Bio:
Long story short:
This is the resume-style portion that no serious player's site seems to be without:
Currently active with:
Once active with:
Subbed in / appeared with:
Studio sessions for:
Arranging / transcribing / copying work for:
Education:
Short story long:
This is a more wordy non-fictional account of my adulthood "rise" from casual noodler to full-time freelancer. Read on if you enjoy reading, and / or if you're contemplating going down the same path. (You want "Bio"? I'll give ya "Bio"!!)
I was born in 1970 and raised in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.
Like many middle-class kids, I was "encouraged" to take music lessons by my parents (& "encouraged" to practice). For awhile in elementary school, I studied cello and piano. I had some talent, but not a whole lot of motication. The cello was okay, but the whole classical scene was kind of "not me" so I didn't have too many places to go on cello. I kind of envied the guys who got to play the even bigger fiddle (i.e. double bass), but never got up the nerve to ask for one. Piano was okay too, but the learning material was annoyingly patronizing ("Little Little Sailing Ship"? Oh, Please! I may be only 9, but I'm not a MORON!!!). Generally speaking, suburban North America in the 1970s was not exactly a hotbed for childhood focus and self-discipline. By junior high, I dropped all my instruments and was of the opinion that band was for weirdos & losers. (How very, very ironic...)
Fast-forward to my first year at the Alberta College of Art (1988). I made friends with a dude (Larry Lintott) who was heavy into music. We clicked because we were both into Captain Beefheart. I used to go to his pad and gab and jam until it was light out... For $100 CDN, he offered to sell me either a guitar or a bass. I was attracted to the lower register and the relative simplicity of the four-stringed instrument, so I somehow coughed up the dough, and the short-scale Fender Bullet bass was mine. In my surprisingly ample spare time, I worked on bass parts from records by The Talking Heads and The Rolling Stones. That summer (1989) I started jamming in public, in a little room called "The Theatery".
By my second year in college, I was renting an upright bass and doing limited performances with Ron Halliday, who was an idol of mine and Larry's. (I remember frantically struggling to learn a bunch of Neil Young & Van Morisson songs by Saturday night...) The money was zilch, but the excitment was way up there!
By my third year, I bought a "good" bass: a 34" scale Washburn (i.e. Samick, gag!!) and was getting more active. I made a completely disastrous appearance with a top 40 band, "The Bridge". Turns out, a lame repitoire with lame musicianship makes for a pretty intensely un-listenable combination! (I've never sucked quite so hard as on that show...)
In the fourth year, we regrouped and with my old roomate, formed "Molten Menace". My roomate somehow snagged the use of a giant, historic old theater for use as a rehearsal space. (It started as a kind of a Vaudville theater in the 1910s, and eventually became a movie theater and ran all the way up to the late '80s. The last public event was "Tango & Cash".) When we weren't crawling through all the secret passages up in the attic & down in the cellar, scaring the crap out of each other and having water fights with the old fire extinguishers, we had a lot of fun, rehearsing.
We took the stage for a big party at the college. We were supposed to open for two professional bands, but somehow we wound up going on last! We banged away at our reasonably well-rehearsed covers of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Sammy Hagar, The Sex Pistols and, of course, the Revolting Cocks. We even had one original: "Wipe Out Your Whole Family".
The friendly, familiar home crowd responded with a riot. They hurled empty beer cups onto the stage in a continuous hail. The guys from the previous bands came up and started throwing them back. (I lined some up with my feet and kicked them back out...) At one point, someone had to get on the mic and calm the crowd down because they were starting to turn over tables. I also distinctly remember part of the stage collapsing as I tried to run across. How chaotic is that! During the last song, I took a solo where I beat prized my once-prized Washburn (now all done up with a "custom" paint job resulting from a botched attempt at shielding the control cavity) with a pair of busted drumsticks, and screamed obscenities into the mic. The whole room roared.
There could be no doubt: a scant 18 months after our total humilliation in "The Bridge", "Molten Menace" was an absolute triumph. Compared to the two preceeding bands, our gear was crap and our chops was crap, but we didn't give a fuck; we just went out there with some kind of attitude, and kicked a whole bunch of ass. I learned a lot, that night. (Alas, it took our poor drummer whole 3 days to completely clean all the beer splatters out of his drum set.)
Although Molten Menace never played a second gig, many of it's other members have also gone on to bigger and better (if somewhat less barbarian) musical things.
(Looking back, we should have stuck with it: hollering obscenities and bashing our instruments to bits. It seems to be what the moneyed suburban kids really go for. We might have made a lot more dough than I am now with this freelance Jazz crap.)
After graduating from art school, I spent a winter roaming the USA and Europe, then landed back in Calgary and got stuck in an extremely shitty job: driving courier. (It was miserable, highly stressful & dangerous, and the pay after expenses was worse than if I'd been on welfare, but at least it ruined my car!) To make matters worse, the whole music thing was very, very not-happening. I was too timid to go to the jams, and as far as starting up a band went, even the lamest lamest suburbanite Top 40 wannabe bands were giving me the cold shoulder. Ouch...
So I decided to give music school a stab. I scraped up enough courage to go and show what I had to the college bass teacher (John Hyde), and to my relief, he didn't laugh me out the door. To my amazment, it looked like I might actually have a shot! We started lessons in preparation for an audition, later that spring. I learned how to read rhythms and chord symbols, I worked on a Bach Cello Suite (#3 in Eb, cause everyone and their dog does Suite #1 in G) and I worked on my sight reading.
I made a lot of progress by the big A-day, but I wound up doing a few big blunders. First of all, on A-day minus 5, I bought an upright bass and decided to take it, without ever telling my teacher. When I told the jury I'd had the upright bass for less than a week, that raised a lot of eyebrows... in a not good way. Second, I assumed there would be a cord there for me to plug my electric into the amp. Of course, there was no such cord, and I was beyond screwed. (Pro lesson #1: bring your own cord.)
Things were looking mighty gruesome, when one of the jury (the most intense one) turned it all around. He got out a Jamey Abersold CD and asked me if I could possibly attempt to play along to a simple 12 bar blues. Yes!!! Saved!! I could definitely do that! Eyebrows were raised, in a good way & good murmurs were exchanged. (I'm still not sure exactly what it was that impressed them...) From that point on I ceased to be road kill and became a viable candidate.
The guitar teacher member of the jury returned from his office with a guitar cord (oh, blessed mercy) so I could demonstrate the Bach Cello Suite on the electric. It wasn't concert quality, but it was good enough to show them I knew how to woodshed. (If there's one thing out there you can't fake, it's the Bach Cello Suites!) And they actually said, thank you for not doing the usual Suite #1 in G.
Between my blunders and my general newness to formal training, I didn't exactly ace the audition, but I made it onto the waiting list... and later that summer, my name came up.