Episode 1: Twelve Tones & Six Billion Songs... A Conversation with Andre Floyd

Episode Summary

In this inaugural episode of The Sum of All Wisdom, Dr. Scott Catey sits down with longtime friend and musician Andre Floyd, to discuss his life, career, and philosophy. 

We talk about the stories we carry, how meaning evolves, and how lives are sometimes unexpectedly intertwined. Andre looks back over a life and career lived as a musical “cobbler,” and he talks about resilience, amplifying marginalized voices, uplifting community, and creating opportunities for self-determination and self-respect among young people from cultures that often get erased or misrepresented. He also remembers the ways he has used music for good throughout his life, teaching Montessori, providing music therapy, and the importance of sharing music, especially in difficult times. 

What unfolds is not just a conversation about gigs and bands, but about pivot points—those moments when life gets turned over, takes a new direction, or transforms. From singing the National Anthem at Wrigley Field in 1982, to playing pool with Seamus Heaney, to performing at Luke’s alongside Montana icon Jay Rummel and others, Andre reflects on what it means to build a life by “cobbling together” community, opportunity, talent, and instinct.

Music as life is full of both possibility and responsibility, and Andre shares his wisdom on both, and more. 

In This Conversation

• Growing up in an Air Force family and finding the guitar at age 11 
• Cubs vs. Expos: Singing the American and Canadian national anthems at Wrigley Field—and in the wrong key 
• The Chicago years: mentorship, management, and cultural education 
• The Missoula barstool literary scene
• Jay Rummel: brilliance, anger, and artistic obsession 
• Mood Iguana, Tapas Records, and the sociology of collaborative music-making
• Religion, separation, and community fracture 
• America’s unresolved racial history and its cultural consequences 
• Teaching and mentoring Native youth in Arlee, Montana

About Andre Floyd

Andre Floyd is a Montana-based musician whose career spans decades of performance, recording, collaboration, and community-building. The son of an Air Force Tech Sergeant, Andre’s early life moved from Alabama to Kansas, Maine, Panama (where he kept an ocelot as a pet and dated Tata Vega), and eventually Montana.

He has performed across the country and around the globe, with some of world’s most storied artists. His band Mood Iguana was a staple of the regional scene before he dissolved it rather than allow it to become less than his original vision.

Today, his work increasingly centers on mentoring Native youth in Arlee, Montana—offering tools for self-definition and nontraditional success.

Links

Facebook

Spotify

Music Featured

“Your Garden” by Andre Floyd

“Found True Love” by Andre Floyd

Used with permission.

About the Show

The Sum of All Wisdom: Conversations on Music, Makers, and Meaning is a long-form podcast exploring the lived experience of working musicians and music-adjacent creatives whose work shapes communities in visible and invisible ways.

Written and hosted by Dr. Scott Catey, produced by Ravenna Studios.

Union Square Soirée: Catharsis and the Human Experience of Listening 

with Dr. Ramilya Saubanova and Juan Gonzalez, founders

Episode Description

When world-class musicians meet audience and community in the intimate setting of an historic Baltimore townhome, exceptional things happen. 

In this episode of The Sum of All Wisdom, host Scott Catey speaks with Ramilya Saubanova and Juan Gonzalez, founders of Union Square Soirée, a Baltimore-based salon concert series reviving the historic tradition of intimate house concerts.

Hosted in a beautifully restored 1872 Baltimore rowhouse, Union Square Soirée brings together classical musicians, jazz artists, and emerging performers for concerts where audiences sit just feet from the performers—close enough to see the physical artistry behind the music.

Scott and his guests explore:

·       the revival of the salon concert tradition

·       how intimacy changes the experience of live music

·       the importance of supporting young musicians

·       how salon concerts create community and cultural conversation

·       why audiences are rediscovering small-scale live music in a digital age

·       art for audiences versus art for art’s sake 

·       music, artists, food, wine, and… coffee!

The conversation also touches on Baltimore’s musical culture, the role of conservatories like Peabody Institute, and the power of music performed in human spaces rather than on distant stages.

Juan also reveals a little known secret about Vivaldi’s compositional technique and his musical innovations. 

If you love classical music, live performance, music history, intimate concert experiences, and how each of these can help contribute to the revitalization of a great American city, this episode offers a fascinating look at how a centuries-old tradition is finding new life today.

Names, Locations, and Organizations, Mentioned in this Episode

People

·       Daria Vasileva, https://dariapianist.com/

o   NB: Daraa will be a guest on the podcast in a few weeks!

·       Jackson “Jackie” Wu, https://www.unionsquaresoiree.com/jackie-wu

·       Tristan Latchford, UK Composer (https://www.tristanlatchford.com/about.php) 

·       Daniel Crozier, Composer (Rollins College, Florida, nephew of Fred Rogers) https://www.danielcrozier.com/bio/ 

·       Barbara Mikulski (https://www.senate.gov/senators/FeaturedBios/Featured_Bio_Mikulski.htm) 

·       Sally Baby’s Silver Dollars (https://www.sallybabyssilverdollars.com/)

·       Jonathan DePeri (https://www.gcinschool.com/artist/jonathan-deperi) 

Places

·       Union Square neighborhood, https://livebaltimore.com/neighborhoods/union-square/

·       Fells Point (Neighborhood in Baltimore, https://baltimore.org/neighborhoods/fells-point/) 

Organizations

·       Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University, https://peabody.jhu.edu/ 

·       Creative Alliance in Baltimore (https://creativealliance.org/) 

About the Guests

This episode features Ramilya Saubanova and Juan Gonzalez, the founders of the Union Square Soirée salon concert series in Baltimore, Maryland. Union Square Soirée is a unique initiative that brings together emerging and established artists to create intimate, memorable musical experiences that connect talent with the community. 

Guest Information

Dr. Ramilya Saubanova is the founder and president of the Union Square Soirée, as well as a concert pianist with over 23 years of experience performing in prestigious venues across Russia, Europe, and the U.S. She holds Specialist, Master’s and Doctor of Musical Arts degrees from Kazan State Conservatory and the Peabody Conservatory at Johns Hopkins University. In addition to her work with the Soirée, she founded the Tatar Music Concert Series in the U.S., blending music, history, and art to offer one-of-a-kind cultural experiences. Ramilya is also a passionate educator and mentor to young musicians. Her debut solo CD will be released in 2026, featuring works by Brahms, Medtner, Latchford, and Crozier.

Juan Gonzalez is founder and vice-president of the Union Square Soirée, where he combines his love for classical music and history with his passion for community engagement. His goal is to foster an appreciation of classical music while connecting local musicians with a wider audience, creating a platform where both emerging and established artists can shine. Juan brings a rich background to the initiative, with over 20 years of experience as educator, advocate, and patron of the arts. 

Websites & other links

Union Square Soiree

·       https://www.unionsquaresoiree.com/ 

·       https://www.instagram.com/unionsquaresoiree/ 

Ramilya Saubanova

·       https://ramilyasaubanova.com/ 

·       https://www.youtube.com/c/RamilyaSaubanova 

·       https://www.instagram.com/ramilya_saubanova/ 

Music featured in this episode:

Ballade No. 4 by Frédéric Chopin
Used with permission.
Artist-preferred link

Étude Tableaux in E flat minor, Op.39, No.5: Appassionato by Sergei Rachmaninoff
Used with permission.

About the Show & Production Notes

Written, produced, and hosted by Dr. Scott Catey, The Sum of All Wisdom: Conversations on Music, Makers, and Meaning is a long-form, reflect...

From her early training in Russia’s rigorous conservatory system to her artistic awakening in Switzerland, Daria reflects on how different cultural approaches to music shaped her voice as an artist. At the center of the discussion is the music of Alexander Scriabin—its mysticism, emotional intensity, and transformative potential for both performer and audience.

They explore what it means to play from memory, why risk is essential to live performance, how to build a concert program as a narrative journey, and how classical musicians can reach new audiences in a digital age.

Daria also shares insights from her Feminine Power Project, her work championing overlooked composers, and her upcoming debut album Elements.

Some highlights from the conversation:

• Music as Transformation
  A formative moment hearing Tchaikovsky shifted Daria from passive talent to intentional artistry 
• Freedom vs. Discipline
  How do technical precision, individuality, expression, and exploration meet in classical training and performance?
• Scriabin’s Philosophy of Sound
  Music as “ecstatic freedom,” the will of power, and spiritual blossoming 
• Memory vs. Safety in Performance
  Playing from memory creates risk and deepens immersion and intensity 
• Concert Programming as Storytelling
  Programs should follow emotional logic, not chronology or genre sequence; how can the program help to guide an audience through the performer’s vision?
• Reaching New Audiences
  Social media as a powerful tool to bring younger listeners into classical music 
• Expanding the Canon
  The Feminine Power Project highlights overlooked women composers and forgotten voices 
• Art in Uncertain Times
  The role of the artist as a source of light, hope, joy 

Throughout the conversation, Daria situates her artistry within a lineage of composers and performers who push the boundaries of musical language and expression. Central, of course, is Alexander Scriabin, whose evolution from late-Romantic lyricism into mysticism and near-atonality becomes a kind of philosophical anchor for her work. We also hear echoes of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, whose symphonic power first awakened her artistic seriousness as a teenager, and Robert Schumann, whose deeply subjective musical voice raises questions about individuality and interpretation. Daria also references lesser-known but compelling figures like Varvara Gaigerova, whose rediscovery reflects her commitment to expanding the canon, as well as pianistic traditions shaped by figures like Anton Rubinstein. Even iconic interpreters such as Vladimir Ashkenazy appear in the background, reminding us that performance itself is a living, evolving conversation across generations, and how new interpretations of familiar music can reawaken a fire within us. 

Several unexpected moments stand out in the conversation, from Daria’s candid relationship with inspiration to finding transformation in performance. Equally striking is her view that technical imperfection may sometimes be worth the trade if it allows for deeper expressive truth. Perhaps most surprising of all is her framing of classical performance as an act of risk: by choosing to play from memory, she deliberately removes safety nets in order to heighten presence, vulnerability, and connection with the audience.

Names, Locations, and Organizations, Mentioned in this Episode

Composers, Pianists, Performers

·       Alexander Scriabin

·       Varvara Gaigerova

·       Anton Rubenstein

·       Vladimir Ashkenazy 

Organizations

·       Kazan State Conservatory https://kazanconservatoire.ru/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=21&Itemid=286 

·       Union Square Soiree, Baltimore, Maryland: https://www.unionsquaresoiree.com/ 

About the Guest
Daria Vasileva is an internationally performing concert pianist known for her expressive depth, intellectual rigor, and commitment to musical storytelling. Originally from Kazan, Russia, she trained in the Russian conservatory tradition before continuing her studies in Switzerland. Her work centers on the music of Alexander Scriabin and includes the Feminine Power Project, an initiative dedicated to amplifying women composers. 

Websites & other links

·       https://dariapianist.com/ 

·       https://www.youtube.com/@pianistdariavasileva 

·       https://www.instagram.com/daria.pianist/ 

Music featured in this episode:

Sonata Op. 30 No. 4 by Alexander Scriabin
Performed by Daria Vasileva
Used with permission.

Skizzen by Varvara Gaigerova 

Performed by Daria Vasileva
Used with permission.

About the Show & Production Notes

Written, produced, and hosted by Dr. Scott Catey, The Sum of All Wisdom: Conversations on Music, Makers, and Meaning is a long-form, reflective podcast centered on working musicians and adjacent professionals whose craft creates meaning, community, and cultural impact. The show prioritizes listening, craft, and the lived experience of making, sharing, and loving all things music.

If this conversation resonated, consider sharing it—or carrying something from it into your own listening and creative life. And most of all, thank you for listening!

Host Links

Website
The Sum of All Wisdom Newsletter on Substack
LinkedIn
Facebook
Instagram 

Episode Summary
What does it mean to devote your life to music as a passionate avocation?

In this episode, Scott sits down with drummer and instructor Eric Wolferman of the Celtic Dragon Pipe Band to explore the rich, communal, and deeply human world of pipe bands. From the thunder of snare drums to the visual poetry of tenor flourishes, Eric opens a window into a musical tradition that is at once ancient, evolving, and profoundly alive.

What emerges is not just a conversation about music—but about community, discipline, teaching, and the quiet power of tradition and shared cultural practice.

