Kent grew up on a farm in Ohio, where his first exposure to music was from his family.  Many nights the family would gather around the piano after a hard day of working in the fields, with Kent’s sister, Diane, playing showtunes on the piano with everyone else singing along.  After falling in love and purchasing a red plastic guitar from Sears in 1964, and taping a walkie talkie to the back, using the receiving walkie talkie as an amplifier, Kent eventually joined in to play rhythm with his sister at the family sing alongs.  The music from all those old corny musicals gave Kent a good foundation in melody and harmony.

After hearing Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and other rock groups in the late 1960’s, Kent turned to the dark side.  He purchased a “real” Sears electric guitar along with a “real” amplifier, and began practicing for hours each day.  In High School, he joined a local rock band and toured all the local schools playing for High School dances during the early 1970’s.

During the college years in the late 1970’s, Kent continued playing in several rock and top 40 bands on the weekends to pick up a little extra cash.  It wasn’t until he moved to Houston for his first real job at Texas Instruments, that he went to a little hole in wall club downtown, and heard live Jazz for the first time.  From that moment there was no turning back for this farm boy from Ohio.  He bought his first illegal Fake book from a shady looking guy in an alley in 1978, and started practicing again for hours each day, rededicating himself to the guitar, learning all the standard Jazz tunes, and studying the art of improvising over chord changes.

After gaining proficiency in Jazz, he joined a well known local flutist in Houston, named Pam Jamian, and the band played many concerts and a lot of hotel gigs around the city for a couple of years.  Love and then marriage eventually landed Kent in Los Angeles in 1980, where he has played guitar in several local Jazz and Fusion groups over the years, but when he met Andrés Carrasco in early 2002, something about the sound of Kent’s steel string acoustic and Andrés classical guitar just clicked.

(: – > It was like the combining of the Northern and Southern Hemisphere of the planet in a glorious opening of the golden gates of guitar heaven!  Please bring the love of your life, and come hear the fresh nylon and steel sounds of “Guitar Romantica” coming to a Holiday Inn near you!