APOLOGIES if you came here looking for Edgewise news & music…

the band is in a stage of re-invention and I’ll have news about that so, hopefully by the fall of 2025. There will some new charts and some new players -

In the meantime, enjoy the few cuts below from my much earlier days (pre-white hair) with the fusion band Oracle. - J.

Oracle, a blast from the past -

In September of 2020, with all rehearsals cancelled due to the Covid-19 pandemic, I posted these old videos of performances with the fusion band Oracle from the late ‘80’s and ‘90’s. We definitely had our moments, though it seemed like every time we got up a head of steam, something interrupted our progress.. I don’t think this band ever quite realized its full potential. The videos are from a concert given in 1996 at UNC Asheville during a brief period in which the band re-constituted; the video was done by a UNCA student who was obviously trying to make a fancy music video. Tim Haden, guitarist, composer, and UNCA faculty member at the time, sadly succumbed to cancer in 2008.

This piece - by guitarist Tim Haden - was a commemoration of the loss of the seven astronauts of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986. We performed this many times over the active years of the band. We have recently reworked this, and in memory of Tim will be performing it regularly.

One day, after again expressing my frustration with the conservative, unadventurous ears of much of the audience, Tim said, "Jon, it's a pentatonic world." So, the subtitle of Monkey Wrench is "How to be a Chromatic Band in a Pentatonic World." The opening section - featuring the sequencer and marimba sounds in counterpoint - is in a pentatonic scale; the contrasting bridge section is highly chromatic.

My arrangement of the famous Thelonious Monk tune. I have re-worked this arrangement and it’s in the Edgewise book.

Here are some studio recordings of other tunes I wrote for Oracle. We have re-imagined Friday Solitary and Marigold for Edgewise.