I grew up at the Jersey shore in Monmouth County (aka Springsteen Country) but moved to the Harrisburg, PA area with my mother just before starting high school. A few months prior to the move, I had begun fumbling around on my mother’s Yamaha acoustic guitar, finding notes that sounded ‘right’ while plucking along to MTV videos. The fumbling turned much more serious later that year when I heard a stereo version on an FM oldies station of The Beatle’s ‘Day Tripper’ completely void of vocals due to the broken stereo speaker in my bedroom. The riff, the thumping bass, the tom drum fills... I was hooked. Guitar, drums and The Beatles became an obsession.
I cut my teeth playing Beatle, Bowie and Billy Joel classics on drums and later guitar in my high school band Gravity's Pull. But it was during my late high school /early college years when I discovered Rush, The Allman Brothers, Frank Zappa and Phish as well as song crafters like Paul Simon, CSN and Joni Mitchell. Improvisation, composition and new chords soon became a focus. While earning a degree in Communication Studies from West Chester University in 2001 and landing a post production job at a television production company in Philadelphia, the economic collapse of 2009 afforded me the opportunity to make a career change to what I enjoyed most….music! I began teaching drums and guitar in 2010 while playing live gigs and landing side jobs composing music for cable networks and independent media projects (see MEDIA COMPOSITION page). I have since added ukulele to my teaching repertoire while continuing to perform throughout the Philadelphia area as a solo performer and with my acoustic duo Shady Groove. We perform every Tuesday evening at Autograph Brasserie in Wayne and I cohost an open mic that happens every Wednesday evening at the Glenside VFW.