Musician Interviews
David McHank of Styrofoam Records is an artist whose 30-year career includes illustrating posters and album covers, as well as venturing into animated shorts around a decade ago. Mike Molina is a videographer for Robles …
Back when he was younger, Trevor Ginsberg played violin for a short spell — but strings didn’t stick like his love of singing. He started off in choirs, and eventually became a member of the …
Problems in Modern Puppetry Performance : When SDSU English department grad and tech geek Michael Buchmiller turned himself into Professor B. Miller of the Satanic Puppeteer Orchestra, he knew he’d face challenges in the songwriting, …
“I’ve been playing sax for seven and half years,” says Nick Caldwell, a 17-year-old high school senior who attends the San Diego School of Creative and Performing Arts in Paradise Hills, and who is also …
Blue Largo bandleader Eric Lieberman, who describes the group as Americana Soul, first met singer Alicia Aragon in 1982, while he was in the King Biscuit Blues Band and his future wife was a cocktail …
Drummer Matthew Smith has been a fixture in San Diego for quite a few years, playing with the Matt Smith Neu Jazz Trio, Juice Box, and Fresh Veggies Micro Brass. He gigs often enough around …
“I’m 64 years old with one leg. I don’t need any help falling down,” Social Spit frontman Cliff Cunningham tells me. He’s not spewing random trivia; he’s responding to my question about whether he’s drunk …
Slack Key Ohana didn’t intend to release a live album. But the mahalo groove (aka the Hawaiian spirit of gratefulness for everything) held sway in the end. The slack key guitar band’s new full-length Live …
Lauren Leigh began singing around the age of five, accompanying the songs in The Little Mermaid until she knew them all by heart. Her aunt, local singer-songwriter Eve Selis, told her that she was already …
Missy Alcazar took up classical piano at an early age, and was considered a child prodigy. Her teacher permitted her to practice only “the greats” — composers such as Bach and Chopin. But by elementary …
Time to Shine There’s an unreleased Steely Dan album finally seeing the light of day after languishing in limbo for 52 years. Its gestation and suppression is a fascinating tale of how Linda Hoover, a …
Tapestry Blu was a 1980s electronic pop duo, highlighted by the fabulous falsetto of William Gregory (who went by the French pronunciation, Guillaume Gregory) and Nick De Herrera, AKA Niko, a velvet virtuoso on Yamaha …
You might never expect a Ph.D, in anything to discover a passion for outdoor sidewalk busking. But for Dr. Bruce L. Thiessen — Dr BLT to the music world — it’s all part of the …
A one-time resident of Huntington, West Virginia, Iranian guitarist Farhad Bahrami arrived in San Diego in the early 1980s, bringing Persian music to the experimental Trummerflora Collective and serving as musical director for ensembles like …
When Arizona native Ashley E. Norton moved to Nashville, she landed an interesting gig hosting “songwriter rounds,” gatherings which featured groups of three or four songwriters on a stage. They rotated down the line, not …
Tamara Hartfield Paige, who is the orchestra director and department co-chair at San Diego’s School of Creative and Performing Arts, has been called a multi-instrumentalist, but that seems like a serious understatement. Asked for a …