My piano playing is probably most directly influenced by Bud Powell and Thelonius Monk. Bud played the piano like a horn player, and I'm still a horn player in my head. The lesson of listening to Thelonius is to go ahead and play music the way you hear it in your mind, even if it doesn't match some pre-defined mold. I also greatly admire the music of McCoy Tyner, Wynton Kelly, Ruben Gonzales, Oscar Peterson, Herbie Hancock, Charles Mingus, Art Blakey, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Sonny Rollins, John Medeski, Lennie Tristano, Bill Evans, Ben Folds, Jack Johnson, Ray LaMontagne, Bjork, among too many others to list.
It's hard for me to say exactly how long I've been playing piano. I come from a musical family, both of my parents are musicians. Learning and singing songs was just something we did together for fun in my family. One year for Christmas I got a Casio keyboard. I used to tool around on that thing for hours. My parents paid for a few piano lessons here and there, but I didn't take much of an interest in it. My earliest memory of experimenting with jazz is quietly scat singing over the chords to "When the Saints Go Marching In" to myself while wandering aimlessly one sunny afternoon in the 6th grade. I started playing trumpet in my junior high school band. I remember I used to sometimes close my eyes and compose some hard swinging big band arrangements in my head. I remember thinking how cool it would be if I could take the sounds I heard in my head and play them on an instrument.
I stuck with trumpet into high school, which is when I first really started getting into jazz. At first I was attracted to big band stuff, Glenn Miller, Duke Ellington, Count Basie. Watching Harry Connick Jr.'s band on a PBS TV special was an epiphany for me. Later I started to learn about be-bop, started listening to Miles, Bird, Dizzy, Coltrane, Monk, Mingus. By my sophomore year I had realized there wasn't anything I would rather spend the rest of my life doing than learning to play jazz.
I was accepted into the jazz studies program at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle. It was at Cornish where I first began seriously practicing the piano. In the middle of a difficult embouchure change on the trumpet, I think I realized that piano was the instrument I had always secretly dreamed of learning how to play. I decided to focus my energy on learning this new instrument.
It would take me years to realize how valuable an experience Cornish actually was. At the time I felt utterly frustrated, I was just starting to learn a new instrument, and I was going to school with people who had been playing their instruments since childhood. But I still gained a great deal from the amazing faculty they had there. I studied music theory with composer and arranger Jim Knapp. I got some one on one time with Jim while he was my trumpet teacher. I also studied piano and music theory with Randy Halberstadt. Randy has a book out now that's doing very well called "Metaphors for the Musician." Randy also turned me onto the man who had been his teacher, Jerome Gray. I studied with Jerome for a while in addition to my studies at Cornish.
After a couple years at Cornish, my life took a different direction. I felt the need to take a break from the music for a while, during which time I began pursuing another career, this time as a chef. I washed dishes at a restaurant in high school, and into my freshman year at college. I got promoted from dishwasher to prep cook, and from there to line cook. I used this experience to get a couple of other restaurant jobs. The year I turned 21 I was cooking at a 24-hour greasy-spoon, hipster hangout for the Seattle "grunge" crowd, right across the street from where the music building was at Cornish.
I made a succession of career moves into increasingly more higher end restaurants, and eventually worked my way into fine-dining. I moved to San Francisco to get exposure to the restaurant scene here. I was the sous chef at a Michelin-starred restaurant called Acquerello for two years. I went from having started out washing dishes part time in school to running the kitchens I worked in. After Acquerello I took a job as Chef de Cuisine at the Thirsty Bear Brewing Company, another landmark San Francisco restaurant.
After some 15 years of working in the restaurant industry, something was nagging at me. Some aspect of my being wasn't being nourished. I got into cooking because I thought it would be a way for me to have a career where I could still express myself creatively. But the further I got into the restaurant business, the more I realized how little creativity plays a part in it, how much of a drag it is dealing with the day in, day out operation of a restaurant, the long hours, the stress.
And I think I eventually realized that foie gras and truffles just don't thrill me the way syncopated beats and extended harmonies do.
These days I still do some cooking for catering companies, but mostly I'm focused again on the music thing. I would like to get hired to play solo piano at restaurants, hotels, weddings, corporate events, and wherever someone would like to hear some jazz piano. I also play with a number of other musicians, whom with which I could perform as a duo, trio, or larger group. I have invested into a digital piano set-up with a very high quality speaker system. I'm also interested in exploring some of the more EP/funk end of the jazz spectrum. Have a listen to some of the tracks I've recorded and put in this page, enjoy, and feel free to comment. Thanks for stopping by!
"Eventually, in anyone's spiritual journey, it becomes necessary to stop separating one's reality into individual pieces and live, instead, one completely integrated life.
