I began playing bass in 1994 when I discovered it to be my ticket out of a dry and tedious high school art history class. A few months later I played my first gig at a grimy heavy metal bar in Rochester, NY, next to Lake Ontario. The instrument felt good in my hands. I kept playing...

 

I worked with a number of different groups as a full-time touring musician from 1999-2004. I crossed the lower 48 multiple times playing over 1200 gigs on stages large and small. During this period I had the pleasure of working with a talented roster of musicians including Nicky Sanders, Maury Rosenburg, Paul Amorese, Kathryn Koch, Brandon Hollinger, Baby Gramps, Hannah Ross, Donnie Davisson, and the late, great Billy Constable. The informal musical education I received from these colleagues and many others was extensive and transformative. Beyond refining my skills as a rock n’ roll bassist, I learned how to swing, how to improvise, and how to tackle (and enjoy!) musical genres previously unfamiliar to me, ranging from klezmer to reggae to Appalachian traditions and more. The most notable projects I performed with during this period include Hypnotic Clambake (from Boston, MA), Redheaded Stepchild (from Buffalo, NY), and the Davisson Brothers’ Band (from West-by-god-Virginia).

 

Curiosity got the best of me and my music career was interrupted by a roughly ten-year hiatus from steady performance and recording endeavors. I spent this time saving up money and subsequently backpacking around the world, earning a few university degrees, and even settling for four years in Turkey. My years in Istanbul introduced me to a wide variety of Turkish music - exposure which inevitably influenced my thinking about rhythms and tonality. I also never stopped playing music during these years and it was at this time that I began dabbling in songwriting.

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I joined the High Bushy Tails in 2014, while I was living in Chapel Hill, NC and gigged regularly with them around the Triangle Region. The band is known for its impressive wall of vocal harmonies and while working with them I began  collaborating as a songwriter for the first time.

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During my final six months in NC, I also served as part of Flash Chorus’s hardworking backline. This weekly event was (and still is) a remarkably fun community gathering and the direct inspiration for one of my current projects, Song Squad of New York.

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I returned to my hometown of Rochester for about a year-and-a-half from mid-2016 to January 2018. During this brief period I joined forces with Leah Fiorucci, a skilled vocalist whose talent, I believed, needed to be shared with the world. We hit the ground running and within six months Leah & the Upheaval was performing regularly around a region stretching from Buffalo to Ithaca. Our 4-hour+ set of music included several of my own original songs. The band is currently recording an album-length collection of my songs which we hope to complete and release in the near future. Upon moving to Brooklyn, I passed the baton to Bartek Banach, whose skilled hands are laying down the bass groove for the Upheaval these days.

 

During my first year in the New York City area I have become involved in a number of different recording and performance projects (click on the “Current Projects” link on the menu above for more information about these). Despite being the new guy in town, I have also been welcomed by Sam Teichman into the fold of his Leave a Lasting Mark benefit concert series, and have performed with some outstanding musicians at several of these events. Also worth mentioning again is my Song Squad of New York project (see more on that page, which you can also find on the above menu), which I hope to launch in early 2019. This project is unapologetically modeled on Seamus & Kerri’s Flash Chorus, which I am honored to have briefly been a part of a few years ago.