I grew up on three continents, and on a pretty wild mix of music: Count Basie, Gilbert & Sullivan, Pete Seeger, Ella Fitzgerald, Verdi, Amalia Rodriguez, Burl Ives, Violeta Parra, Palestrina, folk music from Spain and Chile, Renaissance recorder music, and lots more.  I came back to the US at 13, just in time for Sgt. Pepper, Simon & Garfunkel and Hendrix.  The only things I remember clearly from high school are choir, the DC Youth Orchestra (3rd chair cello), singing in coffeehouses and rehearsing Steppenwolf and Spirit in a friend’s basement.

At age eighteen I wandered into a choral audition by accident. (I went into the hall to take pictures, but they handed me a form.…)  Three months later I was singing in the gala opening of the Kennedy Center and recording under Leonard Bernstein.  I decided to try music for a living.

I studied composition and orchestration for three years with composer W.S. Huffman and then set out on a very peculiar musical career, with several different tracks: I did more choral gigs (including a couple seasons with the Washington Bach Consort).  I wrote music for live theater and for choirs.  I sang in dinner theater productions, played bar gigs, entertained in the lounge car of the Autotrain, wrote vocal, horn and string arrangements for people’s recordings, played more bar gigs, recorded my own songs and sold the albums at the aforementioned bar gigs, sang in a jazz vocal quartet (Uptown), toured for some years with some giant dinosaur puppets (Dinorock) and scored a whole show for dinosaurs and symphony orchestra, sang & played bass with The Robyn Helzner Trio, doing “World Jewish Music,” built a succession of recording studios and recorded and produced tracks for singer/songwriters.

These days I still perform, but not very often.  I’m mostly concentrating on arranging work and composing “production music” (music for ads, TV shows, etc). The latter is a new line of work for me, and my first placement was in December of 2020 — a background track used in a few thousand Tik Tok videos.