This is my newest work – “Up to No Good” a concerto for bass clarinet and Wind Band.

This is a recording of the March 12th 2016 premiere performance by the U.S. Coast Guard Band with bass clarinet soloist Andrew Grenci.  My sincere thanks to the band and to Andrew Grenci for a stellar performance.

This is my first bass clarinet concerto – Adrift in Endless Realities, performed here by myself and the UMKC student orchestra.

This piece was originally written for created wind instrument, found percussion and bass clarinet.  The two recordings here represent my premiere performance with a vacuum cleaner clarinet and percussion set made out of sawed off wine bottles and kitchen implements, and thingNY’s recent take on the work.

Here is thingNY’s performance of the work.  This is a very different realization, and I have to admit that I love that this piece is flexible enough to be presented so differently.

This video is from a collaborative concert that my new music group – The Digital Honkbox Revival  – performed on.

Improvisational music has always been very central to what I do.  This piece was one of my first forays into modern improvisation and really acted as a catalyst to my later work.  The performers here are myself, Scott Moore (violin), Jeremy Podgursky and Christian Gentry (pianos).

This was written for the U of L trumpet ensemble and is dedicated to my brother – the one and only Matt Baumgardner. I like to think that is represents him fairly well – short and to the point, with plenty of bravado and some fairly rough edges.

This clarinet duet was written during my masters program.  It always makes me smile.

This is a “piece” that Scott Blasco and I created together. We thought that it might be cool to use fruit as an instrument and Scott came up with an ingenious way to insert microphones into pears. The percussion is all pear sounds, and the comb filter on the bass clarinet is controlled by the level of violence that Scott and I choose to inflict on the pears.

Since the whole piece is improvised it is different every time, and it bears mentioning that Scott and I have not yet had a performance that didn’t require some kind of impromptu wizardry on the part of the performers (usually just me and Scott) to overcome an unpredictable technical difficulty. I think this particular performance calls into question the traditional concept of minimalism.

People also seem to get a kick out of the title, which refers to pears that both Scott and I were offered. The pears in question grew in a yard near Troost street and were picked and offered to both me and Scott by a fellow student at UMKC during our time as doctoral students. Scott graciously accepted and ate the pears, while I gave mine away on the Plaza. The title generated from a conversation that Scott and I had in which I exclaimed, “I ain’t eatin’ no Yard Pears!”.

This is a wind quintet in 5 short movements based on the cargo cults of the pacific islands. This performance features the members of the Liberace Winds.  This recording is live and unedited, so the movements are presented back to back with brief pauses.

Introduction and Kludge was written for Sam Wells and Jon Carbin.