What You’ll Hear

• What a pipe band really is
  Beyond the stereotype: four musical “voices” working as one ensemble—pipes, snare, tenor, and bass 
• The role of the drummer
  How rhythm becomes both sound and spectacle, especially through tenor drumming and choreographed flourishes 
• A musician’s unlikely path
  From radio broadcaster → roadie → tenor drummer, and finding the right instrument by accident, and with a little nudge from a friend 
• Music as marriage & partnership
  Playing in a band alongside his wife—who also leads the drum corps 
• Competition at the highest level
  The long road to the World Pipe Band Championships in Glasgow—years of travel, practice, and commitment 
• What judges actually listen for
  Precision, unity, ensemble cohesion—and why mistakes in rhythm matter more than visual flair 
• Teaching the next generation
  How Eric trains young drummers—from first stick control to creative expression 
• The philosophy of mastery
  Why everything begins with simple fundamentals—and how creativity grows from control 
• A global musical community
  Pipe bands as a tight-knit, international network of shared tradition 
• The future of tradition
  Why pipe band music persists—and what it takes to bring new generations into it 

Key Themes

1. Music as Community
Pipe bands aren’t just ensembles—they’re families. Built over decades, sustained by volunteerism, and rooted in shared identity.

2. Discipline → Freedom
Mastery of basics (timing, grip, control) unlocks creativity—especially in expressive forms like tenor drumming.

3. Tradition as Living Practice
These are centuries-old forms—but they evolve through teaching, performance, and community participation.

4. Access to Excellence
At the highest levels, music becomes radically human—where even the “best in the world” are approachable, collaborative, and generous.

Memorable Moments

• Eric describing pipe bands as “a community of people who love the music and culture”
• The reality of competing: 9-hour drives to play 5 minutes of music 
• Practicing for years to earn a place at the Worlds 
• The image of drummers waiting patiently while pipers spend long stretches tuning 
• A kid from Montana standing feet away from the world’s best musicians—and realizing access is possible 

Why This Episode Matters

This conversation embodies a core idea here at The Sum of All Wisdom: Music is not just expression—it is a system of knowledge and a means of transmitting that knowledge.

Pipe band culture shows how:

• Knowledge is transmitted across generations 
• Discipline shapes identity 
• Community sustains art 
• And tradition becomes a living archive of human meaning

About the Guest
Eric Wolferman is tenor drummer and drum instructor with the Celtic Dragon Pipe Band, based in Missoula, Montana. 

Websites & other links

Celtic Dragon Pipe Band

·       https://www.celticdragonpipeband.com/index.html

Music featured in this episode:

Scotland the Brave

Traditional, performed by Celtic Dragon Pipe Band

Used with permission.

Mingulay Boat Song

Performed by Gaelic Storm with Celtic Dragon Pipe Band

Used with permission.

About the Show & Production Notes

Written, produced, and hosted by Dr. Scott Catey, The Sum of All Wisdom: Conversations on Music, Makers, and Meaning is a long-form, reflective podcast centered on working musicians and adjacent professionals whose craft creates meaning, community, and cultural impact. The show prioritizes listening, craft, and the lived experience of making, sharing, and loving all things music.

If this conversation resonated, consider sharing it—or carrying something from it into your own listening and creative life. And most of all, thank you for listening!

Host Links

Website

The Sum of All Wisdom Newsletter on Substack

LinkedIn

Facebook

Instagram 

What does it mean to make music—and to keep making it—over a lifetime?

In this episode, Scott sits down with musician Andrew Hunt for a wide-ranging conversation on songwriting, performance, and the lived realities of creative life. From the discipline of editing to the risks of artistic honesty, they explore how musicians navigate the tension between expression and expectation.

Along the way, they dive into:

• The difference between commercial success and artistic integrity 
• Why some songs last—and others disappear within days 
• The hidden labor behind “simple” music 
• The emotional realities behind story songs, including violence, jealousy, and longing 
• The role of live performance in creating connection and meaning 

At its core, this is a conversation about music as a form of knowledge—and about what artists learn, feel, and risk in the act of creating.

In This Conversation

Topics explored include:

·      Music as Knowledge
Creative practice as a way of understanding emotion, identity, and the world. 

·      Art vs. Commerce
Navigating authenticity in a system driven by audience and algorithm. 

·      Editing as Craft (and Survival)
Knowing what to keep, what to discard, and when to stop. 

·      The Emotional Core of Songwriting
Exploring difficult themes—jealousy, violence, longing—through narrative. 

·      Time, Aging, and Creative Drive
The evolving risks and rewards of making art over a lifetime.Keep bullets short and conceptual.

Notable Moments

• Infinite variation within constraint 
• The “three-day rule” for whether a song survives 
• The Bob Qualters analogy: iteration, obsession, and knowing when to stop 
• The concept of “stewing” as the emotional center of certain songs 
• The paradox of simplicity in recording: minimal sound, maximal infrastructure 
• “I still want to be Johnny Cash” — creative ambition beyond age

About the Guest

Andrew Hunt is an accomplished musician, voice actor, and member of the Recording Academy. His life is an altered country western song... Looking for Peace in all the right places. 

Links:

• Website: https://cowboyandy.com/
• Spotify:
  • Flask 
  • Cowboy Andy & the Salamanders
• Facebook
  • Flask
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/flaskisaband/

Music featured in this episode:

“Shady Grove” (Rough Mix) by Flask
Used with permission.

“Christians” by Flask
Used with permission.

Production Notes

Host, producer, editor: Scott Catey

Publisher: Ravenna Studios
Distributed by Transistor
Recording & Editing: Riverside.com, Audacity.org

About the Show

The Sum of All Wisdom: Conversations on Music, Makers, and Meaning is a long-form, reflective podcast centered on working musicians and music-adjacent professionals whose work creates meaning, community, and cultural impact. The show prioritizes listening, craft, and lived experience over promotion.

If this conversation resonated, consider sharing it—or carrying something from it into your own listening and creative life. If the conversation provoked you, please let us know that, too.

What does it mean to make music—and to keep making it—over a lifetime?

In this episode, part 2 of Scott’s conversation with musician Andrew Hunt on songwriting, performance, and the lived realities of creative life. From the discipline of editing to the risks of artistic honesty, they explore how musicians navigate the tension between expression and expectation.

Along the way, they dive into:

• The difference between commercial success and artistic integrity 
• Why some songs last—and others disappear within days 
• The hidden labor behind “simple” music 
• The emotional realities behind story songs, including violence, jealousy, and longing 
• The role of live performance in creating connection and meaning 

At its core, this is a conversation about music as a form of knowledge—and about what artists learn, feel, and risk in the act of creating.

In This Conversation

Topics explored include:

·      Music as Knowledge
Creative practice as a way of understanding emotion, identity, and the world. 

·      Art vs. Commerce
Navigating authenticity in a system driven by audience and algorithm. 

·      Editing as Craft (and Survival)
Knowing what to keep, what to discard, and when to stop. 

·      The Emotional Core of Songwriting
Exploring difficult themes—jealousy, violence, longing—through narrative. 

·      Time, Aging, and Creative Drive
The evolving risks and rewards of making art over a lifetime.

Notable Moments

• Infinite variation within constraint 
• The “three-day rule” for whether a song survives 
• The Bob Qualters analogy: iteration, obsession, and knowing when to stop 
• The concept of “stewing” as the emotional center of certain songs 
• The paradox of simplicity in recording: minimal sound, maximal infrastructure 
• “I still want to be Johnny Cash” — creative ambition beyond age

About the Guest

Andrew Hunt is an accomplished musician, voice actor, and member of the Recording Academy. His life is an altered country western song... Looking for Peace in all the right places. 

Links:

• Website: https://cowboyandy.com/ 
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@cowboyandyandthesalamander3925
• Spotify:
  • Flask 
  • Cowboy Andy & the Salamanders
• Facebook
  • Flask 
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/flaskisaband/ 

Music featured in this episode:

“Pirate Cowboy,” written by Andrew Hunt, performed by Flask
Used with permission.

“Brady Bill,” written by Andrew Hunt, demo performed by Andrew Hunt
Used with permission.

“Tappin' at the Glass,” written by Andrew Hunt, performed by Flask
Used with permission.

Production Notes

Host, producer, editor: Scott Catey

Publisher: Ravenna Studios
Distributed by Transistor
Recording & Editing: Riverside.com, Audacity.org

About the Show

The Sum of All Wisdom: Conversations on Music, Makers, and Meaning is a long-form, reflective podcast centered on working musicians and music-adjacent professionals whose work creates meaning, community, and cultural impact. The show prioritizes listening, craft, and lived experience over promotion.

If this conversation resonated, consider sharing it—or carrying something from it into your own listening and creative life. If the conversation provoked you, please let us know that, too. Don’t forget to like, comment, subscribe. 

In this episode of The Sum of All Wisdom, Scott reconnects with Dutch experimental composer and sound artist Matthijs Kouw for a deep conversation about sound, space, philosophy, and the spiritual possibilities of composing, experiencing, and listening to music. 

Together, they explore what “experimental music” really means—not as a genre, but as a position: an openness to uncertainty, emergence, and the unknown. Matthijs reflects on the role of indeterminacy in composition, the architecture of sound, and the idea that music can create spaces for listeners to inhabit rather than narratives to consume. 

The conversation ranges widely across:

• Experimental music as process and experiment 
• Drone music, atmosphere, and “dwelling” in sound 
• The influence of thinkers like Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Gilbert Simondon 
• Time, emergence, and metastability in musical composition 
• Negative theology and the limits of language 
• Field recordings, contact microphones, and environmental sound 
• Why cassettes still matter 
• The politics of music distribution and alternatives to Spotify 
• Music as communion, meditation, and philosophical inquiry 

A central thread throughout the discussion is the idea that music can carry us beyond language—toward experiences that resist direct explanation yet remain deeply human and emotionally real. 

Matthijs also discusses several of his recent works, including:

• Transversal 
• Meta-Stabilities 
• Obscurum per Obscurius 
• The collaborative project Irradiance with Gagi Petrovic 

Memorable Moments

“Maybe the orchestra is not a set of instruments, but the entire world.” 

“It’s more like creating spaces for people to dwell in.” 

“Maybe the soundscape is populated by beautiful birdsong and leaf blowers simultaneously.”

About Matthijs Kouw

Matthijs Kouw is an experimental musician based in The Netherlands exploring the relationship between movement and stasis. Using analog synthesis, software, field recordings, and recordings of various objects, Matthijs combines long-form drone with elements from acousmatic music, noise, and microsound.

Links:

• Website: https://clinamen.nl/about/
• Bandcamp: https://clinamen.bandcamp.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mvkouw/

Explore Related Music and Sound Compositions 

Links to musicians, labels, and record stores mentioned in the episode:

·      Alan Lamb: https://room40.bandcamp.com/ 

·      Gagi Petrovic: https://gagipetrovic.com/ 

·      Groupe de Recherche Musical (GRM): https://inagrm.com/fr 

·      Important Drone Records: https://importantdronerecords.bandcamp.com/music 

·      Important Records: https://importantrecords.com/ 

·      Marc Namblard: https://marcnamblard.bandcamp.com/ 

·      Masami Akita/Merzbow: https://www.instagram.com/merzbowofficial/ 

·      Moving Furniture Records: https://movingfurniturerecords.com/ 

·      Phil Maguire: https://philmaguire.bandcamp.com/ 

·      Radboud Mens: https://radboudmens.bandcamp.com/ 

·      Sietse van Erve: https://orphax.com/about/ 

·      Staalplaat: https://staalplaat.bandcamp.com/ 

·      Tashiya Tsunoda: https://toshiyatsunoda.bandcamp.com/ 

·      Waaghals Records Store: https://www.waaghals.com/ 

Featured Music 

This episode includes excerpts from:

• “Irradiance” 
• “Metastability 3,” from Meta-Stabilities
• “Asymptotic,” from Transversal

All music by Matthijs Kouw and used with permission.

About the Show

The Sum of All Wisdom: Conversations on Musicians, Makers, and Meaning is a long-form, reflective podcast centered on working musicians and music-adjacent professionals whose work creates meaning, community, and cultural impact. The show prioritizes listening, craft, and lived experience over promotion.

Written, produced, and hosted by Scott Catey.

If this conversation resonated, consider sharing it—or carrying something from it into your own listening and creative life.

