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“Brilliant could easily describe recording artist Jordon Rothstein” – Beyond Race Magazine

Welcome to Vegan Folk-Jazz-Rock Composer, Poet and Visual Artist Jordon Rothstein, A.K.A. Mascot’s Distance.

Please click on the link below to take a look at a book Jordon wrote featuring his poems and artwork called Black And White Night Owls.

To enroll in the Jordon Rothstein Piano School please send an email to jordon.rothstein@gmail.com or call 917 796 2881

Jordon who scored a feature film starring Hugh Jackman has also worked closely with Deep Purple’s Ian Gillan, Brittany Murphy, Dan The Automator of The Gorillaz and actor Taye Diggs, and has recently released a 10 song collaborative instrumental Funk Retro Hip Hop album on Spirit Music Group, (Spirit Music Group is a major label home to Jay-Z, Pink, Boz Scaggs and many more).

Jordon is currently teaching piano and playing jazz, funk and blues in a few bands around the tri-state area while gearing up to start performing his Folk-Jazz-Rock Originals. In addition he released a collaborative album on March 1st entitled Drapes Of Magic. The project is called Patchouli Brothers which features Jordon and artist Shu Nakamura. Please click here to listen!

Open Fields and Alleyways

Thing About Her

Thank you for visiting artist Jordon Rothstein of “Mascot’s Distance” .

Gigs….

-2020 Shows featuring Jordon’s original music TBA

Past shows…

Fall and winter of 2019 and January and February of 2020- Numerous jazz concerts at assisted living facilities in the Tri-State area.

Every Saturday night from May 2017 – June 2019 at AYHAN’S MEDITERRANEAN. On the Corner of Main Street and Shore Road in Port Washington Long Island.

Featured Jazz organist in Jazz sextet Magic Bean at Bean and Bean.  Friday June 24h, at 8pm.  No cover, located at 210-21 Northern Blvd, Bayside, NY 11361 

Featured Jazz organist in Folk Jazz group Blue Dream at Bean and Bean.  Friday May 27th, at 8pm. No cover, located at 210-21 Northern Blvd, Bayside, NY 11361

-Mascot’s Distance at Merryall Playhouse on Saturday May 16th at 8pm. $15 cover, located at 8 Chapel Hill Road, New Milford, CT 06776

-Mascot’s Distance at the Cutting Room One set show. Saturday August 29th at 8pm. $20 cover, located at 44 E 32nd St, New York, NY 10010

Down featuring Allie Moss of Ingrid Michaelson band

At 1:00 am 30 stories above the city street a light is flickering in a window. I imaginge some lonesome resident watching the tele, or working on a computer.
And I’m looking up imagining what ti’s like inside that apartment. Is there someone there to which I could relate? Or just a program designed for what the inside of a home looks like from without?
And then a bus passes by and I’m looking at a store front with a beautiful manikin stairing back at me, dressed in the latest fashion
How I wish I could paint with words.
To express ones inside in the hopes that someone might feel the same and from that sameness find comfort.
You know Winslow’s made me cry twice, does that make sense?
Abstract pause……
I want to go somewhere with this like the way classical music sounds coming thru a tiny cracked radio,
or the hope I feel when I wake up from a vivid dream that wasn’t a nightmare.
I want to go somewhere with no direction, just movement, no destination, none that can be reached at least.
Feeling unfettered and freedom at last..what? oh i thought u said something.

Yes unleashed like a beautiful yearning for the color in a black and white sunset that doesn’t exist anyway. And the world behind the mirror.
And small talk with meaning which is easy to understand.
Then to tap a spring and feed a well and grow in a field and wait no longer for a love that’s been dangled like a carrot for to long, just around the corner, one more second if only I tried a little harder, is it now in reaching distance?
And then just the fog of a damp spring evening.
The doorman all on the watch and the suburbanites in there trucks on their way home.
Back to there far away perches, where they can see the city with some prespective, different from us i imagine.
Us the dust, the dirt, the sturdy, the broken yet working, the usual crowd, the ones in the stairwell who see by different vision, and never think to ask, yet rather choose to wait it out.
All the while knowing I could do better.

Reviews by – Marco Passarelli
http://www.musictap.net/CapsuleReviews/PassarelliCapsules1006.html

-It would be too easy to write off Jordon Rothstein and Mascot’s Distance as disciples of Ben Fold Five or Keane. Sure, they all boast guitar-less line ups and ultra catchy melodies but that is as far as the comparisons should go. Mascot’s Distance is quickly becoming a staple on the NYC singer/ songwriter scene and this EP gives ample proof of the band’s talents; which are considerable. Musically, they venture into the jazz-inflected pop realm of Steely Dan, complete with all of the dark humor.
Vocalist/ pianist Jordan Rothstein even displays the sometime deadpan vocal quirks of Donald Fagan or Lou Reed. Bassist Joe Burcaw and drummer Yutaka Uchida provide a swinging, and yet thoroughly driving, back drop on “Avenue B” and “Talk Show Circuit”. Highly recommended. Go to www.mascotsdistance.com for more information.

Toad show review by Robert Whyte…
http://www.toadshow.com.au/rob/01_cms/details.asp?ID=400
Mascot’s Distance – Music is such sardonic sorrow…

-At last an original sound in that spiny, sparkling streak of sardonic American music occupied by Steely Dan. Like that sinuously sardonic duo, Mascot’s Distance have pinned their barbs, bitter but somehow optimistic, on the sacred donkey of popular music. There’s more than one sting in those tales. Over the pond, the use of seductive hooks and jazz influenced energy featured in the great work of the Style Council.

