UPDATED SEP 2023:
Bass Roster:
Hit me up with your project ideas or gig subs, I love meeting new folks and play all kinds of styles. I play both fretted and fretless, and fretless is primary and preferred. Here's a couple of quick audio snippets, This is just me slopping around with Logic Pro or some rough live videos from various places. I haven't had much time to get serious about bass recordings... more coming soon.
Youtube playlist of various samples (“demo reel”):
MORE
Even though I ended up with a career in software, music has been my passion and front and center in my life since I was 6.
I grew up playing clarinet and saxophone, and with my mediocre grades, clarinet got me into UC Berkeley. I switched to piano once I got there, and piano has been my primary instrument ever since - although recently replaced with bass. I finished Berkeley with a BA in music, with a focus on composition and jazz theory.
Here's my clarinet audition tape, which I digitized and added to a family video many, many years later. It's Paul Hindemith's Clarinet Sonata, recorded in 1987 in Boston, MA. The video is a from a family trip to the Oregon coast in 2012:
From 1998 to about 2008 I started playing guitar and writing songs. You could call this the singer/composer phase of my life. 90% Garbage, but it's a lot of original songs and would be cool to reuse/improve some of them in a band setting.
Over the years I also messed around with electronica, Logic Audio on my macs, and studio work.
Here's a spotify playlist of the "least worst of" all this effort:
After many years away from the piano, I got back into it in 2010, with a focus on unlearning all the theory and rules of music. (I was also playing a lot of drums during this time)
In 2014 I released a dissonant, free improv solo piano album, recorded in one pass over a few days on a steinway.
As a nerd test, I decided to name many of the tracks popular SEO search phrases (at the time) just to see if there would be any uptick in hits and streams. AND THERE SURE WAS for a couple of the tracks. :) Life is weird.
This album is difficult. It was difficult to play, and it's difficult to listen to. Sorry about that.
In 2016 I enlisted the help of Ted Poor and Carmen Rothwell and went back to the studio for more free improv/jazz. My goal with this effort was to avoid sounding like a traditional jazz piano trio, and instead sound like... just a trio, where no one instrument was the leader. I also wanted to throw out all of the jazz rules around solos, playing the heads, etc, and I even wanted to throw away some intrinsic musical rules around tempo, meter, and general structure.
These tunes all feel "partial" or "incomplete". As a result I named the album "quarter dances".
Here's a video snippet from this studio session.. although this track did not make it into the final release :) (Monk's Think Of One)
In 2018 I pulled together a whole bunch of out takes from everything above and called it The 5th Time is Probably Not The Charm. Many of the tracks are designed as long loops. This album also spans multiple decades and jumps around between the early 1990's, the mid 2000's, and the late 2010's. Whole bunch of Fender Rhodes goin' on here...