Nick's Former Life...

Music was my life from the time I was 3, and I performed professionally and taught beginning senior year of high school.

My music career was very diverse - everything from solo jazz guitar performance, to composing for the theater, to free-form improvisation with chamber ensembles. During 1991 and 1992 I toured the Southwest US, produced a weekly radio series called "A Portable Stage" on KSER, Everett, WA., and catalogued the chaotic tape archives of the Northwest Folklife Festival. At the end of that period, I graduated from the "University Without Walls" program at Regis University, Denver, with a B.A. in music. Soon thereafter I hung up my guitar and plunged headfirst into programming for the web, a career which is equally creative and far more remunerative.

When I was still in high school, I started writing a book about music and the way I saw it. I worked on it on and off for about 10 years, and finished it in 1991. I have had it online for a while, and it's been fairly popular. Parts of it have been serialized in a periodical called The Harmonica Educator. You can find the book here on the site - it's called The Musical Experience: Integrating Eros in Music Education

As I have time, I've been putting MP3s of my music on the web. This stuff ranges from studio projects (including my three CDs) to unreleased studio experiments, to live tracks with various friends, to chamber music that I composed and performed for many years.

NEW - PODCASTS of the entire series of my radio show A Portable Stage (KSER Community Radio 1991/1992).

You can browse this material at http://mp3.kittycrack.net.