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Music played a crucial part of my life in college, with one of the highlights being the five years I spent in MIT's Festival Jazz Ensemble. Even after leaving MIT, I felt obliged to contribute to the band, and designed a mock-up home page to supplement the solitary page reading "under construction" they've had for the last six years. (It's now become a sort of official unofficial site on this domain, despite being even more grossly out-of-date than my own material.)
The band's former leader, Jamshied Sharifi, was an incredible inspiration to many of us, to say the least. In fact, if you look at the songs on the first and self-titled CD, at least one of the titles should look rather familiar. While in the band, I declared myself President from 1992 to 1993, co-produced their first two CDs (you can learn more about that at the invisible home page I created for the band), and won a performance award for Best Drummer in the 1991 Boston University Jazz Festival. I also befriended alto/soprano sax player and mechanical engineer Susan Ward (now Rynerson), who helped me take the idea for a heel-driven hi-hat pedal, and turn it into a thesis for her (sure, she gets one) and US Patent 5,355,761 for both of us. (If you see any companies selling these, let me know so I can cash in on the all-American tradition of suing them.)
Although I collected more than a fair share of criticism for my playing (my swing time still sucks), the unique style of music we played worked well for me, earning the band some good comments from the judges. The judges of MIT's Battle of the Bands competition in 1989, however, were less than impressed with the performance of the band I was in at the time....