Jivie's Story - The First Half Century
I’ve always had a deep zest for life. I want to savor it—the sounds, the people, the places, the strange little intersections of experience that make a life feel rich and worth paying attention to. I’ve always been drawn toward mastery, toward connection, and toward the sheer wonder of being alive.Music has been the thread running through nearly all of it.I fell hard for music when I was young. I became a serious student and performer, eventually earning first-chair All-State honors as a bass singer and making money performing, accompanying, and teaching while I was still a teenager. Musical theater pits became another home. I studied classical piano at Indiana University, earning my B.M. in 1999, and then returned to Arizona to build a life as a working musician.For years, I said yes to almost everything: weddings, corporate events, touring dates, live-band karaoke, musical theater, teaching, accompanying. I built a repertoire of hundreds of songs that could be summoned at a moment’s notice. In 2012, I moved to New York City, where the scale and intensity of the musical life there suited me beautifully.I eventually found myself subbing as a music director, conductor, and keyboardist, including performing onstage in Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 and on Broadway in Rock of Ages, that glorious 1980s spectacle of hair-metal anthems, theatrical excess, and unexpectedly genuine emotional catharsis. My work has always lived somewhere between technical dexterity, playfulness, and the desire to make something feel completely, authentically alive.Then my relationship with sound changed.In early 2022, during previews for an off-Broadway premiere, I was working sixteen-, eighteen-, sometimes twenty-hour days as music director, vocal arranger, Keyboard 1, and conductor. During one rehearsal, an explosive outburst over a hot microphone caused an audio trauma and the onset of permanent, severe tinnitus. I saw an ENT the next day, only hours before a sold-out performance, and learned that I ought to prepare for this to be permanent. Testing confirmed mild-to-moderate hearing loss.And then I did what musicians do.I finished the run. One hundred performances later, we recorded the still-unreleased cast album at The Power Station. I kept working. I kept performing. I kept trying to be stoic about something that had fundamentally altered the way I experienced the world. The constant sensory noise brought anxiety, hypervigilance, frustration, and an increasingly powerful fear of things I couldn't control. By early 2024, my wife and I had left New York for the pastoral farmland of southwest New Jersey. In 2025, after a prediabetes diagnosis and the realization that I had been living with untreated high blood pressure for far too long, I began a much more deliberate process of rebuilding my health.One of the most difficult moments came in an audiologist's soundproof booth. I returned for an updated hearing test and experienced a serious emotional breakdown in the very place where I was supposed to be measuring what I could hear.It was painful. But it was also clarifying, for I began to understand my experience of sound as a kind of mathematical equation involving volume and distance. I may not be able to control every variable, but I can work toward developing better management skills around both.That became a turning point. I discovered the American Tinnitus Association, the podcast Talking Ears, and the emerging world of music audiology. Through TunedXMusiCares, I was able to participate in grant-funded Tinnitus Retraining Therapy. I worked with Nancy Gould and with Dr. Frank Wartinger, who helped me update my hearing protection and in-ear impressions. Alongside that work, I began building a much larger support system: talk therapy, regular primary-care visits, medication, healthier habits, weight loss, better blood-sugar control, and—perhaps most importantly—a willingness to stop treating recovery as a single problem with a single solution. