At age six I wanted to play the drums but my dad heard from a work associate that it’s better to start on the piano. To this day I thank my dad, a mechanical engineer, for this great advice. In sixth grade there was the option to join the concert band, so I chose the trombone because it was “different”. I was intrigued by the mechanics of the slide and I seemed to gravitate toward low register sounds. Playing a trombone was a cool visual thing too, the long brass tubing lunging out like rays of sunlight. As a student trombone player I got a lot of exposure to the inner parts of an arrangement, the chords and counter lines that accompany the melody. Occasionally we’d get the limelight but generally we were the background element for whoever had the melody. I enjoyed it because I knew that a well written background can take an arrangement to another level or even a new dimension. It was like belonging to a special club that had it’s own language. Thus my interest in composition and arranging began.