MY AWAKENING STORY
BEGINNINGS
Ever since I was a young child, I have been absolutely enamored with music. My uncle bought me my first guitar when I was 8-years old, and taught me my very first chords and riffs. He also introduced me to my earliest guitar heros: Eric Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and Jimi Hendrix, which provided a major spark of inspiration and set me on my life path.
A few years later, I began to take lessons, and a deep longing to perform and express myself emerged. While at times I was met with words of caution from my parents and society around me, I persevered and chose to follow my heart and soul anyway. This longing manifested as both great joy and excitement, but also as depression, because I was reaching for something greater and I felt misunderstood.
The variety of emotions and experiences I was having led me to explore various styles of music including blues, punk rock, and 60s psychedelia during my middle school years. I soaked it all up, and was one of the few people in my school and among my friends with a strong passion for musical expression.
MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH JAZZ
When I entered high school, I found the style of music that shaped the next 15 years of my life or so: jazz. It was jazz improvisation that I became so fascinated with, almost to the point of obsession. How do you improvise over jazz tunes, with the complex and often fast moving chord changes? I was fascinated by the fluidity, flow and ease the jazz masters exhibited. They seemed like they had a never-ending source of energy and creativity flowing through them. And the ideas they improvised, in real time, always made perfect sense — as if it were preconceived.
How could they be doing this?? It was a question that stimulated both great jubilation and joy, as well as agonizing anxiety and frustration. The drive to perform at that level, met with the outer resistance of high school responsibilities and limiting belief systems within myself and in the collective led me to deeply question my own existence, and Life itself.
