My friend and collaborator Andre Burke passed away this year on June 30th. Andre has played violin on my most important and personal music since 1993. My last solo record, Shadow Economy, released in 2000, featured Andre on six of the eight tracks. We have been working intermittently since then on a collection of new music which will finally be released this year on December 23rd, which would have been Andre’s 48th birthday. The new record is called X-Ray Yankee Zulu Tango, and this is the opening track, Milonga Del Zero.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Andre’s violin playing the last few months. Thinking about how I, as a composer, could give Andre a few scrawls on a piece of staff paper, and he would give me back music. Music infused with emotion, with attitude, with life. Composing is often regarded as somehow “above” mere musicianship, a higher form of artistic expression. But with Andre, his violin could always transform a simple, even trite, idea into a rich and seductive landscape. Consider the two-note phrase that opens “Total Harmonic Distortion”, our collaboration from the previous record (which you can hear here): nothing but a simple whole-step up. Two notes played one after the other. Could anything be simpler from a compositional point-of-view? And yet, listen to Andre play those two notes, and it has all the life and emotion one needs from music.

Another two-note example: the minor third played in the end theme from “The Wire” (the track called “The Fall”, which you can hear an excerpt from here). Those two notes, played that way, give you the necessary humanity in the midst of a track which is otherwise mostly machines. I think it’s the violin which makes this track exceptional, and it’s probably the most popular piece of music I’ve ever written.

So there will be no more now. Andre is gone, and I’m left with only the music. A dozen years of violining now has a beginning, a middle, and an end. A finite body of work.

Thank you Andre, I miss you.

*****

Andre has a web site with selected examples of his writing and filmmaking here. You can see some of Andre’s films here. Our previous record together, Shadow Economy, is available from Amazon, CD Baby, and the iTunes Music Store.