My Musical Background

While the guitar is my primary performing instrument and the one I'm most technically proficient at, it was not the first instrument I played. My father played saxophone and clarinet with the big bands back before WW2, so naturally a clarinet was put in my hands at an early age. It stayed there long enough for me to learn how to make music with a reed instrument, that didn't hurt your ears. As an aside, guitar aficionados may recognize what the guitar to the right is (was) before I completely ruined it's value by drilling holes in it decades ago. It must have been my youthful exuberance that compelled me ;-)

Next up was the piano. We always had a piano in the house and both of my older sisters were taking lessons, so naturally, I wanted to also. My father, who was getting a 2 for 1 bundle deal for my sisters with the local piano teacher, and being a fine musician himself, opted to teach me instead. As it turns out, it was my initially small time spend with the piano that truly unlocked a world of possibilities for me.

I learned to read music on the piano, but more importantly, I discovered harmony, chords, scales, modalities, the relationship of chords, circle of fifths, all this crazy stuff that I didn't know had names, but heard in my young head. As time went on in my musical life I made sense of it all, and although I quit my studies early and never came close to the technical abilities of my older sister, for me, the piano was an epiphany.

I write all my music on a keyboard, unless of course, it's a solo guitar piece. When transposing, I see a keyboard in my mind, not a fretboard. Same thing for chords and chordal extensions. The piano keyboard imprinted itself on my brain when I was very young and I don't think it's going anywhere, anytime soon.

Black & Whites

Then came the drums. My family moved to Long Island when I was 13 years old. One of my new friends had just joined a fife, drum, & bugle corps and he encouraged me to join also. He quit shortly after he joined, but I stuck with it. Until I wrote this, I had completely forgotten how hard I worked for those years to make the drum line.

The corps rehearsed two nights a week during the winter at a local elementary school, but for me and the few other newbies, it was sitting at a desk learning, and then practicing, an endless list of rudiments on the formica desk top.

On go the lights,..

Who Doesn't Love Drums?

Why formica? Because formica is very bouncy and with the heavy "S" type drum corps sticks we were learning on, the height of the rudiments mattered. The higher, the better.

Eventually my desk was moved into the gym, off to the side, and I began to learn the songs and play to them on my desk top. This went on for a long time. It was late into my second winter I think, when I showed up for rehearsal and went to drag the desk into the gym, that I found an old snare drum and harness sitting on the desk. I was still off to the side, but now I was playing a real drum and working on my form. As the winter waned we moved outside and started marching around the parking lot and by late Spring I was fitted for a uniform. I had made the drum line and was officially a member of the Commack Chiefs Fife Drum & Bugle Corps. The parades, competitions, and outings were all great experiences and I stayed a member until they disbanded due to lack of funding. Strange, after all these years, I still remember the old street beat we marched to.

Drums also run in the family. My long time friend, brother in law, and best man at my wedding, Bill Donnelly, is also an accomplished drummer and teacher who I've played with in bands and who has also played with many top notch artists. Despite my father's reluctance to allow a drum set in the house, I always thought that I would wind up being a drummer in a rock band. So what happened?

Move Over Rover,...

Let Jimi take over!

So, for those of you not familiar with the above lyrics, they are from the song "Fire" off of Jimi Hendrix's 1967 US debut album "Are You Experienced". While it was not that particular song per se, several of the songs off that album changed the direction of my musical life forever.

Even though it was many decades ago, I still remember it quite clearly. I was in my room doing homework, listening to NYC's premier FM radio station at the time, WNEW. They would play entire sides of newly released albums, and on this night it just happened to be Jimi Hendrix's "Are You Experienced". Right from the opening of Purple Haze, my pen was down and my full attention was on the radio. The whole first side blew my mind, as I had never heard guitar used in such exotic ways.

The first two cuts of the first side were interesting enough, but it was songs like "Love or Confusion", "May This Be Love" and "I Don't Live Today" that really got my attention. Interesting chords, echo, feedback, powerful solos, it was difficult for me to process what I was hearing at that time.

Then on side two came "The Wind Cries Mary". It was like the calm eye in the center of the musical hurricane I was listening to. A simple, melodic song with a beautiful chordal solo.

By the time I made it through "Third Stone From The Sun" and finished with the title track "Are You Experienced", that was it, my jaw was on the floor. I had to know how to make all those sounds and I knew at that moment, that I was going to learn how to play guitar. So I saved every penny from my part-time job working in a fish market and bought myself a cheap, department store electric guitar, and a small amp with an 8" speaker. From there I've progressed through an almost endless number of guitars and amps on the never ending journey known as learning to play an instrument. For the above picture, I opted to use a guitar that I made myself, and used exclusively on my debut album "The Universe Explained" available on Bandcamp.

I could no doubt go on and on about all the musical twists and turns my life has taken, but the short version is that there probably isn't a musical genre that I haven't visited at length at some point in my life, other than opera. With guitar, it started with rock, but veered into jazz fusion, bop, finger-style acoustic, to country, and by country I mean not only the current crop of hot Nashville players, but the originators like Chet Atkins. From there it swings into compositions ranging from orchestral tone poems, to electronic ambient pieces, and even some solo piano works. So yeah, I would say it's hard to stick a pin into where I belong in the musical spectrum.