Michael's Personal Playlist
A look into some of the music that has inspired Michael,
as a confectioner and as a practicing drummer
While you may be familiar with Michael Recchiuti through his culinary innovations, you may not know he is also a music school graduate and a lifelong drummer. “ My mother always wanted a child who could play music with her, and I was the one she grabbed on to. When I started playing drums, she would practice with me everyday before I went to school. I kept it going throughout my life, but back then to play music you also had to have some kind of job, because you’d get paid next to nothing. So I’d always support myself working in restaurants and pastry shops...” Though the two disciplines may be separate, they’ve often intersected as a source of inspiration for Michael. Here are three songs that embody distinct moments in the confectioner’s creative process.
Butterscotch - Makaya McCraven While the act of inspiration can be an amorphous thing, sometimes the answers are right there in front of you. The smooth tones of contemporary jazz shaped one of Recchiuti’s recent additions. “Music is always inspiring the work that I do in the kitchen, for example, there’s this drummer I like named Makaya McCraven, and he’s got this tune called ‘Butterscotch’, and I heard it before we’d ever attempted our butterscotch piece. I just couldn’t get it out of my head. That was really an instigator to explore the flavor profile and question ‘what is it I’m trying to make’? And through that experimentation it evolved into a caramel...”
Live To Tell - Bill Frisell The crossroads between internal discipline and inspiration from the external world has always been a driving dichotomy in Michael’s work, a split exemplified by his love of instrumental guitarist Bill Frisell. Frisell’s music is imbued with an obvious, almost obsessive level of craftsmanship, with an extremely virtuosic approach to his guitar sound, but his music still maintains a level of unpredictability when combined with the ambient noises he loves to sample or let into his recording. “I think one of the problems I had while playing in music school was that all of the students I was with were really talented players but the only thing that they could do comfortably was sight read and play what was written for them, which is the opposite of me, as I’m based in improvising. I’d say, ‘Let’s go out and busk in the park,’ and they were like, ‘What are we going to play?’ And I was like, ‘Let’s just play...”
Horizons - Genesis Speaking of virtuosity, Michael’s love of progressive rock is no secret, and he saw prog rock giants Genesis at least three times in their 70s heyday. It was this instrumental interlude by guitarist Steve Hackett that really caught Michael’s ear, and spoke to his love of music that takes you to another place. “Sometimes when I’m playing, I get into that trance-like state where I can start thinking about other things because the groove is so repetitive. Ideas always pop into my head and then I’ll write them down. And a lot of times if I go out to see music, sometimes the music inspires me to think about what I’m doing in the confectionery world.”