About Me

When I was seven years old, I went to a neighbor's house to play with their kids. They had an old upright piano which I found interesting and began plinking around on. I think the kids' mom had a headache at the time and I probably wasn't helping with that.

What I didn't know until years later was that their mom called my mom and told her that rather than playing with the other kids I was playing their piano.

Apparently my parents took that call to heart as, seemingly out of the blue, they asked me one evening if I would like to take piano lessons. I thought for a moment, then said, "Sure." They rented an old but serviceable purple upright piano for a year, saying that if I stuck with it they'd buy a piano. I did and they did, a Baldwin Hamilton upright that was still in the family until my parents passed a few years ago.

I took lessons for ten years from four different teachers. Fortunately, the first teacher, Jacqueline Wan, taught a fair amount of theory and not just performance, using the Robert Pace Music for Piano series of books (I still remember the covers with the keyboard along the edge and the different color book each year), lots of sheet music and a combination of individual and group lessons. We learned to read and write music, to hear and identify intervals, then chords, then phrases. Along the way I'm sure I've forgotten a lot of Latin terminology, things like which cadence is which, etc., that got me through all the levels of testing from the Music Teachers' Association of California, but the parts I keep are the ones that let me listen to and tear apart music in my head, and later, to transpose on the fly, chart and arrange music for groups, identify complicated chords and harmonies and improvise solos and complements.

As I reached high school and my fourth teacher, I was playing the classics, sometimes at regional honors festivals and being judged on performances. The music was more challenging and fun to play, but the classical music crowd was too snooty for me and I liked to tinker with things, so I turned to jazz and pop music, playing in school jazz bands for a few years but eventually quitting because I didn't appreciate the obnoxious, smoking (in school) boxer (literally) that was running the band. I started getting my first musical jobs in high school, playing at a few parties and doing accompaniment for ballet schools. Just like my earlier experience with the classical crowd though, I found the ballet clique arrogant and unfriendly, and even though I was making decent money for the time while they were paying for my services, I gave that up.

I continued to play music through college, but it was easy to get uninteresting jobs and getting better jobs required stepping on other people which wasn't in my introverted nature. Despite people saying I should move to L.A. and get a job doing session recording or the like, I decided It would make more sense to get a “real” job and just play music on the side. So, I got a job that would force me to overcome my discomfort dealing with people and became a cop.

Fast forward a few decades of side gigs playing pop, jazz, smooth jazz, country and Christian music. I'd retired from my job in law enforcement and music was still out there. I went back to playing more frequently and even toured around the country for a while with a Neil Diamond tribute show.

The instruments have advanced over the years. Instead of playing acoustic pianos, my old trusty Fender Rhodes or Korg duo-phonic synthesizer, I'm playing Yamaha keyboards that can emulate thousands of different instruments and building patches with keyboard splits, layers and effects that allow me to really fill in the music, and control those patches by simply changing pages on the song without having to press any buttons. Sound systems have evolved as well, and I can now carry a digital mixer in a suitcase sized bag that can handle a few dozen inputs complete with equalizers, compression and effects and route anything anywhere, all from my phone or tablet. This kind of capability would have cost upwards of $100k when I was starting out, if it even existed.

I still gravitate toward pop, light rock, standards/jazz and country. I play solo gigs, small groups and have done some big band stuff. I can play anything I can hear in my head, read from sheet or comp from chords, meaning probably thousands of songs. Out of necessity I've learned to sing while playing over the years. Mostly harmonies, as that's where my mind leans anyway and as an offshoot of teaching singers their harmony parts by singing them, but I've also been singing some leads over the past few years. That's not really my comfort zone, but it's coming along.