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The first live production work I did — student-led series at The New School.
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Drawn rather than notated, performed as the closing piece of the degree recital on 19 April 2024.
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Nine performances at The New School and Tishman Auditorium, 2021 to 2024. Ten episodes of Sunday Sessions, season two. Three live sound and production jobs. Seventy-two scores — originals, arrangements, studies, and the Julius Hemphill ensemble book. Four data and code projects.
The videos are the ensembles' own recordings on YouTube. The scores are the PDFs I engraved, shown as their own first pages. Set lists, run sheets, stage plots and the recital poster are scans of the paper I kept. Personnel and repertoire are copied from the programs.
Venue, console and crew for MOB and Tavern Trek. Set lists for six Sunday Sessions episodes, which were never posted. Photos from the Ohio years. The chart for All The Things You Are from the recital.
I grew up in Cleveland surrounded by music. My father plays guitar and is a sound engineer, so every car ride was filled with tunes that sparked my love for music from an early age. I began on clarinet in fifth grade, then moved to alto saxophone at the end of the year, but after a summer camp where I played baritone saxophone for the first time, I fell in love with the horn and its sound. I knew I wanted to do something in music. I used my high school years to figure out what kind of music I wanted to play.
High school was a wonderful time full of music and growth. I played in concert bands such as the Cleveland Youth Wind Symphony, the premier youth wind ensemble in Northeast Ohio which would perform regularly at Severance Hall. The Shaker Heights Wind Ensemble which was one of only two high school bands that competed at the AA concert band level and the Symphonic Band. I was selected by one of my school band directors who also conducted an adult civic band to play 2nd chair alto as a high schooler. I also played in jazz ensemble programs like the Shaker Heights Jazz Ensemble and Jazz band, The Jazz at The Music Settlement (J@MS) and the Tri-C JazzFest Academy. In Show Choir bands competing at Show Choir invitationals. In pit orchestras for musicals performed at the school. And in summer camps where I taught and played.
These were the teachers that guided me and who I looked up to. Who shaped who I am to this day. During summers, I attended jazz and Afro-Cuban jazz camps, taught at band camps, and worked in the school's band office organizing scores, cleaning instruments and getting ready for the coming school year. Music was year round. An example of how close I was with my mentors, Mario Clopton wouldn't even ask me to play for the groups he ran, for two years in a row at the beginning of the year while I was in another class he would knock on the door and ask the other teacher if he could talk to me and say here's the music for this year and place a packet on my desk. Which was a packet of the Show Choir music and the first musical they were having for the year. I didn't even have a chance to say no (not that I wanted to say no anyway).
I studied jazz and contemporary music at The New School's College of Performing Arts in New York City. I had the privilege of performing in ensembles led by Bobby Sanabria, Rez Abbasi, Marty Ehrlich, Andrew Cyrille, Nir Felder, Allison Miller, Jim Snidero, Andy McKee, Ahmed Abdullah and many more. I took my private lessons with David Schnitter, Darius Jones, Marty Ehrlich and Andrew Gould. Each helped shape my improvisation, composition, and sound exploration.
While going to college, I put my other passion for live sound and music production to work. As my father is a sound engineer I had picked up a few things while shadowing him to his gigs. While in NYC, I joined the student-led, Tiny Desk–inspired Sunday Sessions as a backline assistant and assistant live sound engineer. I also mixed performances for artists and students, set up gear for concerts, and ran PA systems outside the school.
Since graduating from The New School in 2024, I found a new passion in data analysis, math and tech. To start my new exploration to get a good feel for real world application of what I wanted to do, I earned microcredentials in Excel, Minitab, Power BI, and general data analytics. I liked doing all of that so much that I'm currently pursuing the Post-Degree Professional Certificate in Data Analytics at Cuyahoga Community College (Tri-C), with a goal of beginning a Master's degree in Applied Mathematics and Statistics in Fall 2026. As of Oct 2025 I'm still getting everything ready for my application. This all might be tentative as I plan to move back to NYC in summer 2026. In the meantime I work as a LAN (Local Area Network) and Desktop Support Technician for an IT company that oversees more than 250 devices and accounts.