Welcome to jazzdog

I began studying piano in the suburbs of Chicago around age 5 with a classical teacher.  I excelled with this teacher but got a little bored, my mother then decided to bring me to a jazz teacher in Evanston, the suburb just north of Chicago and I began studying with Bob Ravenscroft at the Alan Swain Studios.

 https://www.bobravenscroft.com/bob-ravenscroft-solo

Bob was truly an inspiration for a seven year old.  I began playing a lot of pop and jazz tunes.   I studied with Bob untill I was about 12 and then he moved to Phoenix, AZ where he is a prominent figure in the music scene there. I then began taking lessons with Skip Green, who turned me on to Chick Corea, Ahmad Jamal, Oscar Peterson and Bill Evans. About that time I heard my high school jazz ensemble,The New Trier West Recording Jazz Ensemble, directed by Roger Mills.

https://www.ntwjazzstory.com/1975/ 

I also began studying with Alan Swain,  and hoped to  be able to play in the jazz ensemble. Alan was a prominent figure in the Chicago jazz scene.  

I was really inspired by the band and I was featured on the album we made in 1975,

(https://www.ntwjazzstory.com/1975-music/)

The band a few years ahead of me went to the Montreaux Jazz Festival and won most of the soloist awards.  

Steve Kujala,

http://fretlessflute.com/bio.php

was a member of that band and won the soloist award for flute at Montreux. Steve is a prominent figure in the Los Angeles Music Scene and has played on more then 600 films.  I won the coveted Louis Armstrong award, and a scholarship to the Berklee School of Music in Boston.

At that point in time, I had been focusing primarily on jazz and thought it was time to hone in on my classical chops so instead of going to Berklee College of Music in Boston , I followed my classical teacher, Herman Shapiro, to Santa Barbara and studied with him for a few years. Mr. Shapiro was a great teacher, a professor of Piano at DePaul university in Chicago. 

He was a student of Rudoph Ganz,

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolph_Ganz 

at the Chicago Musical College. I also played in the Santa Barbara City College Jazz Band. Randy Tico https://www.randytico.com/ 

was the bassist and he went on to play with Airto.

http://www.airto.com/

After Santa Barbara, I came back to Chicago. I really wanted to go to New York City, so around 1979, in my early 20s I moved to New York City. I found a piano teacher at New York University, and continued my classical studies. He was a teacher from Germany and his name was Carl Mosbacher. Another great teacher! Carl also taught at the Mannes School of Music. There I was in the Big Apple, inspiration everywhere you look and the best musicians in the world were there. One Sunday, I was around the Guggenheim museum and met

 Vladimir Horwitz, 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Horowitz

we walked up 5th avenue  together and had a nice conversation.  I used to go to jam sessions in the West Village led by Mike Stern and saw

amazing piano bass duos at Bradley's sometimes with Ron Carter and Red Mitchell.

In 1986, I moved to The San Francisco Bay Area. I began studying with a very fine teacher, 

Julian White.

https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2006-07-28/article/24743?headline=Julian-White

Julian was one of a handful of pianists in the Bay Area that studied with the Dutch Pianist

 Egon Petri, a pupil of Busoni. I studied at San Francisco State and Cal State East Bay, where I received my Bachelors degree of music