Drawing inspiration from artists like Harry Partch, Butch Norton, John Bergamo, Pink Floyd, David Bowie, and countless musical traditions from around the world, Jeff has built a creative practice centered on curiosity, experimentation, and deep listening. His latest album, Natural Habitat, transforms birdsong, footsteps, washing machines, field recordings, hand percussion, and invented instruments into immersive sonic landscapes that blur the line between music and environment.

Together, Scott and Jeff explore:

• How mentorship has shaped Jeff’s artistic journey
• The influence of Harry Partch and invented instruments
• Why imperfection often creates the most memorable art
• The role of field recordings and environmental sound in composition
• Creativity, chance, and “happy accidents”
• David Bowie’s cut-up techniques and rhythmic poetry
• Touring internationally with Celtic folk-rock band The Town Pants
• The future of drumming in an age of social media and AI
• Why musicians must remain lifelong students

Along the way, Jeff demonstrates several of his handmade percussion inventions, discusses the philosophy behind his “contraption kit,” and shares why he believes the most important lesson for any artist is simple:

“Listen and serve the music.”

This is a conversation about sound, experimentation, humility, and discovering wisdom in places most of us overlook.

About Jeff Tripoli

Jeff Tripoli is a drummer, percussionist, educator, composer, and recording artist based in Syracuse, New York. A veteran of international touring with The Town Pants, Jeff’s work spans rock, Celtic music, world percussion, experimental composition, and handcrafted instrument design. His recent solo releases, Perspectives and Natural Habitat, explore the intersection of percussion, found sound, improvisation, and sonic storytelling.

Connect with Jeff

·      Website: https://jefftripolidrums.com/home 

·      YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@jefftripolidrums 

·      Bandcamp: https://jefftripoli.bandcamp.com/ 

·      Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/us/artist/jeff-tripoli/1565681196 

·      Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jefftripolidrums 

·      Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jefftripolidrums/ 

Explore Related Music and Sounds 

Links to musicians, bands, books, and more mentioned in the episode:

·      Billy Martin https://www.billymartin.net/ 

·      Butch Norton https://butchdrums.com/ 

·      Charles Corey https://www.charlescorey.com/ 

·      Earl Slick https://earlslick.net/ 

·      Glenn Kotche  https://www.glennkotche.com/ 

·      Harry Partch https://www.harrypartch.com/ 

·      Jeff Moleski | Mole Trax Studios https://rockwellrecordingandsoundstage.com/ 

·      Jim Donovan https://www.youtube.com/jmdbird 

·      John Bergamo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bergamo 

·      Kalani Das https://kalanimusic.com/ 

·      Medeski, Martin, and Wood https://www.medeskimartinandwood.com/ 

·      Ray McNamara https://raymcnamara.com/ 

·      Rick Rubin | The Creative Act (Penguin) https://sites.prh.com/thecreativeact 

·      Rusted Root https://www.rustedroot.com/ 

·      Ted Gioia | The Honest Brokerhttps://www.honest-broker.com/ 

Featured Music 

“Something I Can’t Explain” from the album Natural Habitat by Jeff Tripoli
Used with permission.

“Afro Cant” from the album Natural Habitat by Jeff Tripoli
Used with permission.

“A Stone From Your Heart” from the album Natural Habitat by Jeff Tripoli
Used with permission.

All music is used with permission. All rights remain with the respective rights holders.

About the Show

The Sum of All Wisdom: Conversations on Musicians, Makers, and Meaning is a long-form, reflective podcast centered on musicians and music-adjacent professionals whose work creates meaning, community, and cultural impact. The show prioritizes explorations of listening, craft, and lived experience, and discovery of new music. 

Written, produced, and hosted by Scott Catey.

If this conversation resonated, please consider liking, commenting, following, subscribing, and sharing it—or carrying something from it into your own listening and creative life. 

Thanks for turning us on!

In this first installment of a two-part conversation, Dr. Scott Catey welcomes vocalist, composer, and producer Karo Glazer alongside immersive audio producer Michał Rosa-Rosicki of RED Producers.

Their story begins decades ago in a recording studio, where a young singer-songwriter and an aspiring sound engineer first crossed paths. Years later, after separate journeys through jazz, composition, production, architecture, and international performance, they reunited to create RED Producers—a creative partnership built on the belief that music is fundamentally human and inherently collaborative.

The conversation traces the origins of that partnership, including the creation of “Hand in Hand,” an international peace project launched in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. From there, Karo and Michał explore immersive audio, not merely as a technology, but as a new language for musical expression—one that treats space, movement, and presence as compositional tools.

Along the way, they challenge assumptions about streaming culture, attention, artistic identity, and the future of listening itself.

At the heart of the discussion is a deceptively simple invitation:

Close your eyes and listen.

In This Episode
“You can put twenty microphones around me. It’s still one voice. My voice.” - Karo Glazer

Listeners can expect a deep dive into Karo’s current artistic universe — including the upcoming Abbey Road Concert live video session recorded at the legendary Abbey Road Studios Studio 2. We’ll also talk about “Into The Voice” — an immersive voice experience and live 360 concept exploring the human voice as instrument, space and emotional architecture through immersive audio and performance. And of course, listeners will get an exclusive look into music from the upcoming album #LadyDynamite and “Black Sun” single.

• The origins of RED Producers
• The Artists for Peace project and the creation of “Hand in Hand”
• Why music is fundamentally collaborative
• Architecture, composition, and immersive sound
• How Dolby Atmos changes the creative process
• Listening as participation rather than consumption
• The limits of algorithmic music culture
• Why surprise still matters in art
• Abbey Road Studios and the next chapter of their work
• Building an international immersive-audio community
• Music, mindfulness, and presence
• Human creativity in the age of AI

Memorable Moments
• “I didn't choose music. I was chosen by music.”
• “Music is human.”
• “Close your eyes and listen.”
• “I don’t care who’s singing. I care about music.”

About the Guests
Karo Glazer is a vocalist, composer, producer, and immersive-audio innovator whose work spans jazz, contemporary composition, visual storytelling, and emerging audio technologies. Her projects have brought together artists from across Europe and the United States while exploring new possibilities for musical experience.

Michal Rosa-Rosicki is a producer, sound engineer, and immersive-audio specialist whose work focuses on the intersection of technology, composition, and live performance. Together they co-founded RED Producers, a creative production company dedicated to building new forms of musical engagement.

Karo Glazer & Michal Rosicki are co-founders of RED Producers, an international production hub. Independent - with infrastructure already in place.

Expanded Artist Bio
Karo Glazer is a powerhouse voice and immersive vocal artist, composing sonic structure through sound, space and presence.

Renowned for her four-octave voice and fearless artistic vision, Karo Glazer creates music that feels both explosive and deeply refined: rebellious, sensual and emotionally charged. Moving fluidly between alternative, jazz, soul and psychedelia, she shapes her own distinctive concept: Immersive Voice. Her transatlantic sound draws from both European and American musical traditions, fusing intricate orchestration, hypnotic rhythm, layered vocal expression and cinematic scope. What emerges is an intense sonic journey through passion, defiance, vulnerability and strength.

On May 24, 2025, she made history as the first Polish artist to perform and record a solo concert at Abbey Road Studio 2. She returned to Abbey Road to record an Immersive Voice Live Session; this time solo, surrounded by microphones, pushing further her concept of voice as space, instrument and environment.

Her releases have entered the U.S. market, including a debut on the SubModern Charts and a limited vinyl edition for Record Store Day US.

With a catalogue of over 300 original compositions, Glazer’s work reaches far beyond a single release cycle. Her earlier career was rooted in the European market, with releases across both independent and major labels, leading to extensive international touring. Working across jazz, contemporary and cross-genre projects, she built a foundation of scale, precision and long-form musical thinking—developing a catalogue ready for sync, film and live expansion. Today, she returns as an independent artist. Not at the beginning, but with an established body of work and full creative control. Her broader creative output includes large-scale works such as “Illumination” - an immersive ballet directed by Bolshoi dancer Alexey Torgunakov—and the score for the theatre play “Wisława”, inspired by Nobel Prize–winning poet Wisława Szymborska.

Her work has been recognized by Tom Waits and members of Coldplay at the International Songwriting Competition. She has collaborated with artists including Mike Stern, Klaus Doldinger, Lars Danielsson and John Taylor and worked with Grammy-winning producers such as Flemming Rasmussen and Martin Walters.

“She is not a girl. She is dynamite!” - Mike Stern

Connect with Karo Glazer & RED Producers
https://www.karoglazer.com/about
https://www.youtube.com/@KaroGlazerMusic
https://www.instagram.com/karoglazer
https://karoglazer.bandcamp.com/album/black-sun

Coming Next Week
Part 2 of this conversation explores Abbey Road Studios, women in music production, international collaboration, navigating the modern music industry, and the future of artistic creation in an AI-driven world.

Resources
Dolby Atmos Official Site - https://professional.dolby.com/music/

Today we explore what happens when you accept that invitation, when we learn to really listen?

What happens when we stop treating music as background noise and begin experiencing it as something capable of changing the way we see—and hear—the world?

In the second half of this conversation, Dr. Scott Catey welcomes back vocalist, composer, and producer Karo Glazer and immersive audio producer Michal Rosa-Rosicki of RED Producers to explore music as a source of wonder, creativity, and human connection.

The conversation begins with Karo’s remarkable journey to Abbey Road Studios, where performing in the legendary Studio Two became not simply a career milestone but a deeply personal encounter with musical history. From there, the discussion ranges across artistic discipline, international collaboration, immersive composition, women in music production, artificial intelligence, and the importance of remaining curious in an age increasingly shaped by algorithms.

Throughout the episode, Karo and Michal return to a simple but profound invitation: close your eyes and listen.

They argue that music is more than entertainment or content. It is a language that transcends borders, a practice of collaboration, and an opportunity to recover the sense of wonder that modern life so often obscures.

The conversation culminates in an unexpected moment as Karo offers an impromptu demonstration of her creative process, building music from breath, voice, and imagination alone—a beautiful reminder that some aspects of music are best understood not through explanation, but through experience. 

Highlights

• Karo’s life-changing performance at Abbey Road Studios

• Why great art still demands patience, discipline, and practice

• Supporting the next generation of musicians through “Road to Abbey”

• International collaboration as a creative philosophy

• The promise—and limitations—of AI in music

• Why immersive audio is ultimately about human presence

• Improvisation, jazz, and the art of listening

• Silence, breath, and space as musical composition

• Women in music production and the Music Is Her Name initiative

• The role of curiosity in sustaining creativity

• A spontaneous live vocal demonstration from Karo

Memorable Moments

• “Music is human.”

• “Practice, practice, practice.”

• “Don’t follow the pattern. Just try to find your way of thinking.”

• “If people tell you it’s wrong... then you should probably go there.”

• “Close your eyes and listen.”

• “Practice, practice, practice.”

• “Never limit yourself. You are more than you think.”

• “Stay creative. Don’t follow any patterns.”

About the Guests

Karo Glazer is a vocalist, composer, producer, and immersive-audio innovator whose work spans jazz, contemporary composition, visual storytelling, and emerging audio technologies. Her performances and productions explore music as a fully immersive artistic experience, combining architecture, movement, and sound.

Michal Rosa-Rosicki is a producer, sound engineer, and immersive-audio specialist whose work focuses on the intersection of composition, technology, and live performance. 

Together they co-founded RED Producers, an international creative production company dedicated to expanding the possibilities of musical experience.

Expanded Artist Bio

Karo Glazer is a powerhouse voice and immersive vocal artist, composing sonic structure through sound, space and presence.

Renowned for her four-octave voice and fearless artistic vision, Karo Glazer creates music that feels both explosive and deeply refined: rebellious, sensual and emotionally charged. Moving fluidly between alternative, jazz, soul and psychedelia, she shapes her own distinctive concept: Immersive Voice. Her transatlantic sound draws from both European and American musical traditions, fusing intricate orchestration, hypnotic rhythm, layered vocal expression and cinematic scope.​ What emerges is an intense sonic journey through passion, defiance, vulnerability and strength. 

On May 24, 2025, she made history as the first Polish artist to perform and record a solo concert at Abbey Road Studio 2. She returned to Abbey Road to record an Immersive Voice Live Session; this time solo, surrounded by microphones, pushing further her concept of voice as space, instrument and environment.

Her releases have entered the U.S. market, including a debut on the SubModern Charts and a limited vinyl edition for Record Store Day US. 

