Born and raised in New York City, to be more precise, in working-class Far Rockaway Queens, and of Irish and Croatian lineage, my earliest memories are those as a child living in one of the housing projects on the Rockaway Peninsula. At the age of 10, I was encouraged by my mother to take accordion lessons. My earliest performance situations involved volunteer work at local nursing homes, whereby the residents of those establishments were full of warmth and good cheer, and the sincerity and appreciation in the emotional response of many of these kind older folk encouraged me to consider the accordion beyond the more prevalent, usually banal stereotypes. Already at that time the instrument was completely out of fashion, replaced by the more and more ubiquitous guitar and not even the Lawrence Welk Show was going to change that situation! Nevertheless, as a teenager, living on a peninsula surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean on one side and Jamaica Bay on the other, I was suddenly being bombarded with all these foreign accents and requests for an Irish, Jewish, or Italian tune. Not to mention a growing West Indian and Latin American population encouraging me to expand musically into those ethnic worlds as well.