Analog Keyboards

Hi, and welcome to a page showing my musical history, evolution, and growth over the course of my life. But before we begin: lest ye consider this merely a narcissistic journey into dig me-ism, let’s ask one question: Who am I? Nobody important. Nobody famous. I suppose I am (or was) moderately well-known in the progressive rock and jamband circles that I have gigged and recorded in extensively, but definitely on a local level. But what I am is a person who has pursued the exploration of musical composition, performance, and recording steadily and with great dedication throughout my life. Most importantly, I’ve gone through a number of distinct phases, exploring deeply in particular genres for some years, then moving up the rungs of the ladder to another musical area. Through displaying my evolution here, I hope to emphasize and give evidence to the concept that change is natural. We grow and mature throughout our lives, and pushing oneself into new artistic playgrounds keeps the work new and fresh. Music has brought great happiness to me, and has sustained me through difficult periods as well. I intend to keep playing and moving forward musically as long as I’m breathing. With all that said, here is where I’ve been, and where I’m going…

1973-1978: Teaching Little Fingers to Play

My parents thought it would be a great idea to learn how to tickle the ivories. My grandfather had been a professional trumpet player (but Stalin and World War II both interfered to cure him of that nasty habit). Otherwise, there was not a wisp of musical talent in the family. So my dad and I both started at the same time with one Gloria North, a belle of the ball that always wore plunging blouses and oceans of perfume. I was 8 years old, and went through the rigors of “Teaching Little Fingers to Play” through the Bach Inventions for about 5 years. Evidently, I showed a lot of promise, but my heart wasn’t in the music. Mozart and Haydn were OK, but at night, I kept spinning my parents copy of “Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” until the grooves wore out. This led to:

1978-1983: Maybe I’m Amazed at the Way I Need You

There is an incredible freedom that is experienced when kids that are studying music find their way. Once I moved from Brahms to the Beatles, music shifted from being a chore to being a passion. Any expression of the soul must be internally motivated - art can never be forced upon someone, or it will never stay with them. I wore out fake books of John, Paul and the lads, Billy Joel, and Elton John as the beginnings of my personal piano style began to take hold. I sang and sang, played the daylights out of our cheap Baldwin upright and spent the rest of my time geeking out with these new-fangled toys known as personal computers. By 1982, at 17, I was starting to write down my own little melodies and tunes. They were simple, naiive, and derivative at first, of course. But little by little, the stage was being set.

1983-1984: Who Can it be, Now?

They say that we are most deeply affected by the music we hear in high school. During my teen years, the airwaves were saturated with the simplistic, synthesized new wave music of the Cars, Men at Work, Thomas Dolby, Gary Numan, and a host of other artists long-gone. There was something refreshing about the easy, direct simplicity of the material, as well as the new-fangled sounds of synthesizers. So I saved up my cash from working at the toy store, and bought a Realistic analog synthesizer (designed by Moog Music - I still have it), then a Roland JX-3P and a Roland Cube keyboard amp. One terribly cheap electric guitar, a few Boss pedals, a Yamaha drum machine, and a Tascam 4-track cassette Portastudio later, and I was off to the races (This was the beginning of a lifelong habit of gear lust). Pretty soon, I was writing songs, recording ultra-cheesy music videos, performing in little talent shows, and just having a bang-up time with my high school and freshman-year dorm buddies. But pretty soon, I was hitting my head against the ceiling of just fooling around, and yearned to begin playing for people.

1984-1985: Uh-oh, It’s Magic: The Top-40 Corporate Rock Gigfest

And thus, in my sophomore year of college, I answered a newspaper ad looking for a keyboardist. Some very nice folks were putting together a top-40 band named “Common Interest” to go play bars. I use the term top-40 loosely, because what it really was was a smattering of early 80’s, middle American cover songs with an emhasis on female vocals (we had the hot female bass player with the killer pipes). There was Tina Turner, Huey Lewis, the Cars (my choice), Berlin, ZZ Top, Bob Seger, some country folk - all sorts of fare perfect for a fledgling gigging keyboardist to cut his teeth on. I had groovy red and black tiger striped shirts with no sleeves, a cool bandana, black nylon pants, and purple Hi-tops. I lugged around a 73-key Fender Rhodes with the JX-3P on top. Later, I sold the Rhodes and bought a Yamaha DX7 instead - a lighter choice, but in retrospect, infinitely cheesier in the sound department.

