I was born in Teaneck, New Jersey, but I grew up in Southern California.  My first music gig was in the summer after my junior year in high school.  I played ragtime piano, incidental music, and the calliope (!) for the Birdcage Theatre at Knott's Berry Farm, an amusement park in Buena Park, CA.  They put on old-fashioned melodramas, but because the actors were professionals doing it as a day job between real acting gigs, and several of them were comedy writers for shows in LA (Steve Martin had worked there early in his career), the improvisation and in-jokes would accumulate through the six daily shows until the finale, which was usually hysterically funny and surreal, and often for mature audiences.  This was my introduction to the entertainment industry. 

A college music program and classical training in composition were weirdly inadequate preparation for going into the world as a musician, though it was good cover for working hard on learning banjo and fiddle, and I did get myself to Ireland for the fiddle part.  Somehow, a cassette tape of my senior recital (with Beethoven and Vivaldi played on a banjo, ragtime, and compositions for banjo and fiddle) ended up at Flying Fish Records in Chicago, who signed me.  A year after I graduated, I was producing my first album for international release, and I had never worked in a recording studio.  That was an education!  I made two records for them, Mysterious Barricades (1982) and Ellipsis (with Robert Kotta and William Pint, 1984).  Ellipsis put on a pretty good show, back in the day! For the second record, Flying Fish hired Irish music legend Micheál Ó Domhnaill to produce us, and that, in fact, really was an education.  It was a year-long effort, and he taught me most of what I know about making records. 

After Ellipsis broke up, I was freelance for several years, touring with other groups, and I began performing and composing music for live theater in Seattle.  That was when I began my decades-long collaboration with performance artist/juggler Thomas Arthur, eventually recording Handmade in 2006.  If you haven't seen his WhooshClang!, you should.  That was definitely my oddest piece of music, made mostly from BBC sound effects.  Most of the music I've made for Thomas is more like the two tracks from Handmade in the "music" section here on the site.

I had moved to San Diego in the late 80s and spent a couple of years in grad school at UCSD earning an MA in Music Composition.  During my time in grad school, I discovered the earliest example of African-American banjo music hiding in plain sight in the 1854 piano piece, The Banjo, by 19th-c. American composer, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, and published the article you can download on this site. I quit playing the modern banjo so I could devote myself to both building gourd banjos (in my version of the original fretless design) and mastering this entirely undiscovered roots music, while designing and teaching World Music courses (and others, from music theory to world history), starting in 1990, at Washington State University in Pullman, WA.  I believe that I am the only teacher there (or maybe anywhere) to introduce the transcription of Robert Johnson records into the 20th century music theory course, but it was a great assignment.  Jettisoned Stockhausen to do it.  I taught at WSU until 2009. 

I had set the banjo work aside for years for other projects, but dived back in, building a new instrument in 2010, and began preparing for recording and performing the music I had discovered in my research.  I also had to explore new repertoire--West African ngoni and akonting traditions, and pushing my envelope into Albeníz's Leyenda.  My 2016 CD American Akonting represents the culmination of my work on the gourd banjo. 

I have done a fair amount of record production for other artists, but have tried to clear my schedule recently to focus on my own work, in particular my opera, Cassandra. In recent years, I have worked in a remarkable range of venues, from performing the mandolin in the Washington-Idaho Symphony's staging of Mozart's Don Giovanni (February 2014) to performing my "Palouse ragas" on the Afghan rubab for restorative yoga here in my little town of Palouse, WA once a month.

Some other highlights...

In Fall 2007 I received a commission to compose music for a devotional service being created by the Common Ministry at Washington State University and University of Idaho for people of no particular religion. The result, Mosaic, was recorded in Spring of 2008 and the limited CD release is now sold out. In Spring of 2006 I released a CD of music I have composed for Seattle-based performance artist Thomas Arthur called Handmade. I’m also currently a member of a traditional Irish music band called “Potatohead,” which released a CD called Palouse Irish in 2005.  My choral piece Canntaireachd was accepted for publication in 2020 by Pavane Publishing in San Pedro, CA.

Someone told me recently that I should add my academic degrees to my bio... So, I received my BA in Music Composition in 1980 from Pomona College in Claremont, CA, and my MA in Music Composition from University of California, San Diego in 1990.  For what it's worth, I also earned my shodan ("black belt") in aikido from Shihan Mitsugi Saotome in 2003.  Besides performing for several years with William and Bob as “Ellipsis,” other groups that have performed my music include the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, Chanticleer, the Pacific String Quartet, and the Northwest Chamber Orchestra.