The first five poems in the collection Lizard by Sarah Rosenthal, set to music by Dave Rosenthal. Featuring Tom Lucas (banjo), Lewis Martin (guitar), Jasmine Pritchard and Sid Smith III (vocals), Josh Setala (percussion), and Jimmy Touzel (sax and bass), Nicole Rowe (studio engineer), and Myles Boisen (mastering), with CD art and design by Lucy Hodges. Listen here or contact rosenthal (no space) poet (at) gmail (dot) com for a CD.
About the Team
Photo credit: Jonah Belsky
Dave Rosenthal began taking piano lessons at age four at his grandfather’s instigation. He participated in the Music Major program at Chicago’s Kenwood High School chaired by acclaimed composer and musician the Rev. Dr. Lena McLin. He received a BA and MA in mathematics from Brandeis and a B. Mus. in composition from the Rubin Academy of Music and Dance in Jerusalem, later continuing his piano studies with Boston-based teacher Keiko Kobayashi. Dave earned a PhD at MIT’s Media Lab; his dissertation was titled “Machine Rhythm: Computer Emulation of Human Rhythm Perception.” His compositional style draws on his experience growing up in Chicago’s diverse Hyde Park neighborhood, where his ear was trained both by the classical canon and by contemporary music including the Chicago Blues; soul artists such as Marvin Gaye, James Brown, and the Temptations; and rock icons such as The Doors, The Who, Jimi Hendrix, and Jethro Tull. He is CEO of Maestro Analytics, a B2B software startup.
Photo credit: Denise Newman
Sarah Rosenthal is the author of Estelle Meaning Star, Lizard, Manhattan, and two books in collaboration with Valerie Witte: One Thing Follows Another: Experiments in Dance, Art, and Life Through the Lens of Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer and The Grass Is Greener When the Sun Is Yellow. She edited A Community Writing Itself: Conversations with Vanguard Writers of the Bay Area. The film We Agree on the Sun, a collaboration with Jonah Belsky, Ayana Yonesaka-Ruiz, and Ames Tierney, has received numerous accolades including Best Experimental Short, Berlin Independent Film Festival. She has received the Leo Litwak Fiction Award, a Creative Capacity Innovation Grant, a San Francisco Education Fund Grant, and residencies at This Will Take Time, Hambidge, New York Mills, Vermont Studio Center, Soul Mountain, and Ragdale, as well as a two-year term as Affiliate Artist at Headlands Center for the Arts. Learn more here.
Myles Boisen is a guitarist, composer, improvisor, and record producer/engineer, best known around the Bay Area for his twin-necked twanging in The Splatter Trio, as well as musical exploits with The Club Foot Orchestra. Over the past two decades Myles has performed with John Zorn, Rova Saxophone Quartet, John Tchicai, Nina Hagen, Eugene Chadbourne, Vinny Golia, Myra Melford, Glenn Spearman, Ralph Carney, Eddie Marshall, and his own "Guitarspeak" ensembles. In collaboration with guitarists Fred Frith, Henry Kaiser, Elliott Sharp, Robert Fripp, and others, he has developed a potent musical language that combines a wealth of traditional and contemporary styles, focusing particularly on prepared guitar technique and improvisation. Myles' discography numbers more than 30 compact disc recordings, including his "Guitarspeak" disc, ten CDs with The Splatter Trio, and musical work for MTV, film director David Lynch, and CBS, as well as dozens of production and mastering credits on recordings by other artists from 1979 to the present.
Lucinda Hodges is an artist based in Kansas City. She attends the Kansas City Art Institute where she is pursuing a double major in Illustration and Creative Writing. She has worked with a variety of artists to create paintings, murals, and posters. Her art has been featured at the Leedy Voulkos Art Center as a part of the AAPI show in 2022 and 2023. Lucinda works with ink, gouache, collage, and digital tools to create works that are inspired by the city that surrounds her.
Photo credit: Jonah Belsky
Tom Lucas has little formal music training other than a few piano lessons taken as a child. He taught himself the five-string banjo at 17 but got his bachelor’s degree from UC Berkeley in philosophy (academia has been slow to recognize the banjo). He has played in various bands including The Crooked Jades, the Earl Brothers, and his current band, Savage Bond, which plays original Americali music. He has also played in theatrical productions as well as various studio projects.
