Biography
I grew up in a musical family and started playing music myself at age 5. Originally I played ukelele and piano and later transitioned to guitar and piano. I took years of lessons on both instruments until 6th grade, when I focused on French horn and school band. By 8th grade I was playing piano in the junior high school jazz band, and in high school I played French horn in band and orchestra, piano in the jazz band and guitar and keys with The Distractions, my first "real band" that actually played a few paying gigs around Austin in the early 80's.
After high school I played with the Austin Community College jazz ensemble (led by Dr. Robert Wilson), Triktrax (fusion jazz band that became a funk band), rock cover band Stuck in Neutral (which made the 1985 Austin Chronicle "top 10 cover bands" list), and a few other bands here and there. In the mid 1980's David Nather and I collaborated on several cassettes of original music and performed some live gigs under the band name "Hello". Andrew Wimsatt was the recording engineer on those cassette demos.
In the late 80's I joined the Ken Ragsdale Orchestra (little big band) which had been gigging around Austin since the early 1960's. I stayed with the Ragsdale band for 8 years into the mid 90's.
In 1989 I released "electrophonic", my first professional grade original music release, to favorable reviews, and in 1990 I collaborated with Andrew Wimsatt on his "Reflections" cassette release, and in 1991 I released "The Illusion of Competence" cassette. From 1991 to 1996 I played with Ragsdale and worked on tracks for a followup release. I compiled the best of the 90's tracks on the CD "Lost In Time" which was released in 1996.
Sometime in the mid 90's I started playing with Java Jazz, and in the late 90's I was a founding member of UnderCover (rock cover band). I continue to play with both of these bands around the Austin area.
Throughout the late 80s into the early 00's the Hidden Agenda side project crept along in the shadows: a loose collaboration between a few prefer-to-be-anonymous friends and anyone that happened to be standing alone when the record button was pressed. The Hidden Agenda "collective" produced several albums of less-than-respectable music, the most commercial of which can be found in the Music That Hurts and Topographic Pictures Of the Crimson Lamb's Tears CDs.
In 2008 after several years of work I completed the blues CD "Respectable", moved to Bryan and started playing with Grupo Luigi (jazz) and playing other shows with Andrew Wimsatt and John Orozco.