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When I was a young man, I shined the shoes of Louis Armstrong and Louis Jordan! Music was just everywhere like that. And in my family, everyone could play something, and if they couldn't play, they could sing.

My first love of jazz came from joining the Chilliwack Middle School band - it was like an 18-piece jazz band, and I wanted to join just because the older kids looked like they were having so much fun.

We were really grown up for our age and it was an incredible special band.

In high school, I was always into Jerry Lee Lewis, and they decided they needed a piano player for the jazz band. I had my little boogie-woogie thing that I did, so I did my little boogie-woogie thing. I had a very high-pitched voice.

Just coming from a musical family, I was always surrounded by it. On the car rides to school, my mom loved playing A Tribe Called Quest and the Beatles' 'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band,' and then my dad was listening to a lot of Bill Withers and Stevie Wonder.

My dad was a huge big band and jazz fan, and we both sort of enjoyed be-bop, but man, it required so much skill to play it. And then there was cool jazz, the era that Miles, Coltrane, and Ornette ushered in, and that found a home in me. It turns out that that music was just really where I breathed.

My dad loved black singers. So listening to New Orleans music, eventually I wanted to play an instrument.

I was in the band when I was a kid, I played the trumpet.

I was a pop-music junkie. My parents were into Frank Sinatra and Doris Day. They weren't too excited when I had Aretha or the Stones pumping.

As a kid, my parents had the typical stuff going on in the home, like Bee Gees, The Carpenters. Then I got exposed to what my brothers were listening to: a lot of classic rock, Led Zeppelin. It was around the mid-'80s when the whole Electro-Techno-Pop-House music thing started happening in Chicago.