A big thing I could tell you about me is that I don't settle for mediocrity. With my music I am extremely passionate and am always continually striving to reach that next level, never settling for where I'm currently at. This same thinking carries over into everything I do...especially woodworking. I guess you could say I'm a bit of a perfectionist. I'm a thinker and like to figure things out. I have never used any plans or blueprints for my designs...I'm one of those people that can think an idea in my head and take it to my hands and it will usually look like what I had envisioned. Even when I was in the 7th grade, I built an 8' rowboat from scratch with no plans and it worked great!

As a child I was a big dreamer. It wouldn't be dreams of little things, it was always large; building an airplane, a large boat, an amusement park...things like this. My heroes growing up were people like the Wright Brothers and Henry Ford, and the Titanic intrigued me to no end. Historical inventors and builders of new and innovative marvels were the norm. Even recently, I have been interested in Preston Tucker, an engineer and auto designer who produced a car way ahead of its time in 1948 that GM, Ford, and Chrysler shut down after him only producing 50 cars. Again, what intrigues me about it is the "dream", that wanting and searching for new and better ways of doing things and the passion that fuels it despite the odds.

On the music side of that, Glenn Miller and his big band of the 30's and 40's were a huge influence on my road to becoming a musician. As young as late middle school age, you could have considered me a Glenn Miller historian. I have nearly every movie, documentary, album that has ever been produced either by, or about him. Not only did I love the music as it was my first introduction to the jazz realm, but it was again his passion and dream of having his own "sound" with his band, and with a lot of hard work, he found it. You can always recognize his band by the unique "sweet" sound of the saxophone section, which was characterized by a clarinet playing lead which doubled the first tenor. And, then the tragedy that so often follows these men and women with big dreams...in 1944, Glenn Miller disappeared over the English Channel on a flight to France to do a Christmas show while in the army with his air force band. To this day, nothing has ever been found of him or the plane. A very sad ending to the story, but nevertheless has shaped me into who I am today.


So Now What by Ron Kieper