Bio

Hello and thank you for checking out my website-- this bio will tell you a little about me. I grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia and attended Temple University, graduating with a Bachelor of Music degree with a major in theory and a minor in piano. I had many fine teachers there, and studied piano with Sophia Melvin and Harvey Wedeen. After I finished my studies in classical music, I got interested in jazz and studied with several fine players in the area: Curt Harmon, Ward Marston, Mark Randall, and Steve Giordano. I played around Philadelphia, but eventually got tired of the insecure life as a musician and started doing computer work. In 1990, I moved to San Francisco, working first for a subsidiary of Sun Microsystems, and then for a year as a consultant for Coopers & Lybrand. In 1994 I struck out on my own as an independent contract programmer specializing in database design and programming. Over the next seven years, I worked for seven companies, including Charles Schwab, Sybase, Network General, and Barclay's Global Investors. When my contract at Barclay's ended in 2001, there was suddenly no work available thanks to the dot-com bust.

After about a year, I decided to focus my attention on music again, as I had started playing seriously again around 1998. In 2000, I retrained using the Taubman Approach, and that gave me a secure technical foundation at the piano to pursue further study. I attended San Francisco State University from 2003-2004, earning a master's degree in piano performance studying with Dr. Victoria Neve. In 2005, I worked for six months as a contract database tester for The Gap, then moved to Tucson to pursue a doctoral degree in music at the University of Arizona, studying piano with Rex Woods. From 2005 until 2008, I attended classes and taught class piano, studio piano (both classical and jazz), and a jazz pedagogy course. I completed my DMA document on Nikolai Kapustin in the summer of 2009 and my degree was awarded December 2009.