Charles

This is kind of how my bio page reads on my website:I was born in Savannah, Georgia in the Fall of 1972. My parents originally come from California and Florida. I spent my childhood in a small southern town in Alabama, beginning percussion and wind instruments in middle school. I began playing a standard trap kit at age 14, guitar at 12, bass at 14, and started drawing and painting at around age 12. I studied with local art teachers in high school, and briefly attended the Alabama School of Fine Arts as a freshman. Throughout highschool I worked with half a dozen area musicians and musicians from Tuscaloosa, playing guitar, bass, or drums. At age 18, I survived a high speed car accident when the car I was a passenger in plummeted into a deep ravine outside Tuscaloosa, Alabama. In 1991, I moved to San Francisco to enjoy the music scene and go to school. Between 1991 and 1994 I worked with a variety of musicians, usually playing bass or drums and sometimes singing. After a few years at City College, I transferred to the Art Institute, and did a semester of exchange in Paris. In 1992, I began working intermittently for a Bay Area sculptor, and went to Berlin in 1995 to help him while I was on exchange in Paris. After graduation in 1996, I began helping him plan shows in Brazil, Australia, Canada, Denmark, Germany and other countries. In 1996, I spent four and a half months living in London, and in 1997 spent five months living in Milan. Between 1994 and 1998 I began learning to play a variety of Asian and African drums and instruments like keyboards, jaw harp, hammered dulcimer, didgeridoo, Bansuri, Su-ling, upright electric bass, and began to learn to better record and produce my own music. In 1996 I began studying tabla, learning from a text I picked up at Ali Akbar college. In 1999, while working for Manpower, I attended the Javafest in the Moscone Center and decided to expand my computer knowledge, studying alone after work and building an online portfolio with volunteer and subcontracted projects. Lately I am freelancing as a web developer. During the summer of 2003, my hopeless obsession to understand the nature of space and time finally got the better of me, and I spent some time indulging in the texts listed on my cosmology page at charleschapman.net Usually something about me doesn't make sense to people at first so if you want to know just email me and ask. The details of my life are accesible,as I have nothing to hide. I do not take myself seriously and am not a snob. I am only interested in being a classical musician and have little interest in the American recording industry.