I’m a musician/composer based in San Jose, CA. I play piano for New Ballet School, formerly Silicon Valley Ballet, and teach at Evergreen Studio of Music and the Arts. I also play bass in Mercy Terrace. For many years I was the house pianist at the Go Go Gone show in downtown San Jose, hosted by the illustrious Mighty Mike McGee. From 2012 until the 2020 pandemic shuttered things, I also hosted a weekly radio show called The Bottom 40 at KSCU, the Santa Clara University station.

I grew up in Merrill, Wisconsin, studied piano at the Wausau Conservatory of Music, and won the Wisconsin Music Teachers Association Piano Competition both my junior and senior years of high school. I went on to earn a degree in piano performance from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, studying classical under Christopher Taylor and jazz until Joan Wildman. After college I spent the better part of a decade touring with various bands (The Kissers, Smile Brigade) before relocating to Seattle and settling into a career teaching and accompanying ballet classes. I moved to San Jose in 2012.

Since 2016 I’ve released three albums and one EP of solo instrumental works. My compositions have been used for choreography by New Ballet, eMotion Arts, the Memphis Ballet, and Boise Ballet Academy. In 2022, I was granted an artist residency by the Jack Straw Foundation in Seattle to record an original work with Skyros Quartet. In 2023 I was one of four recipients of the Leigh Weimers Emerging Artist award.

Antigo is an album of instrumental pieces, which, in the absence of better terminology, you could label "classical music." It was recorded over the course of a year and a half at various locations around San Jose, with the help of some wonderful local musicians, and a gracious recording engineer.

Long Form took a different approach than Antigo. Rather than writing sheet music, fretting over the placement of every note, and recording acoustic instruments with microphones, Long Form was created primarily by free-form improvisation, and recorded on my laptop, mostly using digital instruments, with the exception of some Rhodes, piano, and violin on a few tracks.

 Una Corda was written and recorded during the winter of 2019-20. I wanted to create something calm. When the shelter-in-place order hit in mid-March, I was just starting to mix the record — a process that involved hours of close listening on various speakers and headphones, as well as frequent midnight walks to my car parked down the street to sit in the dark with a notepad on the steering wheel, deciding whether to pan a particular sound to the left or adjust the reverb. The transition from routine to quarantine was sudden and disorienting. The grocery store shelves were emptied; the streets were silent; and as weeks went by, time seemed to expand in every direction at once. “Una corda” is a musical directive that indicates the use of the soft pedal. It’s when things go quiet.