Just a lil about me :)

I aspire to be an emcee who contributes to the game & makes a difference

Parents are immigrants, both parents were always there for me and supported me and loved me unconditionally, so I've had a great life. My family is very musical. My mom's side is from Ecuador. My aunts, uncles, cousins, has a culture of playing acoustic guitar, and singing a wide variety of religious, latino pop, rock, repurposed tangos and ecuadorian childhood songs, so this really impacted me. There was always a guitar, or multiple, hanging around in my Abuelita's house, who I lived with for some time.

My mom always had my brothers and I (stubboringly), singing christmas carols in the living room, every day of December. She's the reason I'm an emcee today, really. She got me into music, I played 5+ years in a high school symphonic band, and when I was on the brink of quitting, she found me an incredible trumpet teacher, Mic Gillette, who was a horn player in the legendary band Tower of Power. That's my claim to fame, being a student of Mic's, although, I feel I've turned out to be a bit of a washed up mediocre player myself.

My father loves music, especially jazz (Jimmy Giuffre), musicals (South Pacific), rock, easy going, good music really. He's from England, his father was a piano player who I never met since he passed away way back in the 70s, but it definitely

I grew up in the rich white suburbs of the East Bay Area. I dunno what drew me to hip hop exactly, but a friend of mine Ross, started writing raps instead of doing actual work in one of our classes, and I was thinking "whoa wtf, that's dope I'ma do that". I started writing verses, and that's the first time I ever discovered something that rly lit a fire in me. I organized a group of friends and did some hip hop shit, played in a talent show and killed it, created a mash up of a song called "Never There" (by my fav. band Cake), with a 5 piece group (keys, drums, trumpet, guitar, bass) to play our own song, stealing the first beat from The Roots, The Seed, The Melting Pot, a 16 minute live recording.. which just blew my fuckin mind.

Here's our version, with my own verse and trumpet solo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j12GpDe4wxs

I was smoking a lot of weed those days, it's all kind of a blur, but I'm proud of that, and I organized an even bigger group of ~10 people to play in battle of the bands the next year, and we won, playing beautiful instrumentals, some hip hop (did a cover of Zion I's Coastin). Then, went 10 years not really doing any music. I dunno why I feel ever since, I've been living in the shadow of this 17 year old kid.

Lookin back, I would spend a lot of my time alone, trolling the internet, hanging out on different torrent sites downloading gigs and gigs of underground hip hop. That's where I really dug my teeth and fell in love :)

My favorite artists? Damn so many. Zion I, People Under the Stairs, Jurassic 5, Bliss n Eso, Stevie Wonder, Tim Maia, Los Iracundos, Gil Scott Heron...