I'm from Fairbanks, Alaska, and I'm fine with never seeing the place again.

I took up string bass in Denver in 1985, under the tutelage of the brilliant and hilarious Mary Stribling, to whom my debt is beyond reckoning. Over the next decade and a half I passed through a wide assortment of jazz, blues, bluegrass, jazzgrass, folk, old-timey, musical theater, classical, and Venezuelan (no, really) bands in Denver and Boulder, and did long stints with Laughing Hands, Girls On Top, and the gigantically skilled and talented Julie Hoest, then as now the most underappreciated acoustic musician in the Rocky Mountain region.

In 2001 I moved to Dresden, Germany and pretty much stopped playing for four years. Through the efforts of Julie Hibbard (who was also in Hot Buttered Grits, mentioned below) and Robert Masou, and thanks to the enormous patience and generosity of the members of the New Town Swing Orchestra, I slowly got back into it. I spent six years (2005-2011) with New Town, and I've played in a variety of one-off ensembles with various people I met hanging out with them. I've also been in a couple of really fun bands on electric bass: an eight-piece R&B operation called Hot Buttered Grits, and an adorable little rock and roll trio called Enough Rope - me, Ben Schlingelhof (who was also in Grits), and Per Widlund (who was in Grits on guitar and New Town on trumpet, and for a while played in a jazz trio with Guillaume and me).

At Bunte Republik Neustadt in 2007, I heard Lutz Kowalewski playing acoustic blues in front of Purple Haze, and was very impressed. I got a business card from him, and after a leisurely exchange of emails over the following winter, we played our first (totally unrehearsed) gig together in April 2008, along with the great Bernd Kleinow on harmonica. I didn't know at the time about Bernd's status as a living legend of East German music, but I sure was floored by his playing. Since then I've been playing very regularly with Kowa in various constellations - sometimes the two of us, sometimes with Unlimited Blues (Kowa and Bernd, plus me more often than not), and lately with a new electric blues trio called the Mongrel Blues Band, which consists of the two of us and Kay Dodt on drums. Kowa also played in Hot Buttered Grits for a while. He couldn't keep it going for calendar reasons, but that was where I found out what a great electric guitar player he is.

Through our mutual friend Ewa Paluch, Guillaume Salbreux and I had already heard about each other when he arrived in Dresden in August 2010. We hit it right off personally and musically, and in the last couple of years we've played together as a duo, as a trio with Per Widlund, and as members of various one-off rhythm sections at various social/cultural events in and around the MPI-CBG community. We did a couple of things with Debojyoti Chakraborty in this period, too, with Debo playing sitar. Sitar is Debo's main instrument, and he considers tablas very secondary. Given how he sounds on tablas, you can imagine what a force he is on sitar. If you have the chance to hear Debo play Indian classical music, go.

Guillaume and I really wanted to try a jazz trio with Debo on tablas, and Debo was curious too. We talked about it for a long time before we finally managed to organize an initial rehearsal. That was in January 2012, and we've been grinning ever since.