If you entered this site through the welcome page, you’re aware that I have a lot of equipment for making music.

I must say though, that I think these days a somewhat unhealthy emphasis is placed on how much gear someone has.  As I think back on my musical life to the present, I realize that - by far - the relationships I have been privileged with are vastly more important than the toys that I have to make my music with...

....and nowhere is this more apparent for me than in the teachers with which I’ve had the good fortune to work.

For example, I recall when I finally found Mike Longo, my superb piano teacher for 8 years, and remember realizing as I first began working with him that the four piano teachers I’d already had were by comparison...pretty mediocre.  What a find that was!  Of course, Mike is most known for his groundbreaking work with Dizzy Gillespie, but he had spent a formative year in Toronto studying with the great Oscar Peterson, practicing, he told me, 13 hours daily.  One day in a lesson he resolutely said to me: “You can’t learn this from a book, this is passed on from musician to musician”. 

That comment made a big impression on me.  Here he was passing on to me the keys to the kingdom, and coaching me not only on the musical content of jazz, but also on the most elusive of things piano: touch and time...musician to musician.

From Oscar, to Mike, to me.  What an incredible gift!  And how about this: you’ll find Oscar studied as a child with a pupil of Lizst, Liszt studied with Carl Czerny who was a pupil of Beethoven’s.....musician to musician.

I have similar experiences with all of the great educators listed to the left.  And as I look back on these teachers and colleagues that have made my journey so wonderful, I am eternally grateful for the apprenticeships and relationships that I’ve had, and I realize that they are the real reason my gear is in use today.

Not the other way around.