Born in Toronto 1960, moved all over ending up in Montreal. Went to McGill University in classical bass trombone performance, but never intended to play full time in an orchestra. My plan from the beginning was play, write, teach; any style, basically try to be as polyvalent as possible. My first gigs were on bass (electric, then upright, learned from my brother, who is a bassist, and my sister, who plays bass now for Prince) but I gave that up once I was out of school. I wrote, played and conducted for shows, choirs, and casuals in Montreal, gaining valuable chops and experience. I finished my Master's degree in Jazz Studies and Contemporary Media (writing major) at Eastman School of Music in 1988 and won a few awards for writing music. I came back to Montreal to be with my sweetie, eschewing the big centres like New York and Los Angeles, preferring to be a relatively big fish in a small pond, and taught jazz arranging for the next 17 years at McGill, and trombone and theory privately. I kept gigging at anything that came my way, more or less keeping up the "play, write, teach" philosophy, but my first love was jazz. I left McGill last year, and now teach jazz composition and arranging at Vanier College and Université de Montréal. I still gig quite a bit on tenor trombone, bass trombone and tuba, playing regularly with the Altsys Jazz Orchestra, Streetnix, Montreal Jazz Big Band, the Opus Lib brass quintet, and l'Orchestre Symphonique de Sherbrooke. I write a lot too, for jingles, films, shows, and whatever jazz I can manage to fit into all that, though the teaching side seems to be on a relative upswing. I married my sweetie, who teaches college, and we have two children, 11 and 9. I'm pretty sure that if I had tried this in a bigger city I would have failed miserably, or else found myself pigeonholed into a specialty, which did not follow my original plan.
I have used Finale since 3.2 to create pretty parts for the musicians, but I never managed to get my head around working directly to the computer. I still use cheap staff paper and a 2B pencil to sketch, working everything out before I ever get to the computer. For my commercial work, I can often do it without referring to a piano, but I noodle endlessly on the piano whenever I am creating something that is new to me.
Christopher
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