When I was four years old my mother bought a baby grand Steinway piano. She tells me I went up to it and said, "This is mine." I guess my brothers' influence started early. They had already been playing trumpets and clarinets and various things for years, and I wanted to be like them. I don't remember saying, "This is mine," but I do remember coming home from kindergarten and playing "My Country 'Tis of Thee" with one finger and thinking I was better than the teacher at school who played it for us to sing along to. I was wrong then, but eventually I think I did surpass her piano skills. My parents soon tired of hearing my versions of the "classics" and started my official lessons with Jackie Stewart. I practiced classical music fairly steadily through little league, tennis, and junior high 'til eventually I got overwhelmed with the perfection of professional classical pianists. I thought I could never match their level of execution, and that to me was what classical music was about - perfection. So I got sidetracked with tennis and high school - music would have to wait.

So I'm off to my first year of college - Cañada junior college in Redwood City, California. I'm taking all the usual general ed courses - one of which is Music Appreciation with Philip Ienni. This man played the piano and sang and danced around the class, and you had to be made of stone not to fall under his spell. He made music the most exciting thing in life. Halfway into the first semester I dropped one of my other classes so I could enroll in all of Mr. Ienni's music classes and become a music major (again following my brothers who had been music majors - graduating from Cal State Long Beach and University of the Pacific). Fortunately I had taken some music theory when I was younger and with some intense study I caught up to everyone in class fairly quickly. Unfortunately second year music was not offered at Cañada so I transferred to Chapman College in Orange, California and studied classical piano with Scott Smith. "Studied" may be too strong a word. I was playing on the tennis team and a great deal of my focus was there. Speaking of the tennis team - we won the NCAA division II national championships that year and I decided I needed a tougher challenge. Simultaneously I decided that jazz was better suited to my interests and the University of Southern California was, at that time, the only school in the nation with a jazz program and a great tennis team. For four more years I studied (yes really studied this time) jazz piano with Lloyd Hebert and Wayne Jones, and played on the tennis team under coach Dick Leach (coincidentally he had been my first tennis coach back in San Marino when I started tennis at age 10). This time it was tennis that suffered and I was less than crucial to our team's success.

Graduation for me was very underwhelming. In music schools the performance majors must put on a senior recital as a sort of final exam. Mine came months after the actual graduation and although my family and friends dutifully showed up (my brother's friend Gary Stone even professionally recorded it on short notice), no one from the school's faculty made it. Truth be told I didn't feel like they missed much. But my friend Marianne Stone (no relation to Gary) ended up asking me to play on her senior recital shortly after and this time one of the faculty did come (Dr. Thom Mason, head of the jazz department at USC). After the concert he offered me a full graduate scholarship. That was one of the nicest things that ever happened to me, and I tried graduate school for a semester, but it just wasn't for me.

Cut to ten years later. I'm on the phone talking to Peter Erskine. I'm asking him to play on my CD. He sounds like he wants to say yes but needs a tape from me first before he'll commit. The only recordings I had were those two recitals. So reluctantly I sent him one track from Marianne's recital that featured me and soon I heard back from Peter. He agreed to play!

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