Since the age of two, I have wanted to play the drums. A big part of my music career has been as a per­cus­sion­ist, and it was through per­cus­sion that I started with con­tem­po­rary clas­si­cal music. It was also the cat­a­lyst for my explo­ration of many other kinds of music, and I was quite active as a per­former until recently.

As a child, I moved between clas­si­cal per­cus­sion and jazz drum­ming, thanks to the influ­ence of my teacher, Trevor Bran­den­burg. Because the clas­si­cal per­cus­sion reper­toire is largely mod­ern, I had an early expo­sure to twentieth-​century music, and I always liked it. I had had rel­a­tively lit­tle expe­ri­ence with the clas­si­cal West­ern canon, so I never learned the mis­con­cep­tion that mod­ern clas­si­cal music is dif­fer­ent, weird, or “dif­fi­cult”. Also being a per­cus­sion­ist, I didn’t focus very much on pitch aspects of music until my later teens.

After high school, I decided I would study jazz drum­ming, so I enrolled in the jazz pro­gram at Grant MacE­wan Col­lege (GMC) in Edmon­ton. Brian Thur­good, my teacher at GMC, encour­aged me to pol­ish my tech­nique and work towards a pro­fes­sional level of per­for­mance. I enjoyed this chal­lenge, and my play­ing improved tremen­dously. How­ever, the more I refined the skills I had in jazz and pop, the more I was curi­ous to learn about other kinds of music. I was espe­cially inter­ested in Cuban music, and stud­ied pri­vately with Cuban per­cus­sion­ist Mario Allende for sev­eral years. I also took some courses at the Uni­ver­sity of Alberta on Ghana­ian Ewe music.

The Cuban stud­ies in par­tic­u­lar had an influ­ence on me, and I even­tu­ally ended up study­ing in Havana (see Cur­ricu­lum Vitæ). My curios­ity for explor­ing new kinds of music also led me to start com­pos­ing. I started out doing arrange­ments for bands I played with, then even­tu­ally began com­pos­ing my own songs. Grad­u­ally I became more inter­ested in learn­ing how to write for instru­ments I didn’t play and that weren’t nor­mally part of the jazz/pop ensemble.

After mov­ing to Toronto in 2002, the demands of my com­po­si­tional career pre­vented me from doing much per­form­ing. Since that time, most of my per­for­mance projects have been based around free improvisation.