New for 2025, I’m starting what I hope will be a regular musical scene at The Royale: Third Thursday Throwdown! It’ll happen on the third Thursday of each month, of course. It’s an opportunity to do lots of good things: strengthen our music-making and music-loving community, experiment with music I’ve wanted to play and people…
Fiddler on the Roof, Broadway Sacramento, 2024: A Musician’s Chronicle.
Preface This is a self-indulgent post, a chronicle of a normal and mundane, if fortunate, series of events in a normal and mundane, if fortunate, human life, and as such there’s really nothing about it that ought to interest anyone but me, the person who recently lived it. But for me it is so vivid,…
Robert, where’s your sense of humor?
People far and wide send me accordion jokes, memes, etc. People far and wide wonder why I don’t ROFL. Here is my attempt to answer while being as nice and grateful as the truth permits. Let me ask you: How much do you laugh at the 647th time someone tells you the same joke? I…
New Recordings from Me and Ned Boynton
Here’s a set of tunes I recorded recently with Ned Boynton. In October, 2023, my close collaborator Ned Boynton and I traveled to Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA to play as a guitar / accordion duo for the cocktail hour and wedding ceremony of a couple of now-newlyweds. I really enjoyed getting to meet them and their…
Why Twelve?
Modern Western musicians live and work mainly with a twelve-note chromatic equal-tempered scale. As you can read in ample resources elsewhere on the web, equal temperament is a tuning compromise that lets fixed-pitch instruments play in every key without sounding more out of tune in any key than in any other, and without sounding too…
Perfect Pitch?
Welcome to yet another episode of “Somebody asked a question on social media so Robert wrote a blog post!” People ask about a thing called “perfect pitch.” Confusion about this phenomenon is so rampant that even the Wikipedia article about it contradicts itself in its first two paragraphs, which I quote here for reference: Absolute…
Fraudio and the People who Buy it
I guess it was just a matter of time before a major controversy would arise around some of the issues I discussed in my earlier post about music media formats. Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs created a business of getting access to original master tapes of classic albums and making vinyl pressings (and SACDs, I think)…
A New Accordion-Nerd Video!
Today I posted a video to YouTube in response to a rather inside-baseball question on social media about easier ways to play a particular type of chord on the left side of an accordion, the side with all the buttons that look the same (but sound different!). The video is called Crazy Stradella and it’s…
Phineas Newborn, and Revisiting the Question of “What Good are Scales?”
As students of music we aim to train our ears to hear each note on its own terms, and when we improvise, to intend each note on its own terms. To many of us, especially jazz students, scales can be crutches that work against the goal of musical intent because relying on rules like “every…
Fun with Fills, What Good are Scales, and Thoughts on Growing Musical Vocabulary
You know how every now and then you hear something and you’re like, “What was THAT?!?” Well, I was listening to music in the car a while back and this amazing fill caught my ear big-time. I made a note to come back to it because it sounded fantastic and a big part of it…
A (NOW FIXED!) Disappointment with My New Organ Clone
[ Over three years since I described the Viscount Legend phasing problem here and reported it to the factory, Viscount has issued the new OS 1.9 update for the Legend series and I am ecstatic to report that the update appears to fix the problem I described in my original post below back in January,…
Musing on Music Media: CD, Vinyl, and Streaming — Audio Media Sound Quality, and How We Got Here
In an offhand comment on Facebook I mentioned that putting music on an LP entails some necessary sonic compromises for engineering reasons, and a friend replied, “Are you saying the sonic compromises are still being made for today’s vinyl, or for CDs and other digital formats too?” This post is an edited version of my…
Hammond Lesson Samples from PianoGroove now on YouTube
Just a couple of days ago, Hayden, the founder and head honcho at PianoGroove, posted three of my Jazz Hammond Organ lessons on YouTube. To get the full ten-lesson series you still have to subscribe to PianoGroove; these three will give you some idea of what the lessons are like. The three sample lessons are:…
Launched: My New Organ Course on PianoGroove!
In an earlier post, I announced that I had recorded a series of introductory Hammond Organ lessons for PianoGroove, and now I’m happy to share that Hayden and I finished post-production and the course launched a bit over a week ago! Anyone can check out some free material related to the course on PianoGroove’s site,…
Update from Behind the Scenes: Teaching. (Me? Teaching?!?)