1985-1987: The Prog Era Begins: Freefall and the Shores of Infinity

Common Interest broke up (as all bands do) when a couple of members moved to L.A. It had been a great learning experience and quite fun, but I was interested in working on my own compositions instead. In addition, the harmonies and rhythms of straight-ahead rock music were not floating my boat. I had discovered the music of Genesis, ELP, Yes, Frank Zappa and King Crimson - bands that had brought the complexities of classical music and jazz into the rock format. They had captured my imagination, and I wanted to pursue this line of music. I answered an ad placed by some other UC Berkeley students who were interested in the same type of music, and Freefall was born. We hit it off instantly, and the music flowed like a river. We composed, recorded, and gigged through the rest of our time at Cal before everyone went their separate ways. In retrospect, Freefall was the most talented and musically capable group of musicians I have ever worked with. At age 20, we were still musically naiive and young, but the level of musicianship and potential were unparallelled in my experience. For better or for worse, everyone except me pursued careers in other fields, but all still play as a hobby. We are still great friends, though we are scattered across the world now, but come together every Christmas like clockwork.

1987-1992: Edge of the Sky: A New Episode

While in Freefall, I had heard of a Marin County-based progressive rock band named Episode. Once Freefall fell, I contacted them and found out that, lo and behold, they were looking for a keyboard player. We met, and though they were about 10 years older than me, we hit it off musically and personally right away. The result was a long and dedicated journey into really trying to make an art rock band work. We rehearsed three times each week recorded a great deal, and wrote quite a bit of complex, symphonic rock. Lots of odd time signatures, synthesized orchestral instruments, long, involved pieces with lots of timbral changes, and polyphonic vocal harmonies.

Though we were primarily a recording band, we tried our hand at gigging locally, playing a gig each month or so. The problem was that the music was artsy,

Our first recording project became an LP called “Into the Epicenter” that was picked up by a small distributor of the genre called Syn-Phonic Records. We then recorded a 15-minute piece called “Edge of the Sky” for a compilation album. Next, a cover of the Pink Floyd song “Echoes”, which we released with “Edge of the Sky” on a 30-minute cassette. Eventually, we began work on what was unquestionably our magnum opus, a CD called “Starlight Tales”. We released it in 1993, and then began to drift apart. Too much time together, combined with the ever-present musical differences caused our personal and musical relationships to fray. We decided to take some time off.

In 1994, the band reunited for a big progressive rock festival in L.A. called Progfest ‘94. We enlisted the help of an additional keyboardist, a cellist, and a guitarist/mandolin player to really fill the sound out. The resulting concert was a lot of fun, and a video and double CD live set were released of the whole festival. It was a nice postscript to the project. Two years later, Episode reunited somewhat with some additional players to record and perform my concept album “Under the Big Tree” (see below).

1989-1993: Get it Right the 2nd Time: Formal Training and Islands in the Stream

I had begun my college career at UC Berkeley by studying computer science. By the time I realized that music was my true calling, it was too late to begin the formal training there. I finished my degree in Psychology, but took as many music classes as possible. After a year in the real world, I knew that my path in music required training. So I switched to working part-time and went back to college, eventually receiving a second bachelor’s degree in electronic music. The experience was incredibly uplifting and powerful, and introduced me to whole new worlds of musical thought I had never dreamed existed. I discovered musique concrete and 20th century avant garde music, and delved deeply into modular analog synthesizers and computer music. Along the way, I released my first solo CD. Entitled “Islands in the Stream”, it was a concept album of experimental electronic music, with various pieces focused on water themes, tied together by electronic realizations of a stream at various points along its course.

