Early exposure to King Crimson’s In the Court of the Crimson King and Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma made me a convert of the pioneering progressive rock of the era, which satisfied my hunger for more adventurous forms of rock music that were liberated from the tyranny of the blues format. No disrespect to the blues, of course – I just yearned to explore a more expansive sound field. 

Meanwhile, my older brother introduced me to jazz at a tender age, and my interest in the genre really blossomed with the advent of jazz-rock fusion. I was, and remain, a huge devotee of the original Mahavishnu Orchestra and like-minded musicians such as John Abercrombie, the first edition of Weather Report, and of course Miles Davis in his electric period. By the time I reached my twenties I was listening to more jazz and experimental music than rock, which is still the case today, though I’ve soured on much of what passes for fusion nowadays. But the entire ECM catalog has had a profound influence on me, as have groundbreaking ethnic fusion groups like Oregon and jazz explorers such as Sun Ra, John Coltrane, Don Cherry, Paul Bley, and Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). I also developed an abiding interest in free improvisation, initially through exposure to some of the musicians who were in the outer orbit of the Crimson camp, such as Harry Miller and Keith Tippett.

Back to my earlier years, my first serious band was the progressive rock trio Zuir in my hometown of Utica, New York. We were definitely the odd band out in musically conservative Utica, a bastion of redneck rock. After graduating from high school, the band moved out to Seattle in 1975 to try our luck there at the suggestion of my brother, a Seattle resident. Although little came of it musically and the band dissolved shortly thereafter, the experience led to my adopting Seattle as my abode, and I’ve lived here on and off ever since.

Meanwhile, another friend from Utica, keyboardist and composer Craig Wuest, formed an electroacoustic project named “Earthstar” and later relocated to Germany at the encouragement of electronic music legend Klaus Schulze, who went on to produce the Earthstar LP French Skyline. In 1979 Craig invited me to join him in Germany, where I participated in Earthstar sessions, some of which were released on the Sky label. I’ve since come to appreciate that Earthstar was the only U.S. group to have participated in the German kosmische music scene while still at its height.

Back in Seattle after the Earthstar adventure, I became involved with experimental musician K. Leimer’s Savant project and forged the first of many satisfying ongoing musical relationships with Northwest musicians. After a three-year stint in NYC, I returned to Seattle and became involved in a number of avant-rock bands and free-improvising ensembles.

Then came perhaps the pivotal move in my career to date, when I accepted a teaching position in China instigated by my fiancée (now wife) Anne. I went there with scant expectation of playing music publicly in a supposedly repressive authoritarian state, but soon embarked on a surreal musical rollercoaster ride that saw me become a minor celebrity in China. During the four years I spent in mainland China and later Taiwan, I played more than 100 concerts in venues ranging from nationwide television broadcasts, sports arenas, and concert halls to sleazy underground nightclubs, night markets, a textile factory, and even a venerable Taoist temple. Along the way I organized three of the earliest unofficial concert tours of China by non-mainstream Western bands, recorded an album for the China Record Company that sold tens of thousands of copies, performed for television and radio audiences numbering in the hundreds of millions, and collaborated with some of China’s most important contemporary musicians, including the founding fathers of Chinese rock, Cui Jian and Zhang Xing.

Since returning to the States in 1993, I’ve played in more bands than I can count, notably Jeff Greinke’s LAND, Stackpole, Axolotl, Iron Kim Style, the international project Ting Bu Dong, and now Moraine. Moraine began life roughly seven years ago as an improvising duo of myself and cellist Ruth Davidson; before long we shifted our focus to composition and expanded to a five-piece, initially the “string quartet plus drums” lineup of guitar, cello, violin (Alicia Allen), bass (Kevin Millard), and drums that recorded manifest deNsity. After Ruth and our original drummer Jay Jaskot moved to the East Coast, we replaced the cello role with woodwinds (James DeJoie) and assumed a harder-edged sound, as heard on the second CD, Metamorphic Rock, which was recorded live at NEARfest 2010.

I’ve been extremely fortunate to have forged a highly supportive relationship with Leonardo Pavkovic of MoonJune Records, who has literally put me on the international map as a musician. Leonardo is a larger-than-life figure who’s been a tireless benefactor to a global family of creative musicians in so many ways.

