About Zel
At the impressionable age of 8, Zel's first start in music was taking piano lessons under the strict tutelage of Mrs. Ellie Perrot, an amazing woman who used to teach at the Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Leipzig, Germany. Her family fled Germany in the 1930s and resettled in Rochester, NY. She gave Zel a firm grounding, not only in how to play classical piano, but also basic music theory.
At age 16 Zel attended his first rock concert: Black Sabbath. Once hooked on rock n' roll, there was no turning back. He started jamming with one of his best childhood friends, Michael Christopher, now deceased, one of the world's greatest unknown guitarists. He played in a number of rock bands with MC, and formed a number of his own.
Following the demise of the rock band Control, of which Zel was a co-founder, along with Steve, Brad, and Daryl, Zel formed a number of other groups in both Rochester as well as San Francisco, California. A few years later he started work on the CD Contrasts, which was first released in 1998, and re-released in 2026.
Taking a sabbatical from IT, Zel played in as many as five jazz bands, performing in the San Francisco East Bay area. During his sabbatical, Zel wrote a number Big Band pieces. Currently he's at work on a new big band / jazz CD.
Musical Phases
Rock Phase
From roughly the age of 16 up until 30 Zel joined or formed a number of rock groups, including:
- Zenith Effluveum
- The Quick
- Fallout
- Control
- nVu
- Not That Nancee
- Theatre of the Mind
Big Band Phase
In 2003 Zel took a sabbatical from the IT world, and studied jazz and blues under the tutelage of a well-known guitarist based in the California wine country. He also studied with another jazz and blues guitarist who used to perform as a gig player for first-act bands at the Filmore West theater in San Francisco. Zel wrote almost two dozen songs during this period, and is currently working on a big band CD.
New Age Phase
During the early 1990s Zel grew increasingly influenced by the New Age movement. He attended courses at the Summit Organization in Foster City, California, USA. In the years he was attending Summit courses, Zel received tremendous encouragement to pursue his music. The culmination of this phase was the CD Contrasts, which was actually finalized shorter after Zel relocated to the city of Utrecht, in the Netherlands.
