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I went to this little performing arts school in downtown Phoenix. You had to dance or act, and everyone sang in choir. I started out playing the saxophone, but I always wanted to be in an orchestra. That was a dream as a kid, and there aren't a lot of saxophones in an orchestra.

I moved out to L.A. when I was 17, dropped out of high school, and pursued a career in music.

I did the marching band all throughout junior high and high school. Music was one of my favorite things in school.

Then I left that school and I went to Cerritos College, which was in southern California; they had one of the best big band programs in the country at the time.

I was in every band class I could get in, like after school jazz band and marching band, and that's where I really learned to read music from elementary all the way through junior high and high school.

I came to L.A. in 1970, and my desire and my training was to be a studio musician, which I had read about in my senior year in high school.

I had sort of exhausted all the avenues playing in Detroit. So again, through the stewardship of my brother, I ended up in California and went to the Musicians Institute in L.A. I wanted to get better as a player.

I attended a post-college program in L.A. for Music Business and Production. Took several courses involving Music Production, Arrangement, and Songwriting.

I was in this public high school in Princeton, and it had this topnotch jazz program - if you were a musician of any kind of caliber, your holy grail was to be in that orchestra. It was that claim to fame of the school, of the town, other than the university. But it was better than the university band.

Not with the Rochester Philharmonic, but I formed my own orchestra, made up of musicians from the Eastman School, where I'm on the faculty now, direct the Jazz Ensemble and teach improvisation classes.