I’m very honored to have received the Grammy for Best Jazz Instrumental Album. I’d like to thank everyone who participated in it and made it what it was: The always creative and masterly mixing and engineering of John Davis at Bunker Studios, and everyone else there who assisted, Mark Guiliana, Becca Stevens, Ambrose Akinmusire, Joel Frahm, Kurt Elling, Sara Caswell, Gabriel Kahane, Noah Hoffeld, Lois Martin, Michael Thomas, Chris Cheek and Charles Pillow. I’d also like to thank Dima Drjuchin for his artistic vision on the cover, the package and the two videos, Robert Edridge-Waks for his collaboration on the video of “O Ephriam,” and everyone at Nonesuch for their trust and continual support: David Bither, Bob Hurwitz, Matthew Rankin, Karina Beznicki, Artie Moorhead, Melissa Cusick, Gregg Schaufeld, Dan Cohen, Mathew Watanabe, David Holmes, Chad DePasquale. I’d like to thank my management team of Scott Southard and Tom Korkidis, and everyone at IMN, my publisher, Dan Coleman, and Bob Donelly. I’d like to thank my wife Fleurine and my children, Eden, Ruby and Damien for their love, and my mom and dad who nurtured my musical development as I was growing up, my sister Leigh Anne, and all my teachers through the years. I’d like to thank my God for giving me the message, Gabriel, for relaying it.

And finally: I’d like to thank Snorts Malibu, for his unparalleled contribution on “Proverb of Ashes”. Snorts...Snorts...What can I say? You have...a certain sentiment, an essential, joyful snortiness, tempered, as it were by irony, the irony of a thousand Iron Butterfly albums...yet still there is innocence in what you do...that nutty, childlike, minty quality that runs through your whole oeuvre...The smell of freshly perfumed toilet paper, the pure bliss of soft rock hits from artists such as Ambrosia, the nutty ecstasy of Neal Schon, the assy abandon of Steve Perry’s solo hit, “Oh Sherrie”. Give me a song like that today, Snorts. Where are those songs? The simple dignity of a solo-project, the Ding an sich, Snorts. The daring of Stevie Nicks...the yacht I sailed on with Christopher Cross, with all its fecal, brownish remembrances...the snowy, sublated hearth of Little River Band, and, perhaps, Pure Prairie League. Snorts...you know. You know...even as I know, that you Know: The gnosis we found among the burnished, rubbery pellets of sad/happy nostalgia inherent in early-period Billy Joel...Snorts, I wanted to be a child of Eisenhower. All of that. All of it and more, Snorts, as we continued our journey together, through the paroxysm of prog-rock discovery: The Hobbit-like promise of High-period Gentle Giant in Octopus, the redemptive power of Rush’s Hemispheres (R.I.P. Neil Peart). The cynical disavowal of sentimentality in The Grand Wazoo. Fuck you, Snorts. Now, I must go forward, I must move on - whether or not you join me on the Berlin Turnpike, past the south end of Hartford, to the outer landscapes of Wethersfield. The donut shop and candlepin bowling, Snorts. The old, useless fuzz box and the Leslie speaker with no motor, washed up like some beached roots-rocker corpse in a West Hartford garage, stinking in all its ignobility. Betrayed, maligned - just some weathered vestige of Grand Funk Railroad or Bad Company. Damn it Snorts. Further on, there was this road we heard about, called the Merritt Parkway. Where it led, we had not yet apprehended. Snorts, even as I know you are “no longer Snorts” - even as I know that you were at the Grammy’s, in disguise as “Snipes Marlboro” - oh, Snorts...why - why couldn’t you just let them know you were there? Why didn’t you “network” with Billy Eyelash? Perhaps Post Maloni was there...Snorts. Fuck you Snorts! I love you! Snorts...we sang, you and I, we sang the adrenalined echo of Pink Floyd-nightmares...the harbingered onrustigheid that was part and parcel of “Goodbye Blue Skies”...the unending gloom of Side 3 and 4, the pallid frozen hope outside the wall. Snorts...Snorts! (snorts?): the clean, cocained specificity of Steely Dan: the gnomic lyrics, the promised vision of a Black Cow on Greene Street years before we arrived in Gotham... Gotham...Snorts: the downtown sounds: idiot nights of ecstasy, the ride cymbal of Billy Higgins, the unending grace of Cedar, Kenny, Tommy and Barry at Bradley’s...The junior hopefuls at Augie’s...the wasted, spiked nights at Save The Robots with the Queen of Spades, the pool table at Lucy’s, Violent Femmes and Joy Division on the jukebox, Tim Roth’s harrowing visage from across the table...why did I have to be Mr. Pink, Snorts...Layne Staley’s dark message, suffused through Johnny Quest re-runs...but I digress Snorts. It’s just...Snorts...it’s just that Romeo Void crystallized something for me. It was the possibility of a truce between new-wave and punk. Christie Hynde evoked something for us, Snorts! A confident nihilism, a solid, salvational kick in the groin, as we went back to Ohio. I knew that shopping mall already. There was a vision of leathery benevolence, the butterflied smell of rice vinegar and satin as well, and fish sauce, layered - always layered, Snorts, always layered. Where, after all, Snorts, will I situate, and pack away (yet never really leave, never vanquish...never) the perennial steadfast importance of John Taylor and Mark King, or the bracing, masculine vigour of Icehouse - a synthesized, Australian possibility, une autre habitude, one avenue we explored, you and I, Snorts, in those yellow nights at Carl Junior’s, or in the dystopian solution that IHOP only seemed to provide...We knew better, Snorts, we knew better. It was an alternative, lest we forget, to the emasculated fever of gated reverb on a snare, and Cindy Lauper’s vision of teen waste. Alas, it was the smell of beery sweetness all too often, Snorts - the candied patina of feathered hair, and nothing more. Damnit, Janet. No, Snorts, we make a goodbye here, yet a hello (a meta-hello, mind you, oh yes, Snorts, I will step outside and qualify my qualification, you dirty little whore, Snorts), a hello to Jim Carroll’s red-headed elegies. In other coasts, Tom Waits sang of Hollywood sadness, tempered by bar gin, good weather and brown tar. We never really discounted the cock-rock born on the Strip. And now, lo and behold, I understand the sturdy worker bee, Michael Anthony, and really, anyways, always understood Brad (Whitford). Finally, for now, there was that proletariat New Jersey ethos, one we never reached, but glimpsed in the Boss, and, well, Phillip Roth, submerged in older versions of Newark across the bridge...

But Snorts...really Snorts: Last night was not for Billie. Last night was your night. You little gem. Ride your Steel Horse Snorts. Was kann ich sagen, Schnortchen?