I fail to see why music alone, of all the products of human labor, is deemed to have no monetary value. I’d like to see how the rogue downloaders would react to someone helping themselves to the products of their own labors without reasonable recompense. The “cold fact” (to quote Rodriguez) is that it costs thousands of dollars to record, master, press, and promote an album, even when opting for the most economical methods. So you tell me how a musician is supposed to carry on documenting their work for the public without any hope of simply breaking even. The problem is especially acute in an era when record labels no longer provide material support to the majority of artists. Most consumers of music are evidently unaware that, unlike in earlier times, 99 percent of recording artists today have to shoulder not only their studio expenses, but also the cost of manufacturing their CDs – to say nothing of the cost of equipment, rehearsal space, and many other tangibles. Where is the funding to come from? We’re not alchemists.

Other recent acquisitions include the latest album by Icelandic sort-of-prog band Agent Fresco; pianist Alexei Lubimov’s luminescent renderings of Debussy’s Preludes; the reissue of Terje Rypdal’s Odyssey, augmented by a stunning live concert recording; and Beneath Detroit: Transdimensional Space Window featuring the stunning guitarist Spencer Barefield.

I’m an insatiable reader with omnivorous tastes, but I probably read more nonfiction than fiction overall. I’m currently reading Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle by Matthew Klingle. Other recent reads include Karel Capek’s War with the Newts and Kay Larson’s Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists, a must-read for anyone interested in the intersection of music and the arts with Eastern worldviews in the twentieth century. I’ve also been rereading Ray Bradbury’s oeuvre in the wake of his passing.

That would have to be the concert I played at Chengdu Electrical University in China’s Sichuan Province with my expatriate band Identity Crisis in 1991. Here’s the account I wrote in my book Live at the Forbidden City: Musical Encounters in China and Taiwan: [It’s fine to reprint this as I own the rights.]

The biggest show of the entire [Identity Crisis 1991] tour took place in a vast outdoor amphitheater at Chengdu Electrical University. Comically, the organizers were officers of the campus branch of the Communist Youth League who professed a fervent love of rock and roll. By now we knew better than to count on getting adequate equipment, so we made the communist rockers promise that they would furnish proper instrument amplifiers.

When our hosts came to collect us on the day of the gig, we anxiously inquired about the amps and were told that we would have use of “a very good amplifier—very big!” Just one? Sure enough, we arrived at the concert venue to find nothing but a stadium-size PA system. We would have no choice but to plug all of our instruments directly into the oversized behemoth and pray that everything would sound okay.

With showtime fast approaching, we hurriedly set up our equipment in the hope that we would get a decent sound check for a change, but no sooner did we unpack our instruments than the organizers announced that it was time to leave for dinner. We politely declined, explaining that we would rather get a sound check than eat just then, but the Communist Youth League had given these penniless students money to buy us dinner, and they were not about to forfeit the opportunity to gorge themselves in our honor. Shrugging off all practical considerations, our hosts stuffed us into a minibus and drove us across town to one of their favorite restaurants. With a sinking feeling, we watched them wolf down a dozen hefty dishes while the possibility of a sound check steadily slipped away. Perilously close to showtime, the bus crawled back to the university through gridlocked traffic. To our horror, 4,000 people were already waiting for us to take the stage.

We raced to get everything ready onstage while the impatient crowd yelled for us to begin. An hour later, the concert finally commenced with a startling blast of noise, forcing many in the audience to involuntarily cover their ears in panic. Tom’s frightfully overamplified drums exploded from the strained loudspeakers and ricocheted off distant buildings like cannon shots. Since this was Chengdu Electrical University, we had naïvely trusted the school technicians to know what they were doing, but the flustered young men acted as though they had never even flipped a light switch, much less operated an arena sound system. The lack of monitor speakers made it all but impossible for us to hear each other’s cues, causing us to veer badly out of sync. Every electrical device onstage was plugged into a single dangerous-looking outlet, and whenever the lights came on, Bryce’s keyboard mysteriously lost power. As if all this weren’t bad enough, thousands of tiny flies settled on our faces, crawled up our nostrils, and swarmed over our instruments as we struggled to salvage some music from the din. (Bryce’s synthesizer keys were literally black with bugs.) Partway through our nightmare set, a student singer joined us for a rendition of a [Chinese rock icon] Cui Jian song; the confused fellow gamely belted out the lyrics and made his best rock-star moves amid the swirling mess. Though the concert was a supreme technical embarrassment, the audience nevertheless roared in approval, showing just how starved for sensation Chinese students could be in those days.