[fitness1]

It's been a long journey....


Grew up listening to Nat King Cole, Dean Martin, Johnny Cash, The Monkees, Gary Lewis and the Playboys, Cowsills, 1910 Fruitgum Co., Guess Who, Neil Diamond, Carpenters, etc.

At 16 I started playing in a classic rock band - we covered all the obvious: Aerosmith, Kansas, Rush, Zepellin, AC/DC, Foriegner, Rainbow etc.

A year later I started working in a record store and my horizons expanded very quickly. It was the late 70's and contemporary jazz caught my ear - Metheny, Jean Luc Ponty, John Klemmer, Grover Washington and all the great CTI stuff, Sanborn. Then I started going backward and listening to more traditional jazz from the 50's and 60's.

In '82 (worked at the store until '87) I quit playing in bands and started doing solo work.....and a very large portion of my music turned to the great singer songwriters - I'd already been a huge fan of the Chapin/Croce/Denver/Taylor stuff, but I dug deeper into the more obscure artists. Also started digging into contemporary bluegrass/newgrass and acoustic jazz (HUGE Stephane Grappelli fan).

Just before I left the record store, I started being quite interested in high quality audio, and my listening habits morphed into pretty much acoustic only instrumentation. My goal was to reproduce the sound of an acoustic band on a stage in my listening room. I became more and more critical of recording quality, sound stage, vocal height etc and searched for recordings that accurately reproduced that.

I don't spend nearly as much time listening as I used to, but still have all the music collection that I will take to my grave. In about '91 I reduced my vinyl collection from about 3200 to about 500, and then did another cut down to about 350 10 years ago or so. Most of what left was collectible rock and roll stuff, keeping the acoustic/jazz/singer songwriter artists I knew would still be relevant in my rocking chair days.