I’m not much of an entrepreneur, especially in the web space, but I’ve recently gotten a really nice gig due to the entrepreneurship of others who are full-time small business owner / entrepreneur / operators on the web. A close friend of mine from college is the founder and head honcho of Literate Computing and…
My New (But Now Not So New) Organ Clone
[ Edit added in October, 2022 far later than I should have: Shortly after writing this post I bothered to read the instruction manual more carefully and learned how to make the tone wheel model selection stick across power cycles, so most of the post is invalid and mistaken. I’m leaving it up for history’s…
My New Organ Clone
[ Edit added in January, 2020: If you are reading this to understand how the different organ clones compare, make sure you check out my more recent blog post about a disappointing problem with my Viscount Legend Live. ] I play Hammond console organs, the kind whose best known exemplar is the famous B-3. There…
Charting Scrapbook
This page is a work-in-progress link farm with a record of all the chart appearances I can figure out how to link to. Closer to Home On JazzWeek Weekly Jazz Album Chart 22 January, 2018: on the most-added list 29 January, 2018: on the biggest gainers and most-added lists 5 February, 2018: appearing at #36…
Artist Pages on the Internet!
Most on-line services that sell or stream music try to have a page for each artist where that artist’s discography is represented and you can easily find all the artist’s work from one easy jumping-off point. Unfortunately it doesn’t always work all that well because of situations like mine. First of all, I have the…
Robert Kennedy Quartet on KPFA’s BAJABA Showcase
Last night I appeared with my quartet on the BAJABA Showcase, a monthly live music broadcast from KPFA Radio in Berkeley, California. Performing with me were Ben Torres on tenor saxophone, Mason Razavi on guitar, and Rick Rivera on drums. The show’s host, D Minor, and I talked repeatedly about how to get your very…
Closer to Home now available for pre-order!
I’m happy to announce that you can now pre-order my new album, Closer to Home, at my Bandcamp store! Order now and you’ll get instant download of two tracks, and when the release date arrives on January 12, 2018, you’ll get the entire album. Just like with Big Shoes, if you order the physical CD you…
Closer to Home: New Album Progress Report
Closer to Home is the title of my new album that I’ll release in January, and I’m happy to report that since my post about it last month I’ve made some progress! Mastering is done, and I’m ecstatic with the results Michael Romanowski at Coast Mastering created. It was a joy to attend the mastering session…
New Album on the Way!
It’s been a long time since my last blog post; I’ve been doing other things. One of the things I’ve been doing is recording a new album, and I’m finally ready to pre-pre-announce it! The players are top-notch: Cody Rhodes on drums, Terrence Brewer on guitar, and Ben Torres on tenor sax in addition to…
Robert Kennedy Trio, Live at the BAJABA Showcase!
On October 1, 2016, I had the honor of performing live on KPFA’s BAJABA Showcase with Felicia Bridges and Afrikahn Jahmal Dayvs. I had been on the radio before with Afrikahn, but just for an interview and conversation, not for a performance. This time I played my B-3 in KPFA’s beautiful performance / recording studio…
Stream or download tracks from the Big Shoes album release concert!
Free music you can stream or download! Here’s a playlist of selections from the live concert I did at Coast Recorders with my trio to celebrate the release of Big Shoes.
A Past-Due Post: April 16, 2015 KKUP Radio Interview with Afrikahn Dayvs
On April 16, 2015 I had the pleasure of being interviewed on KKUP Radio’s JaZzLine program by Afrikahn Jamal Dayvs, one of the Bay Area’s great public supporters of the Hammond Organ. Of course our main topic was my recent album release Big Shoes. I apologize that the audio is clipped in some spots; I…
The Greatest Feel-Fake in Rock and Roll
This posting might interest non-musicians but it’s written with musician readers in mind, hence the “musician’s corner” category tag. Before you read on, it might be best to listen to this entire song and then come back here. The web and the world are heavily populated with objects, still images, and videos like this one and this one that show us how…
Big Shoes album release concert success!
I’m happy to report the Big Shoes album release concert and celebration at Coast Recorders in San Francisco was a sold-out success. Cody, Mason, and I had a blast being able to hear each other on stage better than ever thanks to the room’s perfect acoustics and the attentive crowd.
You asked: So how’s Big Shoes going?
Friends and fans have been asking how the record release is going for me now that Big Shoes has been out in the wild for a few weeks. The executive summary: It’s going well and the process continues to be a lot of fun. It’s selling on CD Baby [ Ed. note: not any more, since…
An oldie, linked here for reference (singing at jam sessions)
Here’s a blog post I wrote a few years back giving advice to singers who want to perform at jam sessions. Interest in the post reawoke recently when someone on Facebook raised the topic of discord between singers and instrumentalists, and we all agreed that much of the discord would dissolve with a few simple…
Big Shoes CD Release Concert coming up!
Hi, folks! I’m really excited to announce I’ll be playing a concert in the live room at Coast Recorders in San Francisco on April 18th, 2015 to celebrate the release of my new CD Big Shoes. That room is one of the remaining intact rooms designed by Bill Putnam, and has hosted lots of historic…
Site Under Construction
Hello, friends and fans. My web site is still in its infancy, just coming together out of dust, miracles, and the little scraps left over when you tear a page out of a spiral-bound notebook of staff paper. So please pardon our dust and check back soon. Things will be more polished in no time!
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