Hmmm, let`s see. I`ve been playing bass since sometime in the early `90s. This apparently made no sense at the time, since I came from an almost completely non-musical family. That and I apparently got kicked out of music lessons or something like that when I was about four, or so I'm told.

Fast forward several years and lots of bands and projects to 2003, when I began experimenting with loopers after hearing Steve Lawson and Michael Manring use them. I`d heard a bit of solo bass stuff up to that point - Victor Wooten, Stu Hamm, that kind of thing - and loved it, but didn`t see myself ever doing that. The looping, on the other hand, was a different story. I could get used to this, I thought. Especially once I got a power supply for my very first looper, thus saving me from changing the batteries every 15 minutes.

Once I came up with the name, Zen Beer was born. People always ask me what it means. It means whatever you want it to, but to me it`s a nice way to sum up something that makes you think in an unusual way, but can also be fun as well. Already having done the improv thing for a while, I started doing that with solo bass. This led to a whole bunch of home recordings. Some of these were actually pretty cool.

I`d often wanted to do an actual solo bass album in the studio. At any rate, after a not-very-fun health scare in 2005, I went ahead and did it. I dropped a line to Dean Watson at Gallery Studios in Ottawa, whom I knew from the open jam days. Grand Unified Chaos resulted from this - a 15-song, mostly improvised and written in the studio album, an eclectic mix of ambient, experimental and progressive jazz and rock elements. It got reviewed in Bass Guitar Magazine in April 2007, so dust that issue off and check it out!

Anyway, back to those home recordings. I took them back in 2006 to see about getting some of the more decent ones remastered. After that, I promptly lost the master CD and didn`t find it for another year and a half. Once I found it, in the last place I looked, it was finally released as The Cosmic Trigger EP - a six-song, all improvised ambient bass loopfest.

Around then I did my first clinic - the 2007 Lodo Bass Bash in Denver, Colorado. It was totally awesome! Some of the best players in the world were there, and they were all amazing people as well as musicians. I`ve done  others since then but this being the first event of this magnitude I had ever done, there was something special about it and it will always be remembered so.

After that and a few other bits and pieces, well heck, let`s just say it was inspiring enough to do another solo album. I went and knocked on Dean Watson`s door again and things got rolling in spring 2008. Bass, the Universe and Everything is a much more complex album than the previous two, involving 9-string bass (thank the guys in Denver for getting me into THAT) and more use of layered loops, percussive lines, melodic leads and electronica-like effects to produce a very unique sound.

What next for the Zen Beer project... well, it goes where the music takes me!