Conversations About Inspiration
# Conversations About Inspiration *The first of an occasional series of musings.* --- Where do ideas come from? It's a simple question, and I've spent a lifetime not quite answering it. But it's the one I ...
Words · Notes · Dispatches
Jay Sanders • Mindtonic
Composed. Improvised. Alive. - Music without Borders - From Asheville to Everywhere.
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Musings
I Built a Model of How the U.S. Fiscal System Could Break. Here Is What I Found.
What happens when unemployment, inflation, and interest rates stop offsetting each other and move together? A working paper on AI, debt, and fiscal cascade risk
On Art and AI
There is commercial content, and there is Art. AI will dominate commercial creative work because it generates cost efficiencies humans cannot match. A major studio will increasingly find it cheaper to have interst...
About
Jay Sanders has been playing music professionally for more than three decades, and he still hasn't figured out what to call it and that's kinda the point.
His recordings range from structured orchestral compositions to free jazz improvisations to groove-heavy collaborative sessions with some of Asheville's finest players. He spent years holding down the low end for Acoustic Syndicate — widely credited as a progenitor of the jamgrass scene — and for Americana legends Donna the Buffalo. He co-leads the avant-garde E.Normus Trio, whose debut Love & Barbiturates drew comparisons to John Zorn's Naked City. He also performs every Tuesday night at Little Jumbo, leading a quartet through original music that might go anywhere.
His 2024 solo debut, Evanescent, gathered an eight-piece ensemble to explore themes of impermanence through seven original compositions and a tone poem dedicated to the Voyager spacecraft. A year later, his first large-scale orchestral work — Sinfonietta Helene — premiered with the Blue Ridge Orchestra as a response to Hurricane Helene's impact on Western North Carolina.
This is where you can find recordings, upcoming shows, and merchandise. If you want to support the music directly, you can do that here too — every bit of it goes toward keeping the work alive and the next project moving.
Thanks for listening.