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A Brief Autobiography.....
I was born the fourth of nine
children in White Plains, New York to a French Canadian/Irish
mother from Lewiston, Maine, and a first generation Irish
father from Chattanooga, Tennessee. This combination of
different worlds may have contributed to a lifelong
fascination with other cultures. I've always felt both a part
of, and yet somehow apart from, both North and South. My
father relocated this very large family to Nashville when I
was 16. I couldn't know this at the time, but this event
became one of the most serendipitous things that ever happened
to me. |
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At age 19 an urge to
break out of the pack combined with a search for adventure led me to
hitch-hike out West, where my oldest brother was then living with
friends in Oregon, and where I lived for the next six months. I was
reading, living, and breathing
Jack
Kerouac, who had only died three years earlier, in 1969.
Eventually my restlessness again led me to search for something
more. I answered a "Pianist Wanted" notice someone had tacked to a
bulletin board in a music store in Portland in 1973 and wound up
playing piano with a trio in a club in Grants Pass, Oregon for the
next eight months, launching a now 34 year music career. |
I've had several spiritual awakenings during my lifetime. I was
lucky enough to spend some time with novelist
Ken Kesey at his farm
outside Eugene, Oregon one summer afternoon in 1972 when I was only
19; had an epiphany one night backstage before a gig in Birmingham,
England in June of '04 that music and religion could be the same
thing; and played organ with
Bishop Al Green at his Full Gospel
Tabernacle Church in Memphis, Tennessee on Easter Sunday April 26th
of '05. Then one night after a gig recently in Santa Cruz, CA, I met
and shared an earthquake (a 5.6) with John Cassady, the son of
Neal
and Carolyn Cassady, a couple of Beat Generation icons I read so
much about when I was younger. I'm now sure that these were not
unrelated events.
In between this span of time I studied classical piano with Carol
Stone and W.O. Smith at Tennessee State University; played gigs with
Roy Orbison and
Jimmy Webb; wrote songs for
Waylon Jennings, Jessi
Colter, The Amazing Rhythm Aces and others, and spent 25 years
making a living in Nashville recording studios. For a complete
Discography, click
HERE.
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I've toured Europe with
Gretchen Peters ten times since '01, and I continue to record and
tour internationally and domestically with her. I also tour with
Alex Chilton and the Box Tops when I am not engaged in studio work.
My passion has been and will always be music- the learning and
creating of it. I have a lot more curiosity than greed in my soul,
and I hope that it remains so.
"The Crossing" is my first solo CD. At least three of the tracks
are directly related to my recent tours in the UK. My goal was to
create an instrumental piece of work that would hopefully break new
ground artistically, drawing on the musical influences gained from a
lifetime of playing and performing music. Most of the tracks are
solo piano, but there is a cellist (David
Henry) on 3 tracks, and an
acoustic guitarist (Mark
Selby) on 1 track. Also in the mix on 3
tracks are some sampled original piano notes, manipulated by the
aforementioned David Henry, who also mixed the project at his True
Tone Studio in Nashville. The CD was released in November of 2007. |
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