About Me
I first picked up a guitar, because I wanted to play bass in my friend's band, I didn't have a bass. My mother had an old twisted Epiphone in the attic, so I started learning a few things. My uncle saw my plunking on this thing during all my free time and gave me an electric Yamaha to play. It was an ugly cream colored piece of shit, but I could plug it in and play loud! I saved up money from working at the dry cleaners to buy a Fender, this must have been around the age of 15 or 16. Now I could really play loud! Started jamming with some friends and learned quickly this was a long road. My early hero was Jimi Hendrix. I learned to sing his solos before I could really play them. Band of Gypsies blew my socks off. I was still listening to some Nirvana, Led Zeppelin. Well, listening to Jimi led me to discover the blues. I listened to some of the cats that influenced Jimi, Albert King, Muddy Waters, B.B. King, and some of the cats the were influenced BY Jimi, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Vernon Reid, Prince. My thing was going along fine, and I was learning a lot of the stuff out on the radio, lots of blues licks, and some older popular tunes. I was reading guitar magazines all the time (As a kid, I loved to read, but for this 5-7 year phase, stopped entirely!! I am now out of recovery and have re-kindled my love for literature), and based on name recognition, I went to see Stevie Vai in concert, I was still only 17 or 18. Well, for better or worse, this definitely fucked me up, I mean, I had never seen or heard a guitar being used that way before in my life, and I loved it. So, as a matter of course, I made some friends who liked progressive music, and started listening to these 13/8 time signatures and polyrhythms while I was in high school. Granted, not the most popular stuff among my peers, but it did take my playing to another level. Bought an Ibanez with low action and a thin neck, and practiced the hardest stuff I could play as fast as I could play it. I didn't stay locked in my room, fortunately, and was exposed to a lot of other "non-extremely complex" music through a social life. At parties we would provide entertainment, hip hop with a live band, jazz jam sessions. After high school I moved out west, and abandoned the electric guitar, and abandoned also my reason(!) I started this next wave of development by coming up with a new tuning every time I picked up the guitar and improvising completely guided by intuition and my ear. This made ensemble playing difficult, but I did study tabla and play drum set in a band while out there. Sometimes I would remove strings or re-order them, so that some of the thin ones were near the top, etc. It was a chaotic though adventurous exploration that would bring into my consciousness the limits of experimentation and provide grounds to develop my capacity along more refined paths. So, not liking college, and wanting to play music, I dropped out and traveled around the U.S.A. for about three years. This was me, hitchhiking on Route 1 with an acoustic guitar and a backpack, watching sunsets on the beach and meeting poor righteous prophets on the street. I didn't really have to read all those Kerouac books... OK so some tidal waves came into my life around the best part and my shit got real twisted. This inspired the next giant step in my attitude. Really, it was productive, so to all you motherfuckers who made it hard for me, thank you. I decided to switch to a fretless guitar, and I decided to start focusing on "jazz." I am 100% American, I live and breathe the culture (yes, there is a culture) and I love the diversity of people here. So, to combine the experimentalism, the complex progressive sound, the cool downtown sound, the hip hop vibe, and the American storyteller's tradition, I picked up on this jazz shit. I was still traveling, so now I was focusing on more "musical" spots. Did some research (oral history) down in New Orleans, Austin TX (home of SRV), Nashville, NYC, Philly, L.A. Seattle. This almost brings the story up to date. I'm living in Philly now, for the next few years because of some trouble I got myself in, and I'm moving forward on my career plans. I changed standard tuning to EADGCF (Bliss!), and am trying to crack my head on reading some little black dots. As for my future, here's where I expect to take it. I am dedicated and passionately interested in the metaphysics of the universe, God, and Harmony. So I, through some good well-meaning friends, have gotten into studying just intonation. So my goal, musickally, is combine the American rhythms and melodies with a pure tuning and some sick-ass progressivisms. Still diggin jazz, dig everything. Peace, BCM.
