A few years ago, while hanging out one night with some friends talking about music and our favorite guitar players, one of them asked me all of the sudden what made me want to play music. That was a hard question to answer since there were various elements throughout my life that drove me towards music. I do remember though two distinct moments that really blew my mind and made me go “I WANNA DO THAT!!”

When I was about ten years old, Freddie Mercury had just died and several months later the remaining members of Queen put together a concert in his memory. Everyone from Guns N Roses to David Bowie were there and I distinctly remember watching Brian May and Slash, the two big curly hair virtuosos, playing with an intensity I’ve never heard before. I thought it was the coolest thing I’ve ever seen!

A couple of years later I was watching a movie at home one night, it was “In the Name of the Father” starring Daniel Day-Lewis. There is this one scene in the movie where the main character (Day-Lewis) is on the roof playing air guitar to Jimi Hendrix’s “Voodoo Child” famous wha wha intro. A soldier mistakes the stick Day-Louis was pretending to be a guitar for a gun and starts shooting at him, and at that exact moment the actual music for ”Voodoo Child” kicks in with this explosive energy. I got so obsessed with Hendrix after watching “In The Name Of The Father,” that some of my high school friends still call me “Jimi.”

Those were some of the seeds planted early on that made me go on a pretty long musical journey. I traveled to India, where I studied sitar and just went around soaking up the wonderful culture and music. I lived in New York City and played with various rock bands, and I studied at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, immersing myself into jazz, fusion, funk, classical, and world music. All of these elements were blended into the compositions from my first two albums, but they really came full circle on my latest album Morning Sun. While living in New York I started working with Danny Abowd, a fantastic lyricist and composer. The new approach we took for writing the album was a lot less of a jazz-fusion approach and brought my music back to more of a songwriting approach, and more towards some of my early influences, although I realize the album sounds nothing like Queen, Guns N Roses or Hendrix….

It’s quite amazing how a lot of the latest part of my journey took my music around the world, without me coming along. Releasing my music online gave me the opportunity to connect with wonderful people in Poland, Belgium, England, Argentina, Canada, Mexico, Scotland, Uzbekistan and more. It is an incredible feeling to reach music lovers with music that might not reach the masses, but is appreciated by a small and dedicated group of people. If I am able to evoke a feeling even half as powerful as the one I had listening to “Voodoo Child”, it makes all the hard work worth while.

I hope to continue this journey for quite some time and connect with more music lovers, and I invite you to be a part of this connection by checking out my most recent album Morning Sun.

Thanks for being a listener and making it all matter.