With a catalogue of over 300 original compositions, Glazer’s work reaches far beyond a single release cycle. Her earlier career was rooted in the European market, with releases across both independent and major labels, leading to extensive international touring. Working across jazz, contemporary and cross-genre projects, she built a foundation of scale, precision and long-form musical thinking—developing a catalogue ready for sync, film and live expansion. Today, she returns as an independent artist. Not at the beginning, but with an established body of work and full creative control. Her broader creative output includes large-scale works such as “Illumination” - an immersive ballet directed by Bolshoi dancer Alexey Torgunakov—and the score for the theatre play “Wisława”, inspired by Nobel Prize–winning poet Wisława Szymborska.

Her work has been recognized by Tom Waits and members of Coldplay at the International Songwriting Competition. She has collaborated with artists including Mike Stern, Klaus Doldinger, Lars Danielsson and John Taylor and worked with Grammy-winning producers such as Flemming Rasmussen and Martin Walters.

“She is not a girl. She is dynamite!” - Mike Stern

Connect with Karo Glazer & RED Producers

https://www.karoglazer.com/about

https://www.youtube.com/@KaroGlazerMusic

https://www.instagram.com/karoglazer

https://karoglazer.bandcamp.com/album/black-sun 

Featured Music

• “Black Sun,” by Karo Glazer

• Live vocal improvisation and compositional demonstration by Karo Glazer

• “Looking for a Word,” by Karo Glazer

All music used with permission. 

Resources

Dolby Atmos Official Site - https://professional.dolby.com/music/

Coming Next Week

A warm and illuminating conversation with Tom Catmull, an acclaimed Americana songwriter from Missoula, Montana, whose music blends infectious melodies, vivid storytelling, and a deep love of language. Across seven albums and decades of touring, he’s shared stages with artists including Robert Earl Keen, Junior Brown, and Asleep at the Wheel—always using the songs to lead listeners back to the words.

The Sum of All Wisdom explores music as one of...

What happens to art when attention becomes scarce?

In this episode of The Sum of All Wisdom, Dr. Scott Catey sits down with East Germany-born, Paris-based composer, songwriter, and visual artist Matthias Sturm for a wide-ranging conversation about music, memory, politics, and the future of creative work.

Having grown up in Dresden, in East Germany, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Matthias reflects on life under surveillance, discovering Western music behind the Iron Curtain, and how those experiences continue to shape his songwriting decades later. Along the way, he shares stories of underground cassette culture, punk, jazz, Prince, Depeche Mode, and the surprising ways music crossed political borders.

The conversation then turns toward larger questions. What happens when streaming platforms transform artists into “content creators”? Can meaningful music—or any art—survive an attention economy built on distraction? And how should artists respond to artificial intelligence, algorithms, and a culture increasingly driven by speed rather than reflection?

Throughout, Matthias argues for something increasingly rare: art that asks us not simply to hear, but to listen.

This is a conversation about history, creativity, and why slowing down may be one of the most radical things music can still ask of us.

Highlights

• Growing up in East Germany before the Berlin Wall fell
• Living under surveillance and discovering artistic community
• Punk, cassette culture, and youth music behind the Iron Curtain
• Why Prince, Soft Cell, and Depeche Mode mattered in Dresden
• Building concept albums as immersive worlds
• The influence of Bach, literature, and “dark songwriting”
• Touring internationally while balancing family life
• AI, algorithms, and the shrinking attention span
• Streaming, independent artists, and the economics of music
• Why music should be more than content

Music Featured in this Episode:

• Peace on Earth
• All Beauty Must Die
• Puppet Robe Anthem

All music used with permission

Memorable Moments

“How do you create art and music for people who are no longer able to pay attention?”

“Imagine you’re born in a country which doesn’t exist anymore.”

“I’m not a content creator. I’m an artist.”

Connect with the Artist

Music is more than entertainment. It is one of humanity’s oldest ways of understanding the world. This episode invites us to slow down long enough to remember why. Follow these links to learn more about Matthias and his work. 

Links:

• Website: https://www.matthiassturmart.com/ 
• Chateau des Fougis, where Matthias is in residence: https://www.fougis.com
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MatthiasSturm 
• Bandcamp: https://matthiassturm.bandcamp.com/ 
• Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/matthiassturm/ 
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/matthias.maria.sturm

About the Show

The Sum of All Wisdom: Conversations on Music, Makers, and Meaning is a long-form, reflective podcast centered on working musicians and music-adjacent professionals whose work creates meaning, community, and cultural impact. The show prioritizes listening, craft, and lived experience over promotion.

The Sum of All Wisdom is written, produced, and hosted by Dr. Scott Catey. If this conversation resonated, consider sharing it—or carrying something from it into your own listening and creative life.

Across more than fifty years—from The Soft Boys through his remarkable solo career—Hitchcock has cultivated a body of work where surreal imagery, humor, memory, obsession, and startling emotional honesty coexist in songs that continue to reward close listening.

In this conversation, Scott Catey and guest co-host Andrew Hunt sit down with Hitchcock to discuss his acclaimed new memoir Stranded in the Future, his first memoir 1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left, both published by Akashic Books, and his forthcoming album The Confuser, on the Tony Ghost label. The conversation ranges from songwriting, memory, and technology, to creativity and the peculiar relationship between memoir and imagination.

Rather than treating songs as coded autobiography, Hitchcock describes how music grows from memory, mythmaking, and what he calls “hybrids”—real people transformed into constituents of his imaginative landscapes, from which his songs emerge. Along the way, the conversation explores boarding school, Bob Dylan, Syd Barrett, The Beatles, Nashville, mortality, artistic obsession, and the strange ways each of us becomes a custodian of disappearing worlds.

Whether you’re a longtime Hitchcock devotee or discovering his work for the first time, this episode offers a rare look inside one of popular music’s most singular creative minds.

In this episode

• Why Hitchcock says he “never left” 1967 
• Winchester College and discovering Dylan, The Beatles, Pink Floyd, and more 
• The difference between factual truth and emotional truth 
• Why “a song is about itself” 
• Mr. A, Mr. B., and Ms. C.: obsession, mythology, and creative life 
• Memoir as reconstruction rather than chronology 
• Writing books on an iPhone in the middle of the night 
• Why creativity is essential to mental health 
• Building The Confuser with Nashville musicians 
• The enduring influence of The Beatles 
• The relationship between songs, memory, and identity 
• Why Hitchcock keeps writing 

Books discussed

1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left

Published in 2024 by Akashic Books.

An evocative memoir of Hitchcock’s fourteenth year, when boarding school, Bob Dylan, The Beatles, and the cultural upheavals of the late 1960s permanently shaped his imagination. More than an autobiography, it is an exploration of the year that became Hitchcock’s enduring creative homeland.

Stranded in the Future

Published July 2026 by Akashic Books.

Picking up where 1967 leaves off, Stranded in the Future follows Hitchcock from 1968-1978, the years leading to The Soft Boys while exploring memory, artistic obsession, and the self-mythology that Hitchcock created around the figures who shaped his life. Rather than a conventional memoir, it reads as an imaginative reconstruction of consciousness itself.

Forthcoming Album

The Confuser

Hitchcock’s newest studio album finds him embracing one of the strongest ensemble recordings of his career. Recorded in Nashville with Eric Slick, Todd Bolden, Jeremy Fetzer, Pat Berkery, and a remarkable circle of collaborators, The Confuser combines the melodic adventurousness and lyrical imagination that have long defined Hitchcock’s work with a fresh, deeply collaborative musical chemistry.

During our conversation, Hitchcock repeatedly credits his wife, Emma Swift, as the catalyst behind this creative chapter. It was Swift who encouraged him to record in Nashville, introduced him to key collaborators, urged him to begin writing his memoirs, and continues to serve as producer, tour manager, label partner at Tiny Ghost Records, and what Hitchcock affectionately describes as the “psychic glue” holding the entire enterprise together. The result is an album that feels simultaneously rooted in Hitchcock’s long musical journey and energized by an entirely new creative community. 

Follow Robyn Hitchcock

• Official website: https://www.robynhitchcock.com/
• Bandcamp: https://robynhitchcockofficial.bandcamp.com/music
• Substack: https://robynhitchcock.substack.com/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/robynhitchcockofficial/

Akashic Books

• Website: https://www.akashicbooks.com/
• Stranded in the Future: https://www.akashicbooks.com/catalog/stranded-in-the-future/ 
• 1967: How I Got There & Why I Never Left: https://www.akashicbooks.com/catalog/1967-how-i-got-there-and-why-i-never-left/ 

About Akashic Books

Akashic Books is an independent Brooklyn-based publisher known for literary fiction, memoir, noir fiction, music writing, and culturally adventurous nonfiction. Since its founding in 1996, Akashic has built a reputation for publishing distinctive voices that often fall outside mainstream commercial categories—making it an especially fitting home for Hitchcock’s memoirs.

About the Show

The Sum of All Wisdom: Conversations on Music, Makers, and Meaning is a long-form, reflective podcast centered on working musicians and music-adjacent professionals whose work creates meaning, community, and cultural impact. The show prioritizes listening, craft, and lived experience over promotion.

The show is written, produced, and hosted by Dr. Scott Catey. If this conversation resonated, consider sharing it—or carrying something from it into your own listening and creative life.

Butch Norton has spent a lifetime making other people sound their best.

Over the course of a career spanning more than five decades, he's performed and recorded with artists including Lucinda Williams, Eels, Tracy Chapman, Lowen & Navarro, and many others, while also building an extraordinary body of work as a percussionist, educator, improviser, and collaborator.

But behind the impressive résumé lies a deeper philosophy.

In this conversation, Butch reflects on what it means to be of service—to songs, to fellow musicians, to dancers, and ultimately to the creative process itself. Along the way, we explore his early years growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, his transformative education at the California Institute of the Arts under legendary percussionist John Bergamo, and the experiences that shaped his unique approach to rhythm, movement, improvisation, and listening.

Our conversation ranges from touring with Lucinda Williams and helping launch The Eels, to accompanying modern dance and yoga classes, building percussion instruments from unlikely materials, and even creating an impressive—and unexpected—customized rain stick. Throughout it all, Butch returns to some straightforward ideas: Listen. Pay attention. Stay curious. Try something new.

Whether he's laying down a groove, supporting a singer-songwriter, responding to a room full of dancers, or encouraging younger musicians to embrace mistakes as opportunities, Butch reminds us that great musicianship is rooted not in virtuosity alone, but in curiosity, generosity, and deep listening.

This is a conversation about rhythm, perception, collaboration, and the lifelong practice of staying open to surprise.

In this episode

• Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area during a remarkable musical era
• Discovering percussion after seeing Ringo Starr on The Ed Sullivan Show
• Learning from Anthony Cerone, Charles Dowd, and John Bergamo
• How CalArts reshaped his understanding of music, improvisation, and collaboration
• Launching his professional touring career with Lowen & Navarro
• Joining E and helping form what would become Eels
• Recording Beautiful Freak and Electro-Shock Blues
• Seventeen years touring and recording with Lucinda Williams
• Why great accompanists learn to serve the music rather than themselves
• Performing with modern dancers and yoga practitioners
• Groove, movement, and the science of entrainment
• Improvisation, experimentation, and escaping creative habits
• Building percussion instruments from found objects—including some very surprising source material
• Why mistakes are often the beginning of discovery

Memorable moments

·      "Everything I do is to be of service."

·      "Don't get stuck doing the same things over and over."

·      "Something magical always happens."

·      "Break out of your normal patterns."

Connect with the Artist

Links:

• Website: https://butchdrums.com/
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/mynameisbutch
• Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/us/artist/buick-6/1023585383
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/butch.norton.1

Mentioned in this episode

Artists & Bands

• Lucinda Williams
• Eels
• E
• Lowen & Navarro
• Pat Benatar
• Tower of Power
• Tommy Bolin
• Billy Cobham
• James Brown
• The Beatles
• John Bergamo
• Anthony Cerone
• Charles Dowd
• David Garibaldi
• Mickey Hart
• Harry Partch
• John Cage
• Jeff Tripoli

Other People

• Dave Rundle & Headhunter Sticks & Creations: https://headhunterssticksandcreations.com/

Concepts

• Entrainment
• Groove
• Improvisation
• Modern dance
• Yoga
• World percussion
• Listening
• Collaboration
• Creative experimentation

Explore more

Visit TheSumOfAllWisdom.com for the complete transcript, companion essays, Field Notes, and the Listening Room for this episode, where you'll find additional resources, links, and further exploration of the ideas discussed here.

