The beginning of Everything After was Spring 2002, when Justin Grinnell asked me to compose a piece for his Junior Recital. After thinking about the setting, i wrote There is Beauty There Waiting For You for a quartet of vibraphone, piano/voice, acoustic bass and drumkit. The performers were Nathan Hubbard, Melonie Sacalamitao, Justin Grinnell and Dave Pshaida.

This idea of vibes, voice and piano sat around for awhile until early 2004, when i found an old notebook holding most of the music i wrote in high school and earlier. I put together a recording session to document most of it, using the (then working) group Something Strange Is Afoot (Nathan Hubbard, Justin Grinnell, James Burton) with Melonie Sacalmitao on Piano. We spent an afternoon dealing with my horrible handwriting and less than inspired harmonic language of that period. But this music put us into a more traditional space in terms of harmony and melody, which was a refreshing contrast to the multi-layered music we had been working on as a trio.

From that point, i began to work on a performing group, using some of this earlier music and writing new pieces based on this instrumentation.

This music has a clear beginning in the music i was writing for the quartet Return To One, especially during our Firecliffs era (2000-2001). However, where the RTO music was a melding of woodwind based music with voice, this music starts with the voice-vibraphone-piano combination in mind.

The main focus of this group is the melding of the vibraphone and piano timbres, so much of this music is those instruments playing in unison. The addition of the female voice to the group adds a warmth and (much needed) definition of breath lengths.

Vibraphone is a tricky instrument to blend with. Over the past several years i've lead several groups that were formed to investigate the timbral possibilities of different instruments with the vibes -

1. Everything After (woodwind version) - a look into combining the vibes with flute and the acoustic bass with bass clarinet. For me, the flute smoothes out the vibes. This can be a challenge of orchestration in different ranges of the flute, but the payoff is well worth it - its a beautiful sound.

2. Passengers - vibes and guitar with two electric basses and drums, the same lineup Gary Burton used in 1970's for the classic recordings Ring and Passengers. In my mind, the guitar gives a bit more bite to the attack of the vibes as well as challenging normal notions of vibraphone voicings.

3. Everything After (piano version) - Similar to the guitar, the piano has a better attack than the vibes as well as a longer sustain. The wide range of the piano also offers new compositional ideas, playing above and below the vibes and bass.

I have to admit the biggest problem in this group - the name. Naming bands has never been easy for me. Originally this group was called "The Adrian Rollini Trio +", as we were the Adrian Rollini Trio plus Melonie Sacalamitao. When the ART changed its name, i was calling the group the Nathan Hubbard Quartet for a while, but that sounded too bland to me. Next i decided to name the group Everything After, with the catch that i was running two different groups simultaneously under that name - both set up around the vibraphone, one with the piano-voice-bass-drumkit setup, the other with two woodwinds, bass and percussion. After some time, i shut down the woodwind group, but have incorporated a few of those pieces into this ensemble.

So thats it, at this point i have no plans on changing the name, but be sure to check back in a few months to see if anything has changed.