Studying music formally was enormously important in moving me forward as a musician and composer. In my experience, there is no faster, more concentrated way to grow in your technique and your work. I recommend it for anyone who wishes to apply themselves seriously to the art.

1994-1996: Deep in the Ivory Tower/Positive Signal Flow

After joining the multimedia work force for a short while, I began to feel the urge for more musical training. I knew I had learned a lot, but didn’t feel that my formal musical education was complete. Fortunately for me, Mills College in Oakland, CA is a very important west coast center for both electronic music and avant garde/improvisational acoustic music. Many of the great luminairies of 20th century music had made pit stops there, including Pauline Oliveros, Alvin Curran, Terry Riley, and Darius Milhaud. I was in my late twenties, and the time felt right. So I applied to Mills, quit my job, and began my master’s work in electronic music and recording media.

The 2 1/2 years I spent at Mills was a terrific experience. I focused strongly on analog electronics (built a number of synthesizers, theremins, and various electronic circuits of my own design), real-time DSP processing for performance, and approaches to making electronic music sound expressive live. It was great to be in a nurturing environment, where making weird sounding bleeps and bloops was considered the norm. I think graduate school is the last time in most people’s lives that you can just focus on a purely abstract discipline, simply for the sake of doing it. The principle electronic music staff there, Chris Brown, Maggi Payne, and John Bischoff, are all top notch teachers as well as composer/musicians, and a rotating group of visiting composers teach for a semester at a time, truly enriching the scholastic experience.

I did a good deal of live, semi-improvisational electronic performing at Mills, the best of which ended up making my second avant garde electronic music CD, Positive Signal Flow. It was a good document of the time I spent on this musical emphasis. I’m pretty much done with avant garde electronic music for now (primarily because I am a sound designer for my day gig, which has very strong overlap), but the time will come when I sit down and put together another album in this vein.

I finished up my time at Mills with a master’s thesis concert in two parts: The first half was an hour-long solo electronic music performance entitled “Afrique”, which consisted of real-time sonic manipulation of field recordings I made on a trip to Africa. The piece was an interaction between myself and the audience, in the following way: I was onstage creating sonic tapestries from the sounds of birdcalls, groups of birds in flight, insects, hippos, the wind, and all sorts of other things using a real-time sound manipulation program I wrote. At the same time, I had placed a Theremin that I had built, in the middle of the audience. A Theremin is a musical device that has a pair of antennae that respond to the movement of the player’s hands. The
Theremin controlled the volume and position in the room of a recording I had made of African chanting and singing. The result was an abstract sonic canvas of natural and human sounds, that built slowly over the course of an hour, and was fun for the audience as well as being sonically beautiful. Dramatic lighting, lasers, fog machines, and traditional African garb topped it off.

The second half of the evening’s performance was the one and only live performance of Under the Big Tree (see below) in it’s entirety. It was a nice postscript to the Episode days, and I’m glad the entire piece got to be seen through once.

1994-1997: The End of the Prog Era: Under the Big Tree

In 1994, I was studying music and listening with composer Pauline Oliveros, on a remote mountain in New Mexico. After several days of music and meditation, I had a deep mystical experience that revealed a vision that would haunt me for the next three years. I scribbled the whole thing down, and spent a year interpreting meaning and sketching the music. I grabbed my colleagues from Episode and Now, another prog band we had played with quite a bit, and began recording the album. It took about three years on and off to complete, and was the largest and most complex recording project I have yet undertaken, with two drummers, guitar, bass, every keyboard I could think of, sitar, flute, and cello. But eventually it was completed and released into the world. Looking back five years later, I think we accomplished what we set out to do, and am very proud of the results.

I think I knew as I was wrapping up Under the Big Tree that it was the end of my interest in the prog rock genre. While the complexity and openness of the form continued to appeal to me, I began to feel constrained by the way that everything was so carefully written out. The element of immediacy felt lacking - and improvisation felt like the next place to explore as a result. Saying farewell to a genre I had deeply identified with for a decade felt a bit strange, but now I look back at that type of music with a fond nostalgia, as if it belonged to another lifetime.

