We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Mitch Hampton. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Mitch below.

Mitch , thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

Probably the project with the highest value and meaning for me has been my arts podcast. My unusual childhood and adolescence in which I was exposed to the largest variety of performing arts in New York City and a good ten to twenty years spent reading many books, largely from the so-called canon, made me want to share with the wider world what I have learned from all of that. Additionally, I developed an insight, roughly after September 11th, concerning the essential unity of all of he arts and culture.

Mitch , love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I originally had wanted to be mainly a popular and/or jazz pianist and for some time in the 1980s until the mid 1990s I did that for a living. Under the influence of a classical composer, who felt that composing music for the “classical” concert hall was most important I pursued that for a decade or so, culminating in getting to perform my very own piano concerto in NYC at Lincoln Center. Unfortunately this period did no last, a rift developed between me and the man whose idea was it for me to pursue this particular career in music and I had to reinvent myself in the 00s. I decided to go back to the simplicity and immediacy of the solo piano and worked on developing a style of piano performance and composition that was heavily influenced by American popular music from a lot of the 20th century.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

I want there to be a large scale societal realization that consciousness, in particularly the interiority that comes with consciousness, is a real thing and cannot and is not in any way duplicated by anything coming from the world of tech in general, bots and computers in particular. I also would like people to see that artistic creation is the most direct expression of the nature of our inner selves, more than most other fields and occupations of which I can think.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

The most rewarding has been the ability to allow creative people to get their work out there, to help them express themselves fully without any pushback or barrier – at least for the moment they are on my show -and to make visible the arts’ inevitable diversity to be showcased together, with less boundaries and separation.

Contact Info:

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