Rhythm Quest

My Journey
Starts with Rhythm

Rhythm Quest represents the true beginning of my more engaged pursuit of music and percussion. It was my first attempt at serious music, my first album, and my first time composing. Like all firsts it was a bit clumbsy, but extraordinarily satisfying. Employing a wide variety of percussion instruments from nearly every continent, Rhyhtm Quest employed sophisticated polyrhythm and meter to compose, arrange, and perform complex music.

Starting off as a duet, co-founder Julian Douglas and I began writing ambitious percussion music. We performed a couple of times and were received well enough. People appreciated the complexity and skill, but we weren’t easy listening. The music wasn’t even predominantly dance-able. Indeed, one of our pieces was titled Uneasy on account of its multiple and complex time signatures and unexpected syncopations and changes. We played art music and that’s a rough product to sell. Thus, we didn’t get a lot of gigs in the mundane world.

Soon, we identified and trained 2 more percussionists to join the ensembe: Rick Donnelly, who was a student of Julian’s at the time, and Michael Rutherford, who was enthusiastic about the music after seeing Rhythm Quest perform. Thus, the quartet was born.

In addition to performace, we invested a great deal of energy into teaching. We truly were on a quest to push percussion as much into the world’s view as we could. We offered regular workshops and individual lessons in Bloomington, Indiana and traveled to different festivals around the midwest to give workshops and perform.