Bio

Hometown:	Seattle
School:	Of Hard Knocks
Employer:	In my basement laboratory

I was born at the age of 11, and had to go back and live the first 10 years later on. It was quite disorienting. My initial musical tastes were quite adult, and as I grew smaller, I gradually developed a passion for simple children's songs. Then, I jumped ahead and spent the years from 13 to 21 listening to nothing but serial composers. That is an example of lying, which I am told I need to practice.

With a mixture of sadness, wonder, and the joy of a totally exciting discovery, I became an instant fanatic devotee of James Marshall Hendrix' music the night after his untimely death. I listened to almost nothing else for the next few years.

Later I got into jazz through Mahavishnu, leading back to Miles, Coltrane, etc.

Various fusions of 2 or more genres have always grabbed my ear, since first discovering McLaughlin in the early 70s.

I love Indian music, and collaborations of Indian musicians and western classical, jazz, and rock players, such as the Shawn Lane, Vinayakram Brothers, and Jonas Hellborg collaboration. Also I love Ravi Shankar with Yehudi Menuhin, and John McLaughlin with a variety of players such as Zakir Hussain and Debashish Bhattacharya.

More recently, I discovered modern classical (for want of a better term). I don't know much about it yet, but I love the music of Takamitsu, Shnittke, Frank Zappa (his symphonic as well as jazz, rock, etc), Schoenberg, Weburn, Penderecki, etc.

I've become a youtube junkie, spending quite a bit of time on guitar genius' Shawn Lane, Allan Holdsworth, Guthrie Govan, John McLaughlin, Jeff Beck, John Stowell, etc.

John Stowell is in my estimation, the most sophistocated guy out there in terms of modern harmonic concepts applied to jazz guitar. I'm excited to be working toward the launch of a website based on his teaching, which is called howtoplayjazzguitar.com.