If you enjoyed this conversation, please consider subscribing, leaving a review, and sharing the episode with someone who loves music, creativity, and the stories behind the craft.

About the Show

The Sum of All Wisdom: Conversations on Music, Makers, and Meaning grew from two simple ideas: 

1.     Music is the sum of all wisdom

2.     Music is humanity’s oldest ways of understanding the world.

From there, we dedicated our work to long-form, reflective conversations with master craftspeople who write, make, play, and perform music. The work they do brings meaning, builds community, and creates profound cultural impact. We want to know more about how they do it. That’s the reason for the show. 

The Sum of All Wisdom is written, produced, and hosted by Dr. Scott Catey. If the conversation resonates with you, we hope you’ll consider subscribing, liking, and sharing it—and carrying something from it into your own listening and creative life. 

For singer, songwriter, guitarist, comedian, and raconteur Earl Okin, it begins with a wind-up gramophone at the age of three and unfolds across more than seven decades of listening, performing, writing, and constantly refining the craft.

In this conversation, Earl reflects on a remarkable musical journey that has carried him from postwar London to Abbey Road Studios, from touring with Paul McCartney and Wings and Van Morrison to sharing stages with folk, rock, pop, and jazz legends, all while building a career that defies easy categorization.

Along the way, he reveals how songs are really written, why Peggy Lee changed the way he hears and performs music, what João Gilberto taught him about bossa nova, and why the greatest artists are often their own harshest critics.

Join us for a rewarding conversation about creative persistence, living one step ahead of the cultural curve, how to give your craft the right attention, and what it means to spend a career making, living, and loving music.

In this episode

• A postwar London childhood spent with a gramophone and collecting 78s
• Discovering opera, jazz, and the Great American Songbook
• Recording at Abbey Road in the shadow of Sgt. Pepper
• Touring the UK with Paul McCartney and Wings
• Life on the road with Van Morrison
• How songs emerge from instinct, craft, and “finding the gold”
• Learning bossa nova from the Brazilian masters
• Phrasing or virtuosity? What matters most?
• Perfectionism, practice, and the lifelong pursuit of better performances
• The great musicians aren’t always the famous ones
• Writing an autobiography through stories rather than chronology
• Continuing to compose, tour, perform, and create memorable music into his eighth decade

Featured Music

In order:

• “London Now” 
• “Time”
• “Yesterday’s Wine”

All music used with permission. 

Memorable Quote

“You’re playing, and just a lot of clichés come out of your mouth... then suddenly there’s a little bit of gold. You take it, polish it, and eventually it becomes a song.”

About Earl Okin

Earl Okin is a British singer-songwriter, guitarist, pianist, arranger, comedian, and broadcaster whose career spans more than sixty years. Blending jazz, bossa nova, classic songwriting, and sharply observed humor, he has toured internationally, appeared on major television programs, shared stages with legendary musicians, and continues to write, record, and perform today.

His work reminds us that music is not only a profession or a performance; it is a lifelong practice of listening.

Connect with Earl Okin

Links:

• Earl’s Website: https://www.earlokin.net/ 
• Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/5NVqliGdTXQoIfOTTzAKxk 
• Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/us/artist/earl-okin/18143306 
• Earl’s Podcast: https://earlokin.blogspot.com/ 
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/earl.okin
• YouTube: A large number of Earl’s songs and recordings are on YouTube. Here’s a good one to start with: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAeKi4Mm0x8&t=65s 

In addition, a documentary is in the works, you can find a trailer and excerpts at the following links:

·       Trailer for Documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OirbKMmPB3M

·       Extended Clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyMJPsmaLZs

·       Additional  Clip:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilPn_vZc_k8

About the Show

The Sum of All Wisdom: Conversations on Music, Makers, and Meaning is animated by two ideas: 

·      Music IS the sum of all wisdom, and 

·      Music is humanity’s oldest way of knowing ourselves, each other, and the world. 

The show offers long-form, reflective conversations with musicians and related professionals who have spent a lifetime honing their craft, and whose work creates meaning, community, and cultural impact. The show prioritizes listening, craft, and the lived experience of making music as a way of making a living.

The Sum of All Wisdom is written, produced, and hosted by Dr. Scott Catey. If this conversation resonated, consider sharing it—or carrying something from it into your own listening and creative life. 

In this conversation, Tom reflects on recording his latest album Last Resort, building a musical life, and the lessons that come from decades on stages large and small. Along the way he shares why great performances require musicians to "show their guts," how he avoids crossing what he calls the "cheese line," why words behave like colors, and how his songwriting has changed as he's grown older.

It's a thoughtful conversation about music, storytelling, authenticity, and what success looks like when connection matters more than celebrity.

Highlights

·      Recording a band honestly

·      The evolution of a songwriter

·      Missoula's changing music scene

·      House concerts and human connection

·      The "cheese line"

·      Words as musical material

·      Performance as intimacy

·      Why simplicity is difficult

·      Success beyond fame

Music Featured in this Episode:

• L.O.L.A. Hello
• Narrow
• Puff of Smoke

All music is from the album Tom Catmull's Last Resort, released in December of 2025. All music is used with permission

Memorable Moments

·      "I hadn't put the sound of this band in a bottle."

·      "Open your trench coat and show your guts."

·      That's probably the headline quote.

·      "People long for connection."

·      "I always stay behind the cheese line."

·      "Words are colors."

·      "I listen as much to the way words sound as what they mean."

·      "The more money you make, the less fun you're going to have."

·      "I just want to play good shows."

About the Artist

Tom Catmull is an acclaimed Americana songwriter, originally from Texas, and now based in Missoula, Montana. His music blends infectious melodies, vivid storytelling, and a deep love of language. Across seven albums and long experience touring and performing, Tom has had a multifaceted life in music: he's shared stages with artists including Robert Earl Keen, Junior Brown, and Asleep at the Wheel; he’s played countless theater, festival, and club shows; he's a para-educator, teaching others how to use music to communicate; and and he's built a career around one simple mission: getting exceptional music to you.

Connect with the Artist

Links:

• Website: https://tomcatmull.com/
• Bandcamp: 
  • https://tomcatmull2.bandcamp.com/album/tom-catmulls-last-resort
  • https://tomcatmull.bandcamp.com/  
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tom.catmull
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tom_catmull_music/

Cover phot credit: Dan Bradner Photography: https://www.danbradner.com/   

About the Show

The Sum of All Wisdom: Conversations on Music, Makers, and Meaning is inspired by two ideas: 

·      Music IS the sum of all wisdom, and 

·      Music is humanity’s oldest way of knowing ourselves, each other, and the world. 

The show offers long-form, reflective conversations with musicians and related professionals who have spent a lifetime honing their craft, and whose work creates meaning, community, and cultural impact. The show prioritizes listening, craft, and the lived experience of making music as a way of making a living.

The Sum of All Wisdom is written, produced, and hosted by Dr. Scott Catey. If this conversation resonated, consider sharing it—or carrying something from it into your own listening and creative life. 

For more than four decades, percussionist, composer, producer, and artist-relations executive Rich Mangicaro has stood alongside some of music's most celebrated performers—including Glenn Frey, Joe Walsh, David Crosby, Venice, and many others. But as Rich explains, lasting musical careers aren't built on virtuosity alone. They're built on listening.

In this conversation, Rich reflects on learning groove with The Drifters, finding his place in Glenn Frey's band, building instruments with Gon Bops, composing music for film and television, and eventually discovering his own artistic voice after decades as one of Los Angeles' most respected sidemen.

Together we explore why percussion is about storytelling rather than timekeeping, what separates great musicians from merely talented ones, how the streaming era has transformed music, and why serving the song often matters more than standing in the spotlight.

This is a conversation about rhythm, humility, collaboration, and the quiet discipline of paying attention.

Episode Highlights

·      Growing up with Ringo, jazz, and Afro-Cuban rhythms 

·      Learning groove from The Drifters 

·      Touring with Glenn Frey and Joe Walsh 

·      Why the best percussionists don't play the most notes 

·      Artist relations and designing instruments at Gon Bops 

·      COVID, creativity, and finding a personal compositional voice 

·      Streaming, physical media, and the economics of independent music 

·      Film music, Hans Zimmer, and why movie scores deserve respect 

·      Rick Rubin and listening as creative practice 

·      Why "you can't converse unless you listen"

Featured Music:

·      Amazonia (Travels) 

·      Flattening the Curve (Dialogues) 

·      The Way It Was (A Dream I Had)

All music used with permission

Memorable Moments

·      "My job wasn't to show everybody how good I was."

·      "You can't converse unless you listen."

·      "Music is conversation."

·      "Play what the music calls for."

·      "Our job is to make people dance."

About the Artist

Rich Mangicaro is a percussionist, composer, producer, music journalist, and artist-relations specialist whose career spans more than four decades at the highest levels of the music industry. Best known for his fifteen years performing with Eagles co-founder Glenn Frey, Rich has also toured or recorded with artists including Joe Walsh, David Crosby, Michael McDonald, Aaron Neville, Jeff Bridges, The Tubes, James Morrison, Jackson Browne, and the acclaimed vocal group Venice.

Away from the stage, Rich has become one of the percussion world's leading voices in artist relations, helping shape instrument design while working closely with generations of influential drummers and percussionists. He currently serves as Artist Relations Manager and Product Specialist for Gon Bops, where he also produces and hosts The Percussion Loft podcast.

As a composer, Rich creates immersive instrumental music that blends acoustic percussion, cinematic textures, and melodic storytelling. His three solo albums—Travels (2018), Dialogues (2022), and A Dream I Had (2024)—reflect a lifetime of listening, travel, collaboration, and creative curiosity. In recent years, he has also composed music for television, film, and commercial productions with longtime collaborator Jonathan Clark.

Whether performing, composing, producing, designing instruments, or mentoring fellow musicians, Rich approaches every role with the same philosophy expressed in this conversation: the greatest musicians are not those who play the most notes—they are the ones who listen the best.

Connect with the Artist

Links:

• Website: https://www.richmangicaro.com/
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@RichMangicaro
• Bandcamp: https://richmangicaro.bandcamp.com/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/richmangicaromusicandmedia
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/richmangicaro

About the Show

The Sum of All Wisdom: Conversations on Music, Makers, and Meaning is inspired by two ideas: 

·      Music IS the sum of all wisdom, and 

·      Music is humanity’s oldest way of knowing ourselves, each other, and the world. 

The show offers long-form, reflective conversations with musicians and related professionals who have spent a lifetime honing their craft, and whose work creates meaning, community, and cultural impact. The show prioritizes listening, craft, and the lived experience of making music as a way of making a living.

The Sum of All Wisdom is written, produced, and hosted by Dr. Scott Catey. If this conversation resonated, consider sharing it—or carrying something from it into your own listening and creative life. Until next time: stay curious, keep listening!

★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★ https://buymeacoffee.com/scottcatey 

BOWIE: LIVE ON THE LOCH — NOVEMBER 7–8, 2026 Earl is helping lead Bowie: Live on the Loch, an extraordinary two-day celebration of David Bowie at Cameron House on Loch Lomond, Scotland, in aid of Save the Children. The weekend reunites members of Bowie’s legendary Glastonbury 2000 band—including Earl Slick, Mike Garson, Gail Ann Dorsey, Mark Plati, Sterling Campbell—for a live performance on November 8. 

The weekend also features rare Bowie footage, the Duffy Archive exhibition, conversations about Bowie’s legacy, and Earl Slick’s Rock ’n’ Roll Guitar Auction, with proceeds supporting Save the Children. 

Information and tickets: https://www.cameronhouse.co.uk/bowie-live-on-the-loch/

For the podcast conversation, though, Slick doesn’t particularly want to talk about being a guitar hero. 

“I love being a sideman,” he says. “I like to be the guy that supports the guy.” 

In this episode of The Sum of All Wisdom, Earl joins Dr. Scott Catey—with guitar close at hand—to talk about rhythm, instinct, collaboration, creativity, and what it means to discover what only you can bring to the music. In our conversation, Earl takes us inside his remarkable musical life—from seeing the Beatles and discovering Keith Richards to joining David Bowie for the Diamond Dogs Tour and confronting an intimidating question: Was he supposed to replace Mick Ronson by sounding like Mick Ronson? 

