Patrick has had private musical instruction during three different periods in his life. As a child, he received his first guitar lessons on a just-right hollow body acoustic. A few years later, he was trained on a jaunty -- but heavy -- old bar organ, and then on an elegant dual keyboard, wood-bodied Farfisa. He gradually developed his playing skills over the course of several years of private lessons.
Then, in the mid-1990s, as he became immersed in the then-thriving local night life in the northern suburbs of New York City, Pat returned to his musical studies as a student of the remarkable jazz guitarist Joe Giglio, at the Westchester Conservatory of Music in White Plains, New York.
Writing Music
Under Joe’s expert and generous tutelage, Pat expanded his playing skills enough to achieve his long-held goal of completing his first rudimentary compositions. Then armed with a shiny new black Ibanez six string, an analog four track and a growing assortment of ever-bulkier amplifiers, Pat recorded his first group of songs.
Thematically linked by their genesis in his experiences in the local night life, that first large batch of recordings would ultimately evolve into the score for Pat’s first play, “Payin’ The Door.” With the recorded output of the musicians who populated the local ‘90s music scene and Pat’s music journalism from that era, the songs that grew from those first tentative compositions -- with their observations of the nighttime world -- remain one of the few visceral links to the vanished Westchester / Fairfield music scene.
In recent years, Pat has embraced the emerging generation of electronic composition tools to create new original songs, primarily for use in his film making and audio projects. Thus his most recent musical works are generally of the ‘new age’ variety (although he tends to view them as descendent from the ‘space music’ he first discovered in his teens).
Writing About Music
Throughout the latter half of the 1990s, Patrick attended hundreds of live musical performances in the area near his home in the northern suburbs of New York City. About halfway through his “night life” years, he emerged as something more than a casual fan of the local music scene, as he put his journalistic abilities to use to document and promote the performers, venues and events that populated the nighttime world.
Taken as a whole, his published work about the art and entertainment of Westchester (NY) and Fairfield (CT) counties in the 1990s represents a powerful documentary history of a thriving artistic community that has, sadly, vanished.
For Pat, the single most harrowing event of the long, slow decline was the 1999 death of his friend Susan Albright-Lewitt. Performing in the local area for many years under the stage name Suze Star, Susan was a gifted singer with a remarkable presence. The manner in which she approached her illness and passing was indelibly poignant for all those who loved her, and her death was devastating for her friends and family.
It was the loss of his friend and the less dramatic -- but no less final -- dissolution of the particular live music community that had flourished in the area at the time that led Patrick to write the novel Payin’ The Door and the subsequent musical play of the same name.
His long working-through of this particular subject matter reached its ultimate expression, however, in the creation of the short documentary film “A Deeper Dream: The Life and Death of Live Music in New York’s Northern Suburbs.”
As the author himself puts it, the long nights of spiritual uplift, expanded perspective, and joyous noise -- the work of many whose efforts have been largely forgotten in the headlong rush of change in the rapidly changing suburbs -- are best repaid by “truthful recollection of what went on” in the past, and by “true dreams” of how the best aspects of those experiences can be carried forward.
From the story-songs to the original journalism, from the novel to the play to the documentary film, the debts of present to past -- and the promise of past to future -- is, ultimately, fulfilled.
Writing Music, Writing About Music
Tools of the Trade
Pat’s first ‘90s era electric guitar was a steely black Ibanez, which he used on most of the original demo recordings that eventually evolved into the songs of the musical play “Payin’ The Door.”
His second was the beautiful honey blond Yamaha Pacifica that is featured in promo materials for the play, and in his short documentary film about the local music scene, “A Deeper Dream: The Life and Death of Live Music in New York’s Northern Suburbs.”
The Ibanez...
... and the Pacifica.
