About Me

The Tony Ultimate Story

Tony Ultimate began studying the violin at age 7, taking private lessons and studying at the Third Street Music School Settlement in New York City. He also studied music theory and composition there with Tom Manoff; another student in the class was Rhys Chatham, who became a well known composer in New York’s downtown arts scene. Tony was concertmaster of the Stuyvesant High School Orchestra in his senior year, then took music courses at Northwestern University and played in the orchestra there. (Other members of the orchestra at the time included Steve Rodby, who became the bass player for Pat Metheny, and Arnold Roth, who became concertmaster of the Mannheim Steamroller orchestra.) He took composition lessons with David Noon, a student of Mario Davidovsky. Later he studied composition and theory at the Mannes College of Music, then an independent conservatory on Manhattan’s East Side, and played in the orchestra there under Carl Bamberger and Semyon Bychkov.

Tony began playing the guitar when he was about 13 years of age. His first inspiration was his mother, Ina Alterman, who learned to play on her own, picking folk songs out of Alan Lomax’s collection Folk Songs of North America. In 1978, while studying composition at Mannes, Tony and his brothers formed a rock band called The Vegetables; he and his brother Eric wrote original songs for the group, and they played twice at CBGB’s and a did few other gigs before breaking up in 1982.

Around that time Tony began writing and learning material to perform with an acoustic guitar. He joined the People’s Music Network and met professional folk musicians like Charlie King, Fred Small and Pete Seeger. His first public performance was at a music festival sponsored by the Park Slope Food Coop. At a bar in Park Slope he met James Reams, a bluegrass guitarist who was also starting to play out; he went on to form James Reams and the Barnstormers.

One day at PMN Tony played a new and somewhat challenging fingerstyle song called “The Captain of My Life” (subtitled “Sailor’s Snug Harbor”) at a PMN gathering; he did not know that Seeger was in the audience, but after the performance Pete approached him and related that his grandfather had lived at Snug Harbor, and the song had brought back memories for him. The song became the third track on the first Tony Ultimate album.

With the help of 13 musicians, many of them friends, Tony recorded his first album, Sunshine Through Hasty News, which was released in 1998. He subsequently toured the coffeehouses in and aroun d the New York area, including the People’s Voice Cafe, the Postcrypt Coffeehouse (Columbia U.) and the Mine Street Coffeehouse in New Brunswick, NJ. After the Postcrypt performance Tony was interviewed and performed live on Columbia’s WKCR-FM.

Marriage, children and a Ph.D. program in philosophy limited the time Tony could devote to music over the next decade. He began recording his second album around 2007, but it went very slowly for a long time. In 2013 Tony and his wife purchased a house in Brooklyn, and by 2017 he had put together his studio, the Bay Ridge Sound Underground, with facilities for recording his new material. This led to his second album, Earth to America; recording was mostly completed by November 2022, and after professional mixing, mastering, and artwork by his daughter Emily, the album was released digitally on September 29, 2023 and the CD on November 29, 2023.

Beginning in 2018 Tony became a frequent performer at the Greenhouse Cafe in Brooklyn, playing songwriter sets every few months; he also plays at open mics around town.