Bowie’s answer changed everything: “I love what you do. Do what you do.” 

Earl tells the stories behind his work on Station to Station, including “Stay” and “Golden Years,” and explains why rhythm—not guitar heroics—lies at the center of his playing: 

“The rhythm to me…it’s the heartbeat.” 

He also remembers working with John Lennon and Yoko Ono during the Double Fantasy era, and shares the deeply emotional story of performing “Imagine” with Bowie in Hong Kong on the third anniversary of Lennon’s death. Earl remembers fighting back tears—and knowing that if he looked at Bowie, he might not make it through the song. 

And then there’s Buddy Guy. After playing with Bowie and Lennon and spending decades on some of the world’s biggest stages, Earl says one of the great validations of his musical life came when Buddy Guy invited him to play. The experience left him so exhilarated that he walked around Chicago for two hours the next morning trying to come down from it. 

Near the end of our conversation, Earl describes that disappearance beautifully. When he’s making art or playing onstage, the noise of everyday life falls away. Thinking stops. “I just become me. Whatever the essence of me is.” And perhaps that’s the larger lesson here: greatness isn’t always about standing at the center. Sometimes it’s about listening closely enough to discover what only you can bring—and putting it in service of something larger.

Highlights

• David Bowie and the creative freedom to “do what you do”
• John Lennon, Yoko Ono and Double Fantasy
• Keith Richards and the power of rhythm guitar
• The making of “Stay” and “Golden Years”
• Why Earl Slick loves being a sideman
• Mick Ronson and finding your own musical identity
• Steve Cropper and the lineage of the great sideman
• Playing with Buddy Guy
• Guitars, amps, pickups and playing with your fingers
• Visual art and losing yourself in the creative process
• Why the ordinary world disappears when Earl steps onto a stage

Music Featured in this Episode:

• Slick’s in the moment riffing

All music used with permission

About the Artist

Earl Slick is one of rock and roll’s most distinctive and enduring guitarists. Best known for his decades-long collaboration with David Bowie, Slick helped shape landmark recordings including Young Americans and Station to Station and returned to Bowie’s band across multiple eras. He also played with John Lennon and Yoko Ono on Double Fantasy and Milk and Honey, and has worked with artists including Ian Hunter, John Waite, The Cure, and Buddy Guy. Renowned for his muscular, instinctive playing and deep sense of rhythm, Slick proudly embraces the role of sideman: serving the song, supporting the artist, and always bringing something unmistakably his own.

Connect with the Artist

Links:

• Website: https://earlslick.net/ 
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@EarlSlickOfficial 
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EarlSlickOfficial/ 
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/earlslick_official/ 
• Rock & Roll Guns for Hire: The Story of the Sidemen film: https://vimeo.com/227339886 

About the Show

The Sum of All Wisdom: Conversations on Music, Makers, and Meaning is inspired by two ideas: 

·      Music IS the sum of all wisdom, and 

·      Music is humanity’s oldest way of knowing ourselves, each other, and the world. 

The show offers long-form, reflective conversations with musicians and related professionals who have spent a lifetime honing their craft, and whose work creates meaning, community, and cultural impact. The show prioritizes listening, craft, and the lived experience of making music as a way of making a living.

The Sum of All Wisdom is written, produced, and hosted by Dr. Scott Catey. If this conversation resonated, consider sharing it—or carrying something from it into your own listening and creative life. 

Find a sound. Notice it. Find another one. Play with them. Follow your curiosity. Make a mistake. Keep going.

For Kalani Das, musician, educator, music therapist, author, and master percussionist, music begins with experience, not rules, notation, or technique.

In this episode of The Sum of All Wisdom, Kalani joins me for a wide-ranging exploration of what happens when we stop treating music as something we have to master and begin treating it as something human beings naturally do.

Kalani traces his journey from a dyslexic kid struggling with conventional music lessons to drummer, performer, educator, Orff Schulwerk practitioner, music therapist, and facilitator of musical experiences for people of widely different ages and abilities.

Along the way, he challenges some remarkably persistent assumptions about learning and creativity.

Notation isn't music. Technique isn't a prerequisite for expression. Teachers don't always need to provide answers. And sometimes the most powerful thing a facilitator can do is create a space—and then get out of the way.

Kalani also performs twice for us.

First, he builds an original piece in real time through live looping, moving among percussion, keyboard, ukulele, bass sounds, and Native American-style flute. The performance leads to one of the episode's most important observations: perfection isn't the point.

“Good enough is not only good enough. Good enough is great.”

Later, the conversation turns toward silence, attention, technology, and the grounding experience of making sound. Kalani combines drum, drone, flute, and a reading about space for a striking demonstration of what can emerge from simplicity.

We also explore Kalani's work in music therapy, including traumatic brain injury and addiction recovery; his discovery of Orff Schulwerk; improvisation and play; the importance of letting learners discover things for themselves; and music's extraordinary capacity to create connection.

Ultimately, this is a conversation about permission: permission to play, to experiment, to make mistakes, to listen, and to discover what happens next.

As Kalani puts it near the end of our conversation, being musical is “a way that we not only celebrate who we are, but it's how we remember who we are.” And from there, he’s got one more incredible insight that follows. 

It can also help us “create who we want to be.”

Episode Highlights

·       Why conventional music lessons can sometimes create barriers to music

·       Beginning with sound and experience rather than notation

·       What Kalani learned from Orff Schulwerk

·       Play, experimentation, and the natural ways children learn

·       Why a teacher can be more powerful as a facilitator

·       Kalani's live-looping process and multi-instrument studio

·       Why “good enough is great”

·       Native American-style flutes and musical accessibility

·       Music therapy, traumatic brain injury, and addiction recovery

·       Creating musical experiences that include different abilities

·       Silence as an invitation to participation

·       Listening in a distracted, screen-saturated world

·       Drumming, embodiment, presence, and flow

·       Why simplicity can be extraordinarily powerful

·       Music as a way of celebrating, remembering—and creating—ourselves

Music Featured in this Episode:

• In-episode demonstration & performance

Used with permission

About the Artist

Kalani Das is a musician, percussionist, educator, author, music therapist, and internationally experienced facilitator whose work brings together drumming, improvisation, music education, mindfulness, and community music-making.

His teaching emphasizes accessible, human-centered approaches to music: experimentation before perfection, experience before abstraction, and creativity as something available to everyone.

Kalani teaches drums and percussion, ukulele, and Native American-style flute, and he shares an extensive library of creative and educational material online. His work includes World Drum Club, Kalani Music, Ukulele Club, and his weekly Tuesday Muse Day livestream, plus courses, community resources, and his book The Way of Music: Creating Sound Connections in Music Therapy.

Connect with the Artist

Visit KalaniMusic.com for Kalani's teaching, performances, events, and resources.

On YouTube, find World Drum Club for drumming and percussion instruction, Kalani Music for music and Native American-style flute resources, and Ukulele Club for ukulele instruction.

Kalani also hosts Tuesday Muse Day, a weekly livestream featuring improvisation, live looping, teaching, meditative “yin drumming,” and audience-driven musical challenges.

• Website 
• Patreon: https://patreon.com/kalani 
• Kalani Music on YouTube
• World Drum Club 
• Ukulele Club
• Instagram 
• The Way of Music: Creating Sound Connections in Music Therapy 

About the Show

The Sum of All Wisdom: Conversations on Music, Makers, and Meaning is inspired by two ideas: 

·      Music IS the sum of all wisdom, and 

·      Music is humanity’s oldest way of knowing ourselves, each other, and the world. 

The show offers long-form, reflective conversations with musicians and related professionals who have spent a lifetime honing their craft, and whose work creates meaning, community, and cultural impact. The show prioritizes listening, craft, and the lived experience of making music as a way of making a living.

The Sum of All Wisdom is written, produced, and hosted by Dr. Scott Catey. If this conversation resonated, consider sharing it—or carrying something from it into your own listening and creative l...

Singer-songwriter Emma Swift has spent a life listening closely: to records, to other singers, to fragments of language, to the places where songs come from, and especially to Bob Dylan. Her acclaimed Blonde on the Tracks explored Dylan’s songs not as museum pieces to be faithfully reproduced, but as living works to be inhabited, interpreted, and made new.

For Emma, learning a Dylan song is almost an intellectual exercise: “Some people do crossword puzzles to exercise their brain. I learn Bob Dylan songs.” It is, she says, a way of getting inside someone else’s mind.

That idea opens into a much larger conversation about creativity.

Emma and Scott talk about what it means to be an interpreter as well as a songwriter; the singers who taught Emma how to sing; the continuing mystery of Dylan’s work; and why a great song can still “capsize” us decades after it was written. For Emma, interpretation is not imitation. A song can carry traces of Dylan, Marianne Faithfull, Nina Simone, and every artist who has inhabited it before—and still become something new in the hands of the next singer.

They also explore Emma’s own creative process: notebooks, overheard phrases, melodies captured on a phone, collaboration, and the gradual transformation of small observations into finished songs.

And then there is the increasingly difficult question of how we decide whether any of this has succeeded.

Emma thinks visible metrics may be among the worst things to happen to the creative industries. A record, she argues, succeeds first because it sounds good—not because an algorithm, stream count, sales figure, or social-media metric tells us that other people approve of it. Pulling a beloved record from the shelf and settling the needle in the groove is something different: an intentional, intimate encounter between listener and artist. “There’s something kind of sacred in that.”

It is an idea at the heart of The Sum of All Wisdom: listening is itself a creative act.

Along the way, Emma takes us from Sydney to Nashville, where she arrived in 2012 with two suitcases—one containing clothes and the other, somewhat impractically, filled with records. She came looking for the songwriting world of Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark, and Gillian Welch, and found a place where she could begin building a creative life of her own.

Ultimately, though, this conversation reaches beyond records, songwriting, or even music.

Emma believes creativity is something much more fundamental. It can mean making a song, a garden, a meal, or a piece of clothing. Art can offer refuge from a destructive world—but creativity also gives us another way of participating in it.

“We’re all born to be creative people,” Emma says. And perhaps the world would be kinder “if everybody felt entitled to be creative.”

Highlights

• Why certain songs “capsize” us
• Bob Dylan and the art of interpretation
• Marianne Faithfull, Nina Simone, and the lineage of a song
• What singers can learn by inhabiting someone else’s music
• Emma’s journey from Sydney to Nashville
• Guy Clark and the power of the unadorned song
• Songwriting through notebooks, overheard language, and collaboration
• Why commercial disappointment isn’t necessarily artistic failure
• The problem with visible metrics and algorithmic culture
• Vinyl, ritual, and the intimate experience of listening
• Why creativity belongs to everyone

About the Artist

Emma Swift is an Australian-born songwriter, currently residing in Nashville, TN. A gifted singer inspired by Sandy Denny, Joni Mitchell, Marianne Faithfull and a plethora of dead poets, her sound is a blend of classic folk, Americana and indie rock. 

In August 2020, she released the critically-acclaimed Blonde on the Tracks, a Laurel Canyon inspired reimagining of some of her favorite Bob Dylan tunes on Tiny Ghost Records. The album received Best of 2020 accolades from Rolling Stone, Nashville Scene, No Depression, The Guardian, and more. 

Her new album The Resurrection Game was released on Tiny Ghost Records on September 12, 2025.

Connect with Emma

Links:

• Linktree: https://linktr.ee/emmaswiftsings 

Cover photo by Autumn Dozier, https://www.instagram.com/autumn.dozier/ 

About the Show

The Sum of All Wisdom: Conversations on Music, Makers, and Meaning is inspired by two key ideas: 

·      Music IS the sum of all wisdom, and 

·      Music is humanity’s oldest way of knowing ourselves, each other, and the world. 

The show offers long-form, reflective conversations with musicians and others who have spent a lifetime honing their craft, and whose work creates meaning, community, and cultural impact. The show prioritizes listening, creativity, and the lived experience of making music as a way of making a living and as a way of knowing the world, each other, and ourselves.

The Sum of All Wisdom is written, produced, and hosted by Dr. Scott Catey. If this conversation resonated, consider sharing it—or carrying something from it into your own listening and creative life. 