Photo credit: Jonah Belsky
Lewis Martin is a Dominican guitarist, composer, songwriter, and guitar teacher based in San Francisco. He won the 2016 Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Punta Cana band contest with the Fred Rubin band. In 2017 he played at the Elvis Presley tribute show with renowned Elvis double Michael Cullipher. In the same year, he played at the Heat Latin Music Awards in Cap Cana. In 2018 he collaborated with Colombian artist Gustavo Chaverra to arrange and record Chaverra’s music. Lewis’s debut solo album Combustion was released in early 2021 and features his unique blend of rock, blues, Latin rhythms and Caribbean melodies. He is currently working on his second solo album while gigging and teaching at Blue Bear School of Music.
Photo credit: Jonah Belsky
Jasmine Pritchard is a San Francisco-based singer and vocal coach who has been singing since she was five years old. Born in West Virginia, she moved to Cebu, Philippines at the age of eight and attended international schools and Ateneo de Manila University. She credits her early exposure to different cultures for her love of all forms of music– including musical theater, blues, country, Motown standards and ballads, 90s hip-hop, folk, and Americana. She released her first EP, Good Enough, to a sold-out show on her 38th birthday in June of 2023. Often busy running her company SongRise Studios, where she teaches private voice lessons, hosts and promotes shows, facilitates workshops, and does artist development and video production, singing remains her first love.
Nicole Rowe is a freelance audio engineer and sound artist. Her interests include music, songwriting, narrative short- and long-form audio, sound art, producing, and mixing. As an artist, she values raw emotional integrity and sonic inadvertent intention. Nicole likes to build worlds that feel as direct as they do unquestionably natural. Whether helping a client speak through music or recite their oral histories, Nicole believes the quality of a recording is crucial to support her clients' agency and delivery. With a background in contemporary music, her musical perspective is riddled with pervasive idiosyncrasies influenced by pop tendencies. Nicole has experience with classical, pop, and rock recordings, archival work, audio and visual editing, producing, songwriting, sound design, and film scoring. She loves working in all sonic fields, and is as comfortable recording in a control room as she is editing from home. Nicole holds a Bachelor’s of Music in Music Technology and Applied Composition from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (‘22). She is a staffed engineer at Tiny Telephone Recording in Oakland, California.
Photo credit: Jonah Belsky
Seattle jazz drummer Josh Setala is a bandleader, composer, and sideman, featured regularly at venues such as Mr. Tipple's, The Dawn Club, and Bird and Beckett Books. His performing ensembles include The Playground Trio with Nate Gilbreath and Alan Jones and Ripple Æffect with Lola Miller and Aidan Siemann. He is an alumnus of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and teaches at the Stanford summer jazz workshop. Josh’s poised, empathic presence and imaginative, effervescent playing captivate audiences up and down the West Coast.
Photo credit: Jonah Belsky
Sid Smith III is the Music Director at the renowned Third Baptist Church of San Francisco. Prior to that he served as Pastor of Worship at First Covenant Church of Oakland. Sid consults with music ministries at churches, denominations, and colleges around the country and particularly enjoys consulting with HBCUs. He also works as a freelance writer focusing on political and theological issues. Sid studied tuba and vocal performance at Middle Tennessee State University and theology at Golden Gate Baptist Seminary. He and his wife Kimberly have been married for 32 years; their three children are all musicians: Sid IV recently received a master’s in jazz studies at Northern Illinois University; Victoria is studying for a master’s in music therapy at Temple University, and Grace, a junior at Fisk University, sings alto in the Grammy-Award winning Fisk Jubilee Singers. All three play tuba like their dad.
Photo credit: Jonah Belsky
San Francisco-based musician Jimmy Touzel plays upright bass, electric bass, tuba, clarinet, and sax in a variety of genres including traditional bluegrass, traditional jazz, django jazz, old time, rockabilly, classic country, and Western swing. Jimmy has contributed to numerous music and film recordings, has toured widely, both across the U.S. and abroad. His debut album, Lonesome Lullabies, was released in 2023 by Belle Isle Records. An accomplished classical clarinetist, Jimmy has held the bass clarinet chair in Symphony Orchestra Augusta and the second / E♭ clarinet position in the Long Bay Symphony. He has also played with the Wilmington (NC) Symphony and the Aspen Festival Orchestra. Jimmy earned a bachelor’s degree in music performance from the University of South Carolina. He is on the faculty at Oakland School for the Arts, where he teaches classical, jazz and rock classes as well as music history.