About me

I didn't choose music. It chose me — or more accurately, it was just always there. The Grateful Dead, Coltrane, Aretha filling the kitchen, bluegrass on a Sunday afternoon. My dad had me at Nighttown, the legendary jazz club down the street from our house in Cleveland Heights, before I started kindergarten. While other families went to the beach on vacation, we went to Red Rocks to see Derek Trucks and Widespread Panic. We sat in the Village Vanguard in New York City and watched Brad Mehldau turn a piano into something I still don’t have words for. I absorbed all of it long before I could explain any of it — and that turned out to be the best musical education I ever received.

I started formal lessons at age five with a classical teacher, Ms. Moran. She was exacting and patient and I loved her. But by eight years old I was trying to sneak Thelonious Monk into my recital pieces, and Blue Monk doesn't live on a written page. She knew it. I knew it. So I followed the sound somewhere new.

Jazz opened everything up. My next teacher let me loose, and I took to it immediately. In third grade I was playing boogie woogie piano before chorus class — pounding out walking bass lines while thirty kids chased each other around the room. I remember being mortified. Now I think it might be the most honest musical moment I've ever had. Nobody told those kids to dance. The music just moved them. That's the whole point, and I've been chasing that feeling ever since.

By middle school I was deep into my local community college's youth jazz program. Sophomore year of high school I was leading the top ensemble — a serious band that played professional gigs around Cleveland under the direction of world-class trumpeter Dominic Farinacci. That program taught me something I carry into every session I play and every lesson I teach: you don't memorize music. You internalize it. I play a song the way you'd retell a story you know by heart. The structure is there, but every time it breathes a little differently. I'm a mediocre sight-reader and I'm fine with that. What I can do is listen, respond, and make the song live in the room.

Then senior year, I walked into a wall. I realized my ear wasn't where it needed to be. Ear training — hearing what another musician plays and answering it in real time, without a chart, without rehearsal — is the foundation of everything I believe about music. It's the difference between reciting and conversing. So I stepped back from performing and put in the work. It was humbling and it changed everything about how I play.

Around this same time, something else shifted. I'd grown up on the Dead and the Allman Brothers, on Derek Trucks bending notes until they cried, on the idea that a song isn't a fixed thing but a living conversation that's different every night. Now I was old enough to chase that myself. The organ became my way in — a Hammond doesn't politely accompany. It growls, it swells, it drives a band forward. Rock and roll, Southern soul, psychedelic improvisation — it all ran through the same instrument, and it connected every thread I'd been following since I was a kid sitting in a dark jazz club not understanding why the music made me feel so much. The jazz discipline gave me the vocabulary. The rock and jam band world gave me the reason to use it.

That road eventually led me to Arcata, and the moment I got here I understood why. This is a town built on live music, on community, on the belief that art isn't decoration — it's how people find each other. I'm the keys and organ player for the Bella Rayne Band along with a variety of other projects. I also play solo gigs and private events around Humboldt County, do studio work, and teach young musicians how to speak to each other. I'm building a life here that feels like the one I was raised for. I invite you to join me on the next stage of my life’s great adventure.