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Instrumental Music
I started off learning to play the flute at age eight with my teacher Mr. Steele at Dudley Stone School in San Francisco, CA. I was very nervous in my first solo PTA performance of Bridge over the River Kwai; I remember shaking in my shoes. Things got a little better after that. I later studied privately with Merrill Jordan, then Second Flute in the San Francisco Symphony; lessons continued for eight years or so. The purpose of study might be to one day occupy the seat of the master or one like it. This was not finally the direction I took but I learned a lot about the quality of sound and playing that would have been expected.
Rock and Roll
Growing up in the 1960s Haight-Ashbury you couldn't miss the bands Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company and Quicksilver Messenger Service. I was inspired to take up the electric guitar and find musician friends to jam with. I hoped to play some of my own music as a member of a band like those I admired. How do you do that? Sadly jam partners seemed to come and go with no particular commitment. Did I need to get better as a musician, present my ideas in more organized way? It hadn't occurred to me that in the music business, a signed recording contract etc. often served as the external binding necessary to keep an illusory idea of a band together. In my twenty-one-year old mind I thought love is all you need.
Back to School
Contemplation led to a five-year detour starting in 1975 through the music schools at City College of San Francisco and SF State University, focusing on flute playing and music composition. Requirements for graduation from music school are pretty much the same as they have been for the last hundred years. Instrumental performance majors like me, after receiving the standard academics, are groomed to play in the orchestra. As a flute player they didn't tell me that there may be two hundred others competing for that one available chair in a desirable organization. Not good odds. I quickly figured out there wasn't much work to be had outside of auditioning for a symphony orchestra job in a place I probably wouldn't enjoy living.
The Street and Beyond
In 1980 I was performing for tips at such SF locations as Ghirardelli Square, The Cannery and other spots along Fisherman's Wharf; at first with others in a duo, trio or quartet then later as a solo player doing flute concerti with taped Music-Minus-One orchestral accompaniment. Performing alongside and opposite clowns, jugglers and magicians is a perspective like no other. I did well at this for a time, but unfortunately ended up being limited to playing the same few pieces that were crowd pleasers. Inevitably I got burned out and that was the end of it. Fortunately the act of moving on opened the door to many years of performing regularly for weddings and events throughout the SF Bay Area, providing live ensembles featuring offerings of both classical and jazz. Over time, I had the pleasure of hiring and playing alongside top local professionals.
Electronic Music
In the early 70s I had made my first experimental recordings of guitar doing overdubs between two reel-to-reel tape machines. In 1981 I bought a Fostex 250 four-track cassette recorder and later in 1982 a Roland TR-606 Drum Machine. I began hearing music that really got me excited about the sounds you could make and compose with using a synthesizer. In 1985 I got my first synth, a Roland Juno 106, over time collecting a number of hardware synths and samplers made by Roland, Korg, Oberheim and others. By 2022, the available palette exploded to include an ocean of new soft synths, sampling libraries and specialized effect plugins, all running inside the box. My main DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) was Logic Pro X including plugins: Spectrasonic's Omnisphere 2.6, Native Instruments Komplete 12 Ultimate, The Korg Collection, U-he Synths and Effects. To a lesser extent I kept up with Ableton Live 10 and Propellerhead Reason Studio 11. There's been a tsunami of new plugins/libraries and sound sources showing up almost every day. Until recently I continued to compose, always endlessly fascinated with combinations of new sounds and timbres.
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