 He has studied music (classical trombone performance) at Northwestern University, engineering and philosophy at North Carolina State University, and philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Arizona, Loyola University, and the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium.In the 1980s, he played electric bass and electric guitar in rock bands including Stillborn Christians, Egg, and/or, and the Angels of Epistemology (a band based in Raleigh and Chapel Hill that released a CD on Merge Records).In the 1990s, he moved to Chicago and began transitioning from rock to jazz music.