Biography

Born in Washington D.C., I began to embrace music at a very young age. With my father being an accomplished jazz saxophonist, it wasn’t long before the musical gene was passed on to me. I spent hours listening to my father practice to the likes of Miles, Coltrane, Bird, and the who’s who of jazz, while at the same time embracing the Latin Jazz sounds of Sergio Mendes and Antonio Carlos Jobim. With this eclectic foundation of music under my belt a strange thing happened to me… and that strange thing was called “Jimi Hendrix”. Suddenly it was all about the guitar and psychedelic rock. I got my first guitar and quickly began performing in numerous rock bands covering artists like Eric Clapton (Cream), Terry Kath (Chicago), Jimmy Page (Zepplin), and the original Santana band. Later my interests would shift back towards r&b, soul and funk, only to make the ultimate migration to more progressive jazz-rock fusion artists like Chick Corea, Al Dimeola, John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra, and Weather Report. Oddly enough, as a youngster my first music teacher was Roberta Flack (of "Killing Me Softly" fame) who taught me when I was in the D.C. public school system. Years later I enrolled in college to study Music Education at Howard University (Wash. D.C), while simultaneously performing with my band, doing one-nighters up and down the east coast. Later I would head west to California to finish my education at San Jose State University where I studied classical and jazz guitar while performing throughout the San Jose area in various nightclubs. Distracted by life, I choose to put music on the back burner for awhile. But with any "true" musician, that “backburner” is never far away. Fortunately a new genre of music would draw me back onto the scene, “Smooth Jazz”. Which brings us to my debut CD, “Eclectic Fusion”. This project has allowed me to come full circle, whereas Smooth Jazz allows me to explore all of my musical roots: Jazz, R&B, Funk, Latin, Rock and Fusion, while blending it with a contemporary, upbeat, Smooth Jazz sound. I like to think of it as blending the “old school” with the "new school". I like to think of it as… “Eclectic Fusion”. Enjoy!