Episode Summary

Every traditional song contains more than notes and words. It carries the traces of musicians, families, communities, migrations, technologies, institutions, and individual acts of invention. Bob Dylan may have sung about containing multitudes, but Stephen Wade gifts us with his wonderful and humane understanding of the multitudes contained in a tune. 

In this episode of The Sum of All Wisdom, Scott Catey speaks with renowned banjo player, folklorist, historian, and author Stephen Wade about his new book, Our Common Life: Folk Songs from the Front Porch to the Concert Hall, published by the University of Illinois Press.

Stephen describes traditional music as a collection of “common possessions with individual contributions.” A tune may pass through generations, but it never remains unchanged. Each musician catches it, puts their hands on it, and contributes something of their own, sometimes surprisingly.

Beginning with Stephen’s childhood in Chicago, the conversation follows the people and encounters that shaped his musical life: sidewalk performer Casey Jones and his trained chicken Mae West; blues musicians Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and Big Joe Williams; banjo teachers Fleming Brown and Doc Hopkins; and the musicians, writers, and working people whose lives populate Stephen’s research.

Along the way, Stephen traces the African and Caribbean ancestry of the banjo, the meeting of Black and European musical traditions, Chicago’s role as a crossroads for American music, and the relationship between changing instruments, technologies, dances, and communities.

But this is also a conversation about the responsibilities of memory. Stephen explains that his work represents “promises made” to people who trusted him with their knowledge and stories. Research, in that sense, becomes more than documentation. It is an ethical act: gratitude, reciprocity, and cultural preservation.

Episode Highlights

Scott and Stephen discuss:

• Growing up amid Chicago’s sidewalk culture, churches, record shops, radio stations, and blues clubs 
• Casey Jones, the celebrated Chicago street performer who performed with a chicken named Mae West 
• Hearing Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Big Joe Williams, and Mahalia Jackson as a young person 
• Stephen’s early discovery of guitar, five-string banjo, and American traditional music 
• The differences among five-string, plectrum, tenor, fretless, and gourd banjos 
• How musical styles, social dancing, technology, and instrument design influence one another 
• Stephen’s apprenticeship with Fleming Brown and his relationship with Doc Hopkins 
• Pete Seeger’s influential book How to Play the Five-String Banjo
• WLS, the National Barn Dance, and Chicago’s place in American broadcasting history 
• The musical lineage connecting Dick Burnett, Doc Hopkins, Fleming Brown, and Stephen Wade 
• The history of “Man of Constant Sorrow” 
• Chicago as both an arrival point and a dissemination point for American music 
• The African and Caribbean origins of the banjo 
• Cultural sharing and cultural distinctiveness in American folk traditions 
• William Sidney Mount’s painting Catching the Tune
• Folklorist and music librarian Dena Epstein 
• Hilda Polacheck’s transformative childhood experience at Hull House 
• The extraordinary moment Stephen discovered that the historical account he was reading belonged to Dena Epstein’s mother 
• Will Keys, musical self-reliance, and making banjo strings from screen-door wire 
• The relationship between representative musicians and exceptional artists 
• Folklorist and blues researcher Mack McCormick’s idea of “finding the predominances” 
• Uncle Dave Macon and the world contained in “Arcade Blues” 
• Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, and the histories concentrated inside particular places 
• Jack Conroy, Nelson Algren, the Federal Writers’ Project, and American working-class storytelling 
• How Stephen combined banjo playing, tall tales, spoken language, and theatrical performance in Banjo Dancing
• The moment Stephen discovered that musical virtuosity alone was not enough to hold an audience 
• Why performing reveals what a musician has truly learned 
• What it means to catch a tune and pass it forward 

Memorable Moments

Common possessions with individual contributions

One of the conversation’s central ideas is that tradition and individuality are not opposites.

A song such as Big Joe Williams’s “Baby Please Don’t Go” may become a shared cultural possession, but every musician who performs it brings a distinctive history, voice, technique, and sensibility to the music. Even after recorded sound gave listeners a seemingly fixed version, musicians continued to transform songs through performance.

For Stephen, a traditional tune is therefore never the work of only one person. It is an accumulation of encounters.

“There are many people in a tune.”

Catching the tune

Stephen uses “catching the tune” to describe how music passes from one person to another. The phrase evokes William Sidney Mount’s nineteenth-century painting Catching the Tune, which depicts the process of learning music by ear and highlights the physicality of learning, making, and transmitting music.

This kind of learning is bodily, social, and attentive. A musician watches, listens, imitates, remembers, and gradually makes the music their own. The tune is inherited, but it must also be recreated.

Stephen’s own musical lineage extends through Fleming Brown and Doc Hopkins to Kentucky musician Dick Burnett, who published an early version of “Man of Constant Sorrow.” These connections make musical history immediate: not an abstract timeline, but a chain of people who knew, heard, and taught one another, linking communities, geographies, and centuries.

Making a way out of no way

East Tennessee banjo player Will Keys embodies another of the episode’s central ideas: creativity under conditions of scarcity.

Keys developed a highly individual banjo style that he could neither explain nor slow down sufficiently to teach. As a child, he played an instrument strung with wire taken from a screen door. Later, he carved banjo bridges from discarded materials and made intricate objects for friends.

His work exemplified what Stephen calls “making a way out of no way”—using ingenuity, patience, and the materials at hand to create something personal within a shared tradition.

The exceptional and the representative

Which people best reveal a culture?

Stephen recalls a conversation with folklorist and blues researcher Mack McCormick, who encouraged him to pay attention to average practitioners as well as celebrated artists. Duke Ellington and Ernest Hemingway tell us something about American culture, but so do street singers, factory workers, local musicians, crafts...

For poet, drummer, novelist, and performer Rich Ferguson, poetry lives in the breath, the body, and the beat. It moves through voice and gesture, enters into conversation with music and silence, and gathers new meaning from the people and places surrounding it.

In this conversation, Rich joins Scott Catey to explore the deep musicality of language and the entwining of music and poetry. He explains how cadence becomes an editing tool, why memorizing a poem is a physical process, and how years of preparation make spontaneity possible. As Rich puts it: if a passage doesn’t sing, it doesn’t belong in the poem.

They also discuss the continuing legacy of Beat poetry and its power to awaken attention. At a time when art is increasingly encountered through scrolling, fragments, and disposable moments, what can poetry and other artistic forms do to slow us down and return us to direct experience?

Rich describes Poet Film Stage, the multidisciplinary performance series he created with poet, playwright, and director Kathleen Florence. Combining poetry, theater, movement, music, and carefully placed silence, Poet Film Stage transforms a traditional reading into a collective journey. No single poem or performer is the destination; meaning emerges from the relationships among them.

The conversation culminates in Rich’s performance of “Live and Die in LA,” a propulsive spoken-word portrait of the city he once fled, but ultimately learned to love. Moving through music, violence, racial history, celebrity, incarceration, reinvention, and the accumulated ghosts of Los Angeles, the poem becomes both love letter and reckoning—a city carried in the blood and breath of the poet.

Highlights

Along the way, Rich and Scott explore:

• Why Rich considers his voice a musical instrument
• How the Beat tradition continues to reverberate through contemporary poetry
• Poetry as an antidote to distraction and disposable attention
• The role of movement, gesture, and memory in live performance
• How rhythm helps a writer recognize what belongs
• The discipline hidden beneath apparent spontaneity
• Letting go of beautiful language that does not serve the work
• How emotion and imagination can transform autobiography into art
• The influence of Los Angeles on Rich’s creative identity
• Why poems change when placed in conversation with other poems
• Community, collaboration, and the making of Beat Not Beat
• The artistic partnership between Rich and drummer Butch Norton

Performance Featured in this Episode:

• Live and Die in L.A., a spoken word poem

Used with permission

About Rich Ferguson

Rich Ferguson is a poet, performer, drummer, novelist, and former California Beat Poet Laureate. His books include 8th & Agony, Everything Is Radiant Between the Hates, Somewhere a Playground, and the novel New Jersey Me. He served as lead editor of Beat Not Beat: An Anthology of California Poets Screaming Through the Post-Beat Scene.

With Kathleen Florence, Rich created Poet Film Stage, an ensemble performance project bringing poetry into conversation with theater, movement, film, music, and silence. His spoken-word performances and films frequently feature musical collaborators, including drummer Butch Norton, who was also a guest on The Sum of All Wisdom.

Explore Rich’s Work

Rich Ferguson: http://rich-ferguson.com/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@fuzzydoodah

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fergiebeat/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rich.ferguson1/

Poet Film Stage: https://www.kathleenflorencepoet.com/

Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center: https://www.beyondbaroque.org/

Chapters

00:00 — From New Jersey to the San Francisco poetry scene
04:12 — What is Beat poetry now?
07:51 — Poetry, consciousness, and the struggle for attention
13:31 — Reimagining the poetry reading through Poet Film Stage
18:49 — Movement, silence, and embodied experience
25:45 — “The work lives in my body”
26:33 — The life cycle of a poem
32:58 — Improvisation, preparation, and the illusion of effortlessness
36:16 — Using cadence and musicality as editing tools
38:32 — Killing your darlings and getting the ego out of the way
40:48 — What writing a novel taught Rich about serving the story
44:13 — Memory, imagination, and emotional truth
49:57 — Becoming the place where you live
52:36 — Rich performs “Live and Die in LA”
57:17 — Leaving Los Angeles—and learning to love it
1:00:16 — Meeting and collaborating with Butch Norton
1:01:45 — Poetry, community, and the documentary Speak
1:03:02 — Becoming California Beat Poet Laureate during COVID
1:05:30 — Building Beat Not Beat around Wanda Coleman
1:07:19 — Closing thoughts and what’s next

About the Show

The Sum of All Wisdom is a podcast about music, makers, and meaning—hosted by Dr. Scott Catey.

Listen, watch, and explore more: https://www.thesumofallwisdom.com/

In this conversation, French-American singer-songwriter Erika Horsey and host Scott Catey explore a life shaped by music, movement, emotional sensitivity, and a succession of moments when recognition seemed tantalizingly close. Beginning with her first song—written at six years old—the story moves through self-taught piano and guitar, early performances, industry interest, independent recording, and the creation of a personal record label.

But this episode is not simply a catalogue of accomplishments or near misses. At its heart is the distance between possessing a gift and building a life around it. Looking back with unusual candor, Erika considers the opportunities she did not fully recognize, the times she waited to be chosen, and the hard-earned realization that creative work also requires us to act on our own behalf.

Beneath that story runs a deeper thread: sensitivity as a way of making art. For Erika, songs begin with attention, with observation, with noticing—a stranger’s suffering, an overlooked life, an unexpected act of kindness, the ache of longing, or an emotion that cannot be contained in ordinary speech. Music becomes a way of absorbing experience, processing it, and giving it another form.

We also hear a live performance of an original song and discuss the mysterious moment when words and music seem to arrive together, almost fully formed.

This is a conversation about talent and recognition, instinct and discipline, regret and persistence. Above all, it asks whether a creative life must be validated by conventional success—or whether continuing to make the work is itself a way of claiming that life, regardless of what other may think or say. Erika is an inspirational and endearing voice, one that deserves to be heard and cared about. This is your opportunity to take that step. 

Episode Highlights

·       Writing a first song at six years old

·       Learning piano and guitar by instinct

·       Turning observation and emotional sensitivity into music

·       Recognizing—and sometimes missing—creative opportunities

·       The difference between waiting to be chosen and choosing the work

·       Founding an independent label and releasing music on one’s own terms

·       How songs can emerge almost fully formed

·       A live performance of an original composition

·       Why regret can become wisdom

·       Continuing to create without an expiration date

Music Featured in this Episode:

• “Ashes to Dust,” performed live, originally from the album A Slice of Dust

Used with permission.

Artist Bio

Erika Horsey is a French-American singer-songwriter whose music grows from emotional sensitivity, close observation, and a lifelong instinct for turning experience into song. Writing in both English and French, she combines intimate vocals with piano and 12-string guitar to create music that is reflective, atmospheric, and deeply personal.

Born in Washington, D.C., and raised across Belgium, New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, Erika developed an early connection to both music and language. She wrote her first song at six, began composing on piano as a teenager, and later taught herself guitar. While studying French at Johns Hopkins University, she continued writing and performing, developing the intuitive creative process that remains central to her work.

Erika’s songs often begin with a moment of human connection: a stranger’s story, an unexpected kindness, a loss, a longing, or an emotion requiring another form of expression. For her, songwriting is both an act of attention and a way of processing experience.