1999-2000: If You Build it, They will Come

By 1998, I had built a half-dozen recording studios in various bedrooms and garages. The last one I had worked in for some 7 years, and had built a career in sound design in it. The time had come to design and build a proper post production studio, where I could record and mix music projects in addition to the sound effects and other audio post production services I was doing for films and games. I worked on the design and permit process for my studio for about a year, and finally had the blueprints, permissions, builder, and capital lined up. We broke ground in the Summer of 1999, and finished the 500 square foot facility in the Spring of 2000. Because the entire building was designed for audio from the ground up, we were able to make it dead quiet, with spacious, high ceilings, terrific sounding acoustics, wire runs through conduit in the floors, and all the noisy computer fans stowed away in a ventilated equipment closet. It has a vocal booth, a vestibule area where a guitar amp can be recorded, a foley pit for recording footsteps and props for films, and a nice assortment of microphones and recording equipment.

Though the design and building process took over a year, and my life savings, the results are superb. A tremendous amount of professional and artistic work has already been done there by me and my colleagues, and I look forward to continuing doing a great deal of work there.

1997-2002: The Largest Fowl in the World: Free Improvisational Soup

In December 1997, guitarist Gary Morrell, with whom I had worked extensively on Under the Big Tree, and I decided to get out of the prog rock world entirely and focus on free improvisation in a rock context, a la the Grateful Dead and Phish. The goal would be to play a lot of gigs, as well as make recordings. We brought along drummer Rich DiBenedetto and keyboardist Eric Kampman, alumni of Gary’s previous prog rock band Now, and Ten Ton Chicken was born.

The band began with material from all over the musical map, including prog rock material from Now, Episode, and Under the Big Tree, Dead covers, new songs, and whatever other stuff struck our fancy. Over time, material with more free improvisation became the mainstay of the repertoire. The band began to play gigs with greater and greater regularity, and pretty soon we entered a zone of excellent musical communication and cameraderie. In retrospect, this was the time that the band was the most fun. After 2 1/2 years, keyboard bassist Eric Kampman left, and the search for a bass player began. After working with a couple of different people, we settled on a fellow named Tom Fejes, and added saxophonist Jamison Smeltz at the same time. A new Ten Ton Chicken was born. The new band began to be more sharply focused into two camps: funk jazz and spacey improvisational dissonance. I began to write material that was jazzier and jazzier, with swing rhythms, extended harmonies, complex chord changes, and bop sensibilities. A heavy marketing push was underway, and shortly the band began playing all over the west coast, gigging virtually every weekend. We played 3 short tours together, getting as far as Missoula, Montana. We released two albums, “De Cocksdorp” from the original lineup, and “Just Like in the Old Country” from the new group. I engineered, produced, and in did the lion’s share of the work on both records. But the road and never-ending time commitments wore on me, particularly as I was planning to marry. The continuous work together without a break caused personality and lifestyle clashes, and the rather severe difference in musical perspective between the funk jazz and spacey improv camps created a musical schizophrenia that satisfied no one. I left the band I co-founded in May, 2002, after being mostly unhappy about the group for over a year.

2002-2005: We Call this Number “Jazz Odyssey Mark II”

