Serious as I was about that -- I thought it would be my career at the time -- it was another moment that foreshadowed my life as a musician. I was around 11 and had been taken into Wayne, Maine, a town near where I went to summer camp, to watch a parade. Leading the parade was the drum corps, and as those guys came marching toward me playing their snare drums, my entire metabolism changed forever. I begged my parents for a snare drum and acquired the rest of the set over the next couple of Christmases.

Soon after, I started playing drums in rock bands around Detroit before I discovered and subsequently took up the guitar. That led me to became a full-fledged guitar player and singer-songwriter and to drop out of the University of Michigan and head west to San Francisco to be near the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead and start a San Francisco rock band.

Of course, by then I'd dropped violin -- and my initial career dreams of a classical musical -- altogether. My San Francisco rock band, WINDOW, lasted for six years. During that time I became very interested in Jazz and started studying Jazz guitar with the one and only Bill Connors (first electric guitarist in Chick Corea's RETURN TO FOREVER), which changed almost everything about my technique and approach to music. I became a practice-aholic, sitting in front of my music stand for several hours every day.

Around that time, I also was introduced to Middle Eastern music by a great teacher from Iran who first put a dumbek -- a type of handrum -- into my hands. Since then I have spent a lot of time playing dumbek for belly dancers as part of several troupes.

When WINDOW ended, I started a progressive Jazz project called THURSDAY GROUP which soon moved from San Francisco to New York City, where we performed, recorded two albums and toured the U.S.

To say the least, it's been a pleasure to work with this band and watch it develop as we have built a repertoire of original music and performed around the city.

First Album

Uncle Mean