In college he studied with the revolutionary drummer Milford Graves who inspired PJ to travel to Ghana where he lived and studied West African music and dance for 4 months.
During PJ’s senior year of college, he interned with Jim Donovan, the founding drummer of the multi-platinum Pittsburgh-based band Rusted Root, who then offered PJ a position in his new band. This was the first time PJ ever came to Pittsburgh, and it inspired him to move here in 2006 after graduating college.
Point Park has connected PJ to more opportunities than he could’ve ever imagined. He’s composed and recorded 17 music scores for dance companies and choreographers in Pittsburgh, New York, Dayton, Minneapolis, Denver, and Houston. He has accompanied for National High School Dance Festival, Jazz Dance World Congress, and American College Dance Association. He completed the Mark Morris training program in Brooklyn and has been a resident artist at The Space Upstairs since 2007. His job at Point Park enabled him to get a grant to study music and movement with his personal hero, Nik Baertch, in Switzerland. It also enabled him to receive tuition remission for a master’s degree in adult learning and teaching at Point Park University. Most importantly, PJ’s job gives him the opportunity to play drums every week and keep his tools sharp.
Aside from his work at Point Park, PJ is the drummer for Vietnamese activist band, Mai Koi and the Dissidents, as well as the studio band Watererer, and PJ’s very own trio, the Else Collective.
PJ’s also played drums for a giant outdoor puppet parade and was hired to build stilts and lead a band on them to kick off Pittsburgh’s First Night Parade. Recently PJ and his partner Renée Copeland performed Terra Bubo, a grant-funded 70-minute multimedia contemporary folk percussion performance using traditions from their island ancestry of Sicily, Ireland, and the Philippines.
You can listen to PJ’s work with his band the Else Collective on Bandcamp or check out his personal work on Soundcloud. Yo