I had always heard that jazz was America’s greatest musical contribution. When younger, I thought jazz meant cheesy renditions of “The Girl from Ipanema” or, worse yet, the light, syrupy, unlistenable pablum of Kenny G. Then, little by little, I began to take notice of what jazz was really about. It started with the keyboardists, of course: Bill Evans. Vince Guaraldi. Oscar Peterson. Joey DeFrancesco. Jimmy Smith. McCoy Tyner. Herbie Hancock. Then I began to listen to the people they had played with: Miles Davis. John Coltrane. Dizzy Gillespie. Charlie Parker. The next thing I knew, I realized it had been a year since I had listened to any music for pleasure BUT jazz. Why? Because jazz demands of a musician a great deal of technical skill, harmonic understanding, self-confidence, musical sensitivity, intellectual analytical ability, and contact with one’s deepest emotions. OK, simply put, the chords are 100 times more complicated than rock. And the improvisations are focused, paced, structured, and oriented towards making a complete artistic statement. The reason jamband music is limited is because it is very difficult to make a group improvisation have cohesion and economy. When anything goes, the musicians often blow in unstructured, rambling monologues that lose the audience (if, in fact, they were paying attention in the first place). In jazz, the art of improvisation goes far beyond what scale is cool to play over what chord. There is a dedicated focus on the life of a solo, on utilizing compositional structures such as motives and sequences to spin a yarn that is a cohesive, fluid, structured and complete statement of itself, that is true to the body and spirit of the piece being played, and finally, that expresses the creativity, purpose, mood, and personality of the soloist. And all of this often happens at breakneck speed, over a bevy of chord changes that would leave the average power chord banger not even knowing where to begin.

Now this is not to say that all jazz is reserved and tasteful, that all soloists focus every moment on compositional practice rather than displaying their chops with overflowing flurries of notes. But jazz musicians study how to improvise. They learn techniques, they consult with others, they listen and learn and hone their craft, whether formally or informally, with a great deal of diligence and dedication. Perhaps the fundamental difference between getting into jazz and getting into rock is the amount of musical knowledge and wisdom you need to have internalized before you can really get rolling. With rock, a dozen simple triads and maybe a dominant 7th chord or two, played in open voicings on the guitar, are enough to start playing with others (this is not to denigrate Eric Clapton or Mark Knopfler or any of the thousands of other truly great rock musicians - we are just talking about having enough musical language to start playing with others here). With jazz, I am finding that the barriers to entry include: having completely internalized all modes of the major and melodic minor scales, as well as the blues, whole tone, and whole half diminished scales in all twelve keys, having knowledge of a great number of chord voicings for all types of chords from a minor 7th to a susb9 chord under your fingers in all twelve keys, the ability to read music, the ability to generally play your instrument pretty well, and finally, the ability to swing. What a challenge! No wonder so many musicians happily strum away on G C and D (with an occasional Em for an exotic twist). But is the challenge worth it?

It was for me. To bring this back to my personal musical evolution, it was the only way I could go. I had hit the end of the road with rock music - I had made it as complex as I possibly could, first through the odd time signatures and symphonic structures of prog rock, then through the free improvisations of the jamband scene. Both musical interests (read: obsessions) were pointing clearly in a direction of a nimble and noble beauty, a road that had been traveled by legions of our world’s most talented musicians, a syntax and vocabulary and book of songs that can be shared among people that have never met, that come from completely different backgrounds, that may not even speak the same language. Jazz is where I am, and jazz is where I will be staying for some time to come. It is my musical present, my musical future.

I am approaching this challenge through practice and playing with others. As of this writing, I am taking theory and advanced jazz piano workshops at the wonderful Jazzschool in Berkeley, California (http://www.jazzschool.com). I play often with a number of other jazz musicians, sitting down with our instruments and the real book and enjoying great, lighthearted musical communication while spinning notes into the atmosphere. Most importantly, I started the Nick Peck Quartet in August 2002. This group of excellent musicians and marvelous people got together weekly for years and play together for the sheer love of music. The music energized me, puts a gigantic smile on my face, and made me run to the piano to squeeze 15 minutes of practice in before I had to rush off and make a buck. Once again, I have fallen in love with music, and can’t see any reason why this love affair can’t give me (and thus, by reflection, the people who hear the music) untold meaning and pleasure until my fingers just can’t push down on the keys any more.

2005-present: Hammond and the deep groove

Focusing on jazz pushed me back into focusing on rhythm more deeply. After a time of focusing on harmony, I wanted to settle into an examination of the groove. I’ve been there ever since, trying to get my foundation as solid as possible.

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