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    I am a music writer and musician living in upstate New York. My formal studies include undergraduate work in music and fine art and graduate work in music performance. My primary instrument is the guitar. I also play the piano and sing. My professional history includes work in original rock bands, guitar chamber ensembles, and in an occassional pick-up jazz band, along with many years of performance as a solo classical guitarist. All of this has put me in contact with wonderful musicians and performance situations.
    There are stretches of time when I work on visual art in the form of assemblages, paintings, photos, and housing design. There are books with my paintings illustrating the cover, art shows and exhibits I have been involved with, and houses remodelled with my designs.
    In recent years, I compose music with digital medium as heard on my two solo CDs "Prim" 2001 and "Particle" 2006. In 1990, I formed "The Jim Sande Ensemble." That ensemble has two CDs, "Melting" 1999 and "Cyclorama" 2002. Occasionally I write music for other artists and do commercial music writing.
    I appreciate many types of music including; classical symphonic, chamber, and piano musics; 20th and 21st century atonal, minimal, sound track, ambient, lower case, and field musics; jazz in the bop and free idioms, popular and obscure rock and blues artists, and sacred world music.
    I find inspiration from the material I read, from examining visual artwork, from quiet observation alone or out in nature. Musical form is very elastic to me, its something to be played with and explored. Sometimes I work in a deliberate pre-concept manner where I attempt to transcribe an internal idea, but often its purely an engaged involvement that arises as I undertake writing music where the process has a life of its own. When that happens, I'm happy.
    Since the summer of 2006, I have kept up a blog - Sande. I post at least once per day and it is mostly a political blog. I lean towards the progressive side of politics, so politicians and political parties that promote authoritarianism are not supported on my blog.