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what a long, strange
trip...
My love of music is my first conscious memory. My
parents put the AM radio on in the car, and we sang along with our favorites.
Mom loved old musicals, and that's why so many jazz standards were familiar to
me before i studied jazz. Mom also had a wicked sense of humor; from her and
with her i learned how to laugh at nearly anything...
Dad loved Wagner, Brahms and Hee Haw. He instilled in me a lifelong sense of
music as something serious and important, but we also laughed at Grandpa Jones
and admired Buck Owens and Roy Clark. I learned early on that there is always
something worth hearing in any musical genre, and i learned that even corny
humor made me laugh.
I learned music on the guitar during a time when most Top 40 hits could be
played and sung with a single guitar and voice. I learned hundreds of songs and
wrote scores of my own, mostly bad, but in time i got better...
Jazz was always nagging at me, so in 1991 i enrolled in the Cornish College of
the Arts in Seattle, Washington. I studied jazz piano with Randy Halberstadt and
Dave Peck, and classical piano with Dr. Peter Mack. I had further studies in
jazz with Hadley Caliman, Jerome (Jerry) Gray, Julian Priester, Jim Knapp and
many others.
In 2005 i released IMPROMPTUS, a collection of free jazz improvisations for solo
piano. My latest efforts are RELAX and ONWARD! (original mainstream and standard
jazz), plus RESPONSE ABILITY, a collection of free jazz improvisations for trio
and quartet.
Currently i live in Miami, Florida, USA, with my wife and lots of cats. I teach
private lessons on guitar and piano through Hammocks Middle Community School,
and play regularly at Le Moulin du Grove in Coconut Grove.
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