About Us

Who we are and how we are has always been a major influence on my music. From the first days of my piano plinking and poking at age 6 to my electronic orchestral ensembles today, music has been a way to mirror the internal and give definition to the external. MOJA Music exists to bring thoughtful work to appreciative ears, to create work that moves us with images borne of life and love and all the challenges that make us human. Living life as an African in America has opened my eyes to much that is wrong with this world, but also to so much that is right.

We are a beautiful reflection of the universe. And so the shape of the world around us is a reflection of what is inside of us. There is much work to do. I've always felt that life should have a soundtrack...

That's why I do this...so that we remember that life can work - for all of us.

- Ended piano lessons at age 6; Mom realized I was enjoying the piano more than the lessons...THANKS, MOM!!!....and I continued to play for the next 40+ years

- Learned to play popular songs by ear, building my own chords and voicings and arrangements of everything from 60's R&B to contemporary popular music to show tunes ("West Side Story" was a favorite, but I'll admit, Dave Grusin did it best!)

- Oldest recorded (meaning 'remembered') song entitled, "A Dog and Her Boy" (remind me to make a new version of THAT one! - I still remember it...)

- Continued building my songwriting skills based on the influences of Quincy Jones, The 5th Dimension, Roger Williams, Beethoven, Sly and the Family Stone,
Burt Bacharach, Neil Sedaka, Dave Grusin, Oscar Petersen,....ad infinitum.....I had a ravenous ear ( I could often be found hunched over the well-used console stereo record player with my head going in circles because I just HAD to see what the title of the song was that was playing.)

- College in quiet Seneca Falls, New York was a placid awakening into my skills as a musician...and conversely, my lack of skills as a musician! I began to record my work to tape for the first time and allowed a beloved friend to painstakingly and valiantly try to notate my music. That beloved friend became a serious love interest and was the inspiration for many a love song, most notably, "Vision of You", a tender instrumental with unspoken lyrics (see Simmons College note to follow), but plenty of angst.

- College in the 80's opened me up to the music of Kenny Loggins, Toto, Judas Priest, AC/DC, Dan Fogelberg, Jeff Lorber Fusion, Greg Phillinganes, The Dixie Dregs, Molly Hatchet, Supertramp, Kansas, Rush and more...infusing my musical meanderings with a harder edge and a context for fusing the numerous genre influences that were constantly flooding into my ears and spirit.

- My post-college move to Boston thrust me into my first piano withdrawal. I had always lived within 300 yards of a piano somewhere....until 1984.....I remember shaking in the shower as the water streamed over me like a junkie coming off a mountainous high....until I found the $2/hour pianos in the basement of the Arlington Street church. My musical life had been saved. I had left the Roman Catholic church in my first year of college like a bat out of hell and now here I was spreading my musical wings in the gloriously reverberant sacristy of an all-but-deserted church....yes, Ukumbwa there is a Creator....to this day, I can't produce a track without pounds of reverb and ambience.

- Discovered the electronic piano whilst tooling around the hallowed halls of the now more diminutive E.U.Wurlitzer music store, then on Newbury Street. Thank you to every sales person in the keyboard department who had to watch me salivate over their best product and not get a dime from me, but for my one Roland 76 key electronic piano that kept me alive until I found rebirth a short time later in synthesizers.

- Began to build my musical arsenal with the small, but wirey Roland SH-101 monophonic synth, sleak, simple and funky as the day is long, the Alesis MMT-8 sequencer that was supposed to,but never really dumped it's on-board memory to tape, a couple of Yamaha drum machines, wooden sounding, yes, but magic at the time, and not too long after that, the flagship of all synths.....the Roland D-50, able to play two, yes - TWO, separate parts at one time....but a killer keyboard that I'm still sorry I had to sell for a fraction of it's price to stay in my apartment for another month.

- Created new, more complex, multi-track compositions, becoming infused with elements of percussion borne of my work and play with a new and important friend, Rik Gamad, a Filipino guitarist, instrument maker and 'guru' who had a penchant for the Beatles and did a mean Elvis impersonation that could send the ladies into subdued, but passionate hysterics. I learned to accompany Rik through a diverse array of music on bongos, maracas, tambourine and all the little bells and whistles I began to amass from that point on....

- Realized that Jimi Hendrix was part of my African heritage as a musician

- Rik Gamad and I played out in the Boston Common and Public Gardens on a regular basis and became a quiet and principled fixture on the musical landscape. We were known for playing on the Esplanade before the Boston Pops would begin their July 4th festivities and would usually only stop when the first complaint came back from the Hatch Shell area that our rag-tag, but thoroughly loveable bunch of players/listeners were disrupting the proceedings....the Pops weren't the only ones with fans that would expect to see them on the 4th every year!

- My introduction to computer technologies began with a second-hand Macintosh....thee first no-internal-hard drive, 800k internal FLOPPY complete with 800k external floppy drive....that's alotta floppy k's there, Jim....I didn't mesh music and computers until I discovered Keyboard magazine in the early 80's and a friend's Quadra 605 later on. The possibilities for finally creating and recording the larger musical ideas that had always been in my head were now coming to fruition. I can still remember the day I stuck a drumstick in my shirt-sleeve atop my shoulder and rocked back and forth a la Ray Charles, hitting my cousin's loaner snare drum deftly on the 2-4 as I played what could have been one of the hottest, unheard pop songs of the 70's on our family's Wurlitzer upright.....poor thing took such a beating from my emotions turned inward then outward with every stroke of the faux-ivories.

- Created sound effects and soundtracks for my own video productions and that of my company, Blue Falcon Productions and its clients including the Dimock Community Health Center, First Night Corporation and Exxon/Bayway.

- A little 52k MIDI sequencer program named MasterTracks transformed me from a piano player to a composer/arranger/producer; simple and early electronic technologies of the Roland XP-10 and other keyboards showed me the way to crafting intricate compositions and more emotional and sophisticated representations of the world that was being created inside of me by the world outside of me.

- I graduated technologically to Cakewalk's Metro 4, Cubase and Digital Performer in time and added new sounds to my musical palette with great sound modules like the E-MU Proformance, Korg X5DR, Roland MKS-20, Roland JV-1010 (if you make MIDI music, have at least 2 of these little powerhouses at ALL times!) and the Roland JV-1080. (...the Roland company may actually owe me money for the many times I've gone on and on about their equipment in my computer music classes at Ai/The New England Institute of Art!)