I started to play the piano when I was about eight years old. I learned from a local piano teacher who taught me the basics. It wasn't until about five years later however that I really got into playing, when I moved schools and started learning with a teacher who taught me ragtime, boogie woogie and blues. In my teens I played in many different bands and experimented with different styles of music, including rock, funk, pop and metal. I first worked professionally in covers bands called Boot-Led Zeppelin and The Cosmic Charlies (a Grateful Dead/Phish covers band) This gave me a good grounding in rock music and kept me going for the better part of three years. Covers can only take you so far however and I started to hunger for something else.
I started listening to jazz in my early twenties and slowly became more and more interested and influenced by the sound. At the time, I was playing in an originals rock band called Hubble Deep Field and my change in musical direction started to cause some problems in the band. I increasingly wanted to stray from the typical rock structures of the songs we tended to play and experiment with the chords often found in jazz but seldom found in rock music. Consequently I found myself at musical odds with the other band members. It was at this time that I was starting to play along to Bill Evans and Oscar Peterson records. It wasn't long until I decided that this was the direction I wanted to head in.
Since then I have listened to numerous other jazz recordings and tried to soak up as much as possible, learning from them and forging my own style. It has taken me some time to find a group of like minded musicians that I feel a real sense of musical cohesion with. I have a quartet comprised of myself on piano, Brandon Allen on tenor sax, Yaron Stavi on double bass and Jon Scott on drums. We have been playing many gigs and easing into a nice old school jazz style that will grow and develop the more we play together. We recently played a jazz festival in Trutnov, Czech Republic, called Jazz-i-nec which pulled a full crowd of over 300 people. We are looking to further develop our sound and repertoire and hope to evolve musically the more we play together.