We had an old Chickering baby grand piano.  I plinked around on it by ear, writing songs without words that are now lost.

In sixth grade, I started playing oboe in the middle school band and began classical piano lessons after school.  The piano lessons lasted until I discovered jazz in high school.  When I stopped, I was up to some intermediate Chopin, Brahms and Bach.  My favorite piece will always be Rhapsody No. 79 in G minor. Oboe was painful, but when I switched to alto sax halfway through seventh grade, I magically had the strongest tone.

My parents sent me to a private high school called Lakeside.  The jazz band needed a trombone player, so I took it up for a few months.  But then I transferred back to public school so I could rejoin my friends. I took sax lessons religiously throughout high school.  I was in the Garfield Jazz Band, one of the best high school bands on the west coast and perennial winner of national festivals.  There was a time when I practiced 2-3 hours a day - I was hooked on 50s and 60s bebop and loved improvising more than anything else. I was also constantly listening to rap, and it still dominates my music collection.

I also took up the bass in high school because most of my friends were great rock guitar players and none of them wanted to play bass.  One year I played the high school talent show - I learned Flea's slap solo to Stone Cold Bush by the Red Hot Chili Peppers - then people mistakenly thought I could play slap bass.  

Both of my sax teachers also had careers in classical music on other woodwinds - the second, Mike Davenport, taught me classical sax repertoire (a tiny universe of music from Europe in the 20s and 30s), prepared me for local competitions, and convinced me to apply to Oberlin Conservatory for classical saxophone performance. I got in.  I also, however, was accepted to Yale. My parents preferred Yale, of course. So I made a deal - I'd go to Yale, but first I'd take a year off to live in Seattle so I could get more experience playing in bands.

In 1995, I formed my own jazz quartet, and I started playing tenor sax in a few funk bands.  I was also exposed to the drumming scene in Seattle,  I started taking sabar drumming lessons (Senegalese) from Mapathe Diop, and Guinea djembe drumming for summer dance classes at the local community centers.  I also lived with a rock drummer and started learning the basics of playing a drum set.

Next year at Yale I dove into classical music again as part of becoming a music major - I was writing some classical music, and I also took classical upright bass lessons for a semester. I was obsessed with Beethoven's Symphonies...I bought the sheet music and used to read it while listening, and I once copied the first movement of the 7th Symphony out by hand.

My interest in African drumming led me to take lessons in Yoruba, a language from Nigeria.  In the summer after my sophomore year, I was lucky enough to be able to go study the language, culture and drumming at University of Ife in Nigeria.  The talking drum is amazing because the tonal patterns of the solos actually have semantic meaning - Yoruba is a tonal language.

In my junior year, I transferred to Stanford to study at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) as part of an undergraduate major called Music, Science and Technology.  I felt confined by Yale's music department, which was focused on classical music, especially esoteric 20th century classical music, to the exclusion of all else.  I started listening to a lot more electronica and learning about samplers by making beats on an mpc2000.  Although there were many reasons for this rather unusual school switch, the trigger was a single web page - Perry Cook, a former professor at CCRMA, made a physical model of the human throat and mouth that could actually synthesize singing of vowel sounds - with sliders on the page that could modify the parameters.  Blew my mind.

At Stanford, I studied sound synthesis and sound analysis, and started to gain an appreciation for the recording process after playing around in the studio with my friends' bands.  I also started to think I might want to work in the recording industry after school, so I started to research the major label industry, but what I found discouraged me from moving to LA to pursue that dream.

During my junior summer, I worked testing movie previews in Seattle and learned a bit about market research.  For an independent project my senior year I came up with a business model for testing music on the Internet.  As 1999 was a fashionable time to start your own company right out of school, I launched SphereMedia.  We tested music for five mid-size labels via online radio, but when it came time to convince the major record labels to pay for the research, we failed to sell them.  And then the stock market collapsed, VC funding dried up, and I closed up the business.

My next stop was San Diego.  MusicMatch hired me to be the product manager for their new online radio network.  The timing could not have been better - they had recently secured distribution deals with HP and Dell and within a few years more than 30 million copies of the MusicMatch Jukebox found their way on to new computer desktops.  The many fun aspects of my job included designing the automated system to build personalized playlists (ArtistMatch), access to a library of tens of thousands of albums, managing listening tests for different audio codecs, and eventually, managing the full MusicMatch Jukebox software product.

While in San Diego for two years, I came to terms with my waning interest in jazz.  I acquired recording equipment and started recording friends in my apartment.  I decided my goal was to record albums as a top priority, and play live in bands second.  I signed up for the Recording Connection program, a paid mentorship that included weekly visits to a recording studio (TrackStar Studios) for hands-on training.

 

My roommate in San Diego promoted drum 'n bass at a local club. Around this time I went deep into UK electronica and started buying vinyl from labels like Warp and Rephlex.  The scene was already dying in the UK, but was still percolating through Califronia. 

 

Once I saved up enough money, I moved back to Seattle and opened a recording studio on Rainier Ave called Vent Studios.  My clients were mostly recording hip-hop or rock.  I also started making and shopping my own hip-hop beats. Vent Studios had steady business for a few years, but then fell on slow times.  I went back to a day job, first at Amazon in a non-entertainment position, and then I moved over to Microsoft to work on the new Zune music download store. 

 

While in Seattle I played bass steadily - first in a hard rock band called Civilized Animals, then in a Latin band called Beat Congress, and finally in the indie pop band Terrene. 

 

Near the end of 2004 I left Microsoft and started Wax Orchard, which would not exist if I was not moved for the first time in years by the sound of Paul Kimble's album "Crawl". I had to amplify the message in this music and do something to help it spread.  I partnered with Static Factory, a versatile design firm which had assited me with album art design in the past.  We ended up signing four bands and, in another excellent turn of events, Koch offered us a national distribution deal while we were at SXSW.

 

In 2005, I came to New York and started attending Columbia Law School. Wax Orchard released a dozen albums, and continued until 2008, when we ran out of steam. During the day, I worked as an entertainment attorney for a large midtown firm, and I continued to produce music in my spare time with local musicians in my home recording studio in Murray Hill.

In 2013, I left New York and the law firm to take a biz dev job in the Bay Area. My own music production slowed dramatically after the move as other interests took priority. From 2014-2018, I worked on engineering and co-producing John Dylan's album (all songs written and performed by John Mulhausen, former lead singer for Terrene). I expect the album to be released in 2020.