The characteristics I am identifying in this triumvirate (Steely Dan, Style Council, Mascot’s distance) — which to some people might sound like a triumvirate of Paris (yes), New York (yes) and Muswellbrook (huh?) is a synthesis of jazzy, poppy melody hooks with lyrics like acid-etched fingernails across the blackboard of the brain. Never without humor, but always with a glittering glimpse of the darker side of apple-pie and picket-fence America. The use of sweet chords and rhythms combined with bitter lyrics, a hallmark of Steely Dan and Style Council, is a pervasive thread in the efforts of Mascot’s Distance. The USA, thought by many to be an irony-free zone, has once again been proven otherwise.

I write this on the occasion of Mascot Distance’s second release simply known as “The New EP”.
Mascot’s Distance is a three piece outfit from New York City led by songwriter/producer Jordon Rothstein (keys and vocals), Yutaka Uchida (drums and backing vocals) and Joe Burcaw (bass and backing vocals.

Talk Show Circuit is a rollicking ditty taking a swipe at that most evil of cultural phenomenon, the tell-all talk show. It starts with a keyboard intro reminiscent of the “music box” intro from King Harvest’s one and only hit, “Dancin’ in the Moonlight”. Jordon plays harmonica and fuses that skipping, breathy sound with keys.

All Man’s Land has telling echoes of Donald Fagen’s 1950s “future” evoking those spandex (Brand X) jackets in IGY. Hammond XB2 organ through a rotating Leslie speaker, combines with bass and drums and piano somewhat reminiscent of Nicky Hopkins when he played with Quicksilver Messenger Service. The song is fashioned from one of those lazy, rising, spiralling progressions, seeming to climb higher and higher, giving it a strange, pervasive exuberance.

Chesterville, is more like the piano/vocal tunes featuring on the previous album, a full length CD just called Mascot’s Distance. The band comes in after the first verse, and the instrumentation builds. The bass resonates with a doubled vocal and a nice choir of ooh aah backing vocals.

Avenue B. There is a very strange idea in this Randy Newman-esque song with a hint of the circus morning weather” and proposes that if you were to spend time in the cellar during the week, relinquishing your weekday sunshine, you could get that stored sunshine on to the weekends. Quiet interludes of strange observations lead about it. Jordon sings: “saving up for weekend to thumping chordal choruses, filled with shimmering high hats. Hand claps start the song (gotta love hand claps).
All in all a very fine effort with much to recommend keeping a watch on this band for future offerings.

Robert Whyte’s Review Of Mascot’s Distance’s album Chasing Pixie Dust On A Cheese-a-Cycle…

Salvation!

This is a record that restores your faith in American music. Driven by (or unleashed, it seems) by Jordon Rothstein’s piano, Mascot’s Distance are “Chasing pixie dust on a cheese-a-cycle”, and so you should too. 



This is unselfconsciously tender Americana. This band were leading this field of “get back to the music, please, and never mind the bollocks”. With this album they are rocking it out. 



The new album takes a couple of the top-shelf songs from the early EP (Avenue B, All mans land) and puts them together with a full degustation menu of tasty courses.

Mascot’s Distance has grown from a New York City three piece outfit led by songwriter/producer Jordon Rothstein (keys and vocals) to become an internationally flavoured foursome. Jordan and Yutaka Uchida (drums and backing vocals) are joined by new bassist Danny Zanker and guitarist Laurent Medelgi. The new members bring France, England and Israel to Japan and NYC. 



There are more hard rocking numbers this time out, if hurdy gurdy, folky, soft-pop jazz stylings can be called hard rocking. Of course it can. The trademark Jordan R. mix of light and shade, from rollercoast ride to tender breakdowns is up front on “Chemical cloud and the dome we live in”, the lead in track. The slicing guitar fills out the sound wonderfully. This is future Americana. You’ll need a time machine to understand the lyrics. Which is as it should be. Order one from eBay.



Laurent’s lyrical guitar on “Alley’s general store” show his jazz chops. Very Mike and Leni Stern with Larry Carlton’s better moments. Funky. The song is reminiscent of the Traffic era when Dave Mason was licking HIS chops. A great outro, worth the price of the song on its own.



I have written about “Avenue B.” before. But this doesn’t make it any less strange, with its quiet interludes of peculiar, insightful observations leading to thumping choruses filled with shimmering high hats. It’s a little like walking into a 40s movie half way through and wondering what these odd people are doing. It gives you the freedom to make up your own beginning to the story. 



“All Man’s Land” is another futuristic trip. And I mean trip. When you “touch down in the solar-powered your sister got” your head becomes stuck in a crystal ball. You can predict the suture across the crack in time. 



“You just don’t know” is another absolute cracker, very muscular guitar giving it a lean and hungry feel. The stand out track for me is “Tenafly and the ghost of Mississippi” which is just so plain irreverent you wonder how they get away with it. It is epic, yet covering the tiniest of moments, like a 3am closeup of a drunk staring at the world in the shag pile.



“Pretty big trouble” is simply a hoot. Very much like, but not at all derivative of, The Band, which is appropriate after “Tenafly and the ghost of Mississippi” which is like The Band meets Pink Floyd after 15 rounds with a drunken blue rooster. It’s rockin’ ragtime, not a musical form easily mastered or often heard. You have to laugh, especially at the woeful life of the song’s protagonist, caught deeply in lust with a aging beauty queen. 



It probably is true that Mascot’s Distance is an acquired taste. So acquire it!