Dave Golden is a musician and a Fulbright Scholar, originally from New York, who currently resides in New Orleans and tours internationally. His career has spanned from jazz to classical to folk, bluegrass and country.
Contents |
Jazz Years, 1996-97
Golden's career began in 1996 while playing in a New York City-based jazz sextet with Charlie Looker and Max Bernstein. They gained recognition from Downbeat Magazine and were launched on a European tour, at the behest of the organizers of the 1997 Montreux Jazz Festival, where they played five performances. The group mixed Golden and Looker's avant garde compositions alongside standards and lesser-known elements of the jazz canon. Golden left the music world in 1997 and worked a job at a Finnish paper mill before returning to the US. He earned a degree from Williams College and while there he joined the National Ski Patrol and started a jazz trio with Taiwanese pop star, Lee Hom Wang, who was also studying there at the time.
Country, Folk and Rock Years, 2004-present
Golden resurfaced on the music scene during the Summer of 2004, where he toured the festival circuit playing a repertoire of folk and blues-inspired pieces. In 2004 and 2005, the Future of Music Coalition awarded him with back-to-back Fellowships and a review from Entertainment Today led to a meeting with Dylan/Cash producer, Bob Johnston. Johnston, having just left a decades-long tenure at Columbia Records, lauded Golden's songwriting and invited him to record for his new label, JAM. Golden's career got another boost after Nuvo Newsweekly chose his improvisational encore performance as the highlight of the 2004 Midwest Music Summit. His collaborators at that performance, Chicago's Shelley Miller and New York's Jeremiah Birnbaum, toured with him on and off in 2005 alongside Chicago's Kara Kulpa and Samantha Twigg Johnson. The group called themselves Mercy Driver. Although Mercy Driver only lasted for less than a year, Golden continued to tour through 2005 with individual members of Mercy Driver, while taking breaks to record his debut album in New Orleans. What was to be his debut album as a singer-songwriter, Wake To These Satellites, was never released. A studio error brought the backups to New Orleans in late August 2005 and the album was lost during the floods that followed Katrina. In its place, the dark folk album How To Breathe, was self-released in early 2006 and propelled a more modest tour, but one that saw Golden as a headliner at that summer's Cutting Edge (New Orleans) and Dewey Beach (Delaware) Americana Festivals. In the Fall of 2006, Golden ended his 2-year tour and returned to the studio. Throughout the end of 2006, Golden has turned up with several different bands supporting him, playing under false names such as Greyeye and The Diesel Blues.
Awards
In 2001, he was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship. In 2004 and 2005, he was awarded a Future of Music Scholarship.
Film Work
In 2003, Dave Golden began a professional association with director, Adam Salky. Dave's music was used in 2003's Freddy Anxiety and he scored 2004's Sometimes the Neighbor. In 2006, Golden penned "Pillbox," the closing music for Jenise Treuting's Japanese film, Invitations and Ultimatums.
Sources
- Cincinnati City Beat (OH), 9.20.06
- Entertainment Today (CA), May 2004
- Stevens Point Journal (WI), Arts Section Cover Story, 10.19.05
- WOXY-FM/Randomville.com, Midpoint Music Festival coverage, http://randomville.com/article.html?article=445
- Americana Tonight (TN), November 2004
- Nuvo Newsweekly (IN), 6.8.05, http://www.nuvo.net/archive/2005/06/08/emotiondriven_music.html
- Nuvo Newsweekly (IN), 8.18.04, Midwest Music Summit Coverage, http://www.nuvo.net/archive/2004/08/18/mms_04_in_review.html
