophone and drums together. I got him a drum set when he was like two-and-a-half. By the time he was four, he actually took it seriously, he played a lot and he was getting pretty good. But he grew up and got more into the business side of it, which, well I’m really glad he did.
Yeah, he’s grown up to be quite an important figure. That sounds like a really cute photo by the way!
I’ll ask Nabil to send it. He’s got some great pictures of he and I just hanging out on the rooftop of 501 Canal, and of us just in front of the storefront, or in the storefront playing, rehearsing together. I’ll have him send those out to you. I don’t actually have them.
Purchase The Fire Still Burns at Bandcamp.
Nabil Ayers and Alan Braufman in 501 Canal Street around 1975
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