I cannot begin to say who I am without saying where I am from, where I grew up, and what kind of no-background I had. I was born Dec. 1941 in a place called Quimper, in that part of France known as Brittany, the bit that sticks out into the Atlantic Ocean. Brittany is one of the Celtic nations (part of the “Celtic Fringe”, as it is termed in the U.K.), together with Ireland, Scotland, Cornwall, Wales, and the Isle of Man. It has a language of its own, very similar to Welsh. Incidentally, I speak it.

Another track from Rare. I am playing vibes, keys and flute on this.

Watch out! There are some explicit lyrics on this one.

I'm playin' organ.

This is half of what I did for my Berklee Audition on the 16th. This is a rough run through I did today to test out a new video app on my phone (I have an Iphone 3g, so that means I have no video normally).

The other tune I did was Boplicity by Miles Davis. I'll try to record that tomorrow if I have time.

I dug this. Good players.

Here is another track by the group Rare. I composed this song in a very political mood right after we started the war in Afghanistan. There is probably good reason why politics largely stay out of music (this song being a good example, I'm really not much of a lyric writer). Since there was a vibe solo I thought I would go ahead and post it though. Enjoy!

Rare was a group I was in for approximately a year before it disbanded (I won't go into details, it's water under the bridge). I hadn't listened to these tracks since we recorded them at my house in 2004. We never got to release them because of the break-up. Anyway, I was cleaning up space on one of my hard drives and listened to the tracks. A few of them were fun for me to listen back to so I will share them. I am the recording engineer, producer, and keyboards on this (not too proud of the 1st two titles).

Hey we're screwing around with the shout box. It's been really slowing down the site. so if you don't see it there, that's what's up!

I saw Zakir and Ustad Allah Rakha live and it was so frickin amazing.

Check how they sing the rhythms and then play them back on the tablas.

It's cool cause it's father and son playing! And they're both such monsters.

Susan Pascal is a subscriber on the site. I don't know much about her so I was crusing Youtube looking for stuff. I found this video of her. She takes a great solo over a Latin tune.