After periods in New York and Paris and early interest from major record labels, Erika chose an independent path, founding Angel Wax Productions and releasing three albums: From the Triskel to the Tiger’s Eye, Truth Remains, and A Slice of Dust. Her recent releases include “Renegade,” “Crocodile Tears,” and “Ma Lumière.”

Across her work, Erika returns to the same enduring conviction: a creative life has no expiration date, and the work remains worth pursuing regardless of where recognition leads.

Alongside her work as a performer, creator, and founder in New York and Paris, Erika’s years in Los Angeles, where she lives now, were spent in music leadership: Assistant to the Dean at UCLA's Herb Alpert School of Music, and Director of Admissions at Shepherd University's Cornel School of Contemporary Music — all while writing and releasing her own work. Music has always been the through-line.

Connect with Erika Horsey

Music is more than entertainment. It is one of humanity’s oldest ways of understanding the world.

Links:

·      Erika’s website: www.erikahorsey.com

·      Angelwax website: www.angelwax-productions.com

·      YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ErikaHorsey

About the Show

The Sum of All Wisdom: Conversations on Music, Makers, and Meaning is a long-form, reflective podcast centered on working musicians and music-adjacent professionals whose work creates meaning, community, and cultural impact. The show prioritizes listening, craft, and lived experience over promotion.

The Sum of All Wisdom is written, produced, and hosted by Dr. Scott Catey. If this conversation resonated, consider sharing it—or carrying something from it into your own listening and creative life. 

Stay curious!

·       Surprise at a previous connection

·       A breakup song that probably belongs in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey

·       Tragic clowns and irony

·       The difference between enunciation and finding a richer voice

·       Sixteen years away from recording—and the realization that he couldn’t live without music

·       A songwriter’s unlikely vision of immortality

Greg Amici was fronting the New Jersey band Big Honey when a vocal cord polyp interrupted his music career. During months of vocal rest, he wrote without speaking, working on a palimpsest. The image suits a life in which earlier work remains visible beneath what comes next: bands, acting, screenwriting, songs left unfinished, and songs waiting to be heard.

Years later, an opportunity to write music for a film brought Greg back into the studio. Sixteen years after Big Honey, he realized, “I can’t live without making music.” Working with producer James Mastro and a group of musicians he trusted, he began recording the songs that became Tragicomic.

In this conversation, Greg and Scott explore the album’s characters, dark humor, and visual world. They follow “I’ll Be Back” from a personal breakup into a song shaped by The Odyssey, and talk about why Greg still cares deeply about album art, printed lyrics, and the experience of holding a record.

Greg is also looking ahead. He talks about studying music theory, experimenting with alternate tunings and piano, and working with a voice teacher to change how he sings. A recent injury has delayed his return to the stage, but another album is on its way. With wit and candor, he considers how much he still wants to make—and where a song might live after its maker is gone.

About the Artist

Gregory Amici is a singer-songwriter from New Jersey, whose creative journey has taken him from the heart of Manhattan to Los Angeles and back again. Greg likes to call himself a “count in name only,” tracing his aristocratic lineage through Italian family names such as Benedetti, Stalute, and Scala.

Greg found his calling as a musician in high school, inspired by local bands. Picking up the guitar in his late teens, he founded his first band, The Clergy, and later teamed up with a musical partner to form the ’80s alt-rock band Junk. Their cover of "The Shape of Things to Come" was featured on the compilation The East Coast 60’s Rock n’ Roll Experiment, produced by longtime friend Matt Pinfield. 

Later, Greg formed Big Honey, a New York-based band with a loyal following. Their rise peaked at the CMJ Music Festival but paused indefinitely when a vocal polyp sidelined Greg for years. Despite this setback, his talent was widely acknowledged, earning praise for his distinctive voice and songwriting abilities from peers within the music community.

After a 16-year hiatus, Greg returned to the studio, reuniting with producer James Mastro (The Bongos, Mott the Hoople) and drummer/engineer Ray Ketchem (Elk City) at Magic Door Studio, which led to the album Tragicomic, available now.

Connect with the Artist

Links:

• Website: https://gregamici.com/
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@gregamicimusic/
• Bandcamp: https://gregamici.bandcamp.com/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GregAmiciMusic/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gregamicimusic
• IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0024823/

About the Show

The Sum of All Wisdom is a podcast about music, makers, and meaning—produced and hosted by Dr. Scott Catey.

Listen, watch, and explore more: https://www.thesumofallwisdom.com/

For singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and music educator Cory McAtee, play isn’t simply something children do. It’s a way of discovering the world: experimenting, moving, making mistakes, following curiosity, and paying attention to things we might otherwise overlook.

In this conversation, Cory joins Scott to talk about a musical life that began with pots and pans and neighborhood performances, coalesced through clarinet, saxophone, tuba, piano, and more, and eventually led her back to a childhood ambition to write and perform her own music.

Along the way, they explore what it means to make music for “children of all ages”; why Cory refuses to underestimate the intelligence and curiosity of young listeners; the trees, creatures, and natural world that populate her songs; and why adults may lose something important when we stop playing and begin to assume we already understand the world around us.

They also talk about music education and the formation of listeners; joy, melancholy, and music as an emotional language; the freedoms and frustrations of being an independent artist; home recording and the creative possibilities of experimentation; and Cory’s contribution to Chris Redding’s GRAMMY-nominated The Colors in My Mind.

There are also saxophones in redwood groves, Bananarama, an unfortunate click track, looming bagpipe lessons—and the story of a windy day, a football field, and a sousaphone bell.

At the center of it all is a wonderfully simple idea: growing up doesn’t mean growing out of  wonder. Attention, curiosity, play, and discovery are joyous practices we need throughout our lives.

Episode Highlights

·      Rediscovering a childhood ambition to write and perform music

·      Tim Noah and the encouragement that helped Cory begin songwriting

·      “Steppin’ Into the Outside” and the relationship between music, movement, and nature

·      Why children don’t need to be protected from sophisticated ideas or language

·      “This Old Tree,” mycelium, and imagining the hidden lives of trees

·      What happened when Cory took her saxophone into a California redwood grove

·      Play as a form of learning, discovery, and attention

·      What adults may lose when we stop playing

·      Songs as part of a listener’s lifelong emotional vocabulary

·      Measuring artistic success one meaningful listener at a time

·      Joy, melancholy, minor keys, and music’s ability to help us move through difficult emotions

·      Teaching children not merely to play notes, but to become expressive musicians

·      A tuba bell and Cory’s Mary-Poppins-ish encounter on a windy football field

·      Hearing arrangements from the perspective of multiple instruments

·      Chris Redding’s The Colors in My Mind and making music collaboratively across distance

·      The freedom, experimentation, and occasional disasters of home recording

·      Kindies Do the 80s, Bananarama, and making a familiar song your own

·      The instruments Cory still wants to learn—Bagpipes, anyone?

Cory’s New Music: “Scary Night”

Cory’s new single “Scary Night” is out now, accompanied by a new music video. Built around the wonderfully spooky vocabulary of Halloween—mysterious noises, creaking doors, howling dogs, and things that go bump in the night—it’s another example of Cory’s knack for turning the familiar world into an invitation to listen, imagine, and play.

Find Cory’s music, videos, and more at her official website, linked below, and look for Steppin’ with Cory and “Scary Night” wherever you listen to music.

About Cory McAtee

Cory McAtee is a singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, music educator, and recording artist whose work celebrates creativity, nature, movement, curiosity, and the joy of making music.

A lifelong singer and performer, Cory began making music as a child and went on to study and play an unusually broad range of instruments, beginning with clarinet and later adding piano, saxophone, tuba, and others. Her path toward writing her own songs took an important turn through her friendship with Emmy Award-winning songwriter and producer Tim Noah, who encouraged her to begin songwriting and helped guide her through the early creative and recording process.

Her debut single, “I Want to Go Outside and Play (Steppin’ Into the Outside),” grew from that experience and reflects many of the ideas that continue to shape her work: getting outside, moving our bodies, remaining curious, and rediscovering the world immediately around us. The song received a Bronze Medal from the 2026 Global Music Awards.

Cory’s album Steppin’ with Cory and songs including “This Old Tree” and “Wish on a Star” combine accessible songwriting with an unusual respect for the imagination and intelligence of young listeners. As an educator, she has worked with students from preschool through high school, helping them move from their first encounters with rhythm, melody, and instruments toward expressive music-making of their own.

Her collaborative work includes performances of Bananarama’s “Venus” and “Cruel Summer” for Patrick Adams’s Kindies Do the 80s series. Cory also contributed vocals to “Love Cure” on Chris Redding’s GRAMMY-nominated album The Colors in My Mind, a project exploring neurodiversity, communication, and the ability of music to reach beyond conventional language.

Her newest single, “Scary Night,” arrives just in time for Halloween—a playful trip through dripping faucets, creaking doors, howling dogs, and the deliciously spooky sounds of the season.

Connect with Cory McAtee

Links:

• Website: https://www.corymcatee.com/ 
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@corymcatee/ 
• Bandcamp: https://corymcatee.bandcamp.com 
• Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/4XogwUx2rPxDUpqe5Z8L2z?si=JdViRLhAQGepnEkj26bSHA 
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/corymcatee 

Photo credits: Heather Bee Photography

About the Show

The Sum of All Wisdom is a podcast about music, makers, and meaning—produced and hosted by Dr. Scott Catey.

Listen, watch, explore, discover: https://www.TheSumofAllWisdom.com/

Pianist, composer, and educator Tom Rule enjoys putting that question to the test. He has slipped “Baby Shark” into a church prelude and hidden “Old MacDonald” inside Christmas arrangements—musical surprises that invite us to reconsider what we hear and what we expect.

From his Outhouse Studio in Macon, Georgia, Tom joins Scott Catey for a conversation about the craft and pleasure of making music. He reflects on classical training, learning jazz, teaching students to enjoy the work of practice, and discovering how experiences from different parts of a life can come together at the keyboard.

We also explore his current projects: revisiting recordings whose original digital tapes could no longer be read, developing solo piano arrangements from improvised church preludes, and discovering how much music he can make with one synthesizer. Along the way, Tom shares the joy of playing with trusted friends, the hurt of seeing a college recording studio he built dismantled, and the freedom to pursue an idea without knowing exactly where it will lead.

For Tom, musical magic begins when something catches the ear—a turn in the harmony, an unexpected arrival, or a familiar melody suddenly heard differently.

Highlights

·       Why changing the chords and context can make a familiar melody almost unrecognizable.

·       What Bach’s delayed resolutions reveal about musical surprise—and how Tom brings that thinking into his own work.

·       How playing tuba as a teenager helped prepare him to cover bass and piano in a jazz ensemble.

·       The listening, friendship, and honest criticism behind his decades-long collaboration with guitarist Joey Stuckey.

·       Using AI stem separation to revisit old recordings while keeping musical judgment in human hands.

·       Finding creative freedom in church improvisations, hidden nursery tunes, and experiments with a single synthesizer.

About Tom Rule

Tom Rule is a pianist, keyboardist, composer, arranger, and educator based in Macon, Georgia. His work draws on jazz, classical music, church traditions, and electronic experimentation, combining a wide range of influences with a taste for musical surprises and a ready supply of puns.

He has produced six albums and contributed to more than a dozen others. His teaching career includes more than twenty years in higher education, spanning music and computing at Mercer University, Middle Georgia State, and Chattanooga State. He also teaches piano at Young America Music School and accompanies the choir at First Presbyterian Church in Macon.

A longtime collaborator with guitarist Joey Stuckey, Tom brings the same curiosity to performing, arranging, recording, and teaching: how can music remain inviting while offering something new to discover on the next listen?

Connect with Tom Rule 

Website: https://www.TomRule.info

Bandcamp: https://tomrule.bandcamp.com/follow_me

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/macmusicguy

Rumble: https://rumble.com/user/TomRule?e9s=src_v1_cmd%2Csrc_v1_s%2Csrc_v1_s_o%2Csrc_v1_rso

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@tomrule6

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TomRule.MacMusicGuy

Twitter: https://twitter.com/tom_rule

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tomrule2/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/trule

About the Show

The Sum of All Wisdom is a podcast about music, makers, and meaning—produced and hosted by Dr. Scott Catey.

Listen, watch, and explore more: https://www.thesumofallwisdom.com/