Biography

I was born in London, Ontario, a city very close to the Great Lakes and nice beaches. Life was uneventful until, one day when I was about 10 years old, I plucked the strings of a guitar on display in Simpson's Department store. The sounds and the moment were transformative, and thus began over a year of pining, pestering and pleading with my parents to somehow give me a guitar - any guitar. And so, on my 12th birthday, I received a steel-string guitar in a plain cardboard box. Straight away, I was finding and learning songs using a beginner's chord book and my ear. My early influences were Delta blues, jazz, classical, rock and folk music. I became enchanted with alternate tunings for the instrument, a fascination which continues to this day. By age 16, I was performing, and a short time later formed a partnership with vocalist Sherrill Craig (now Sherrill Christian).

As with most musicians, earning a living means having a variety of jobs, and so, while teaching guitar part-time and occasionally performing, I also worked as an electronics technician - which sometimes involved being sent to Churchill and the Arctic in support of rocket/satellite based research projects. In the late 1980s my interests in electronics and music led me to training as a recording engineer at The Ontario Institute of Audio Recording Technology. Subsequently, that combined artistic and technical background led the school to offer me both faculty and technical support positions, while doing recording engineering when time and energy permitted. While at OIART I studied harmony and general music theory with Peter Kryshtalovich, who remains the Dean of Studies at that school.

A few years later I became the Assistant Manager at a local guitar shop. Some of the most interesting aspects of that work included buying, selling and appraising all manner of guitars - steel-string, classical, electric, and electric bass, as well as other stringed instruments.

On a number of occasions over the years I have been commissioned to write original music for various types of meditation and arrangements for short documentaries.

Eventually I began teaching guitar full-time at my studio in Wortley Village, enjoyable work that continues to this day. For the past few years, I have been in a musical partnership with classical guitarist Paul Kramer. Though we have very different backgrounds in guitar playing, we share some common sensibilities and have enjoyed collaboration in composing, arranging and performing music for two guitars. Our new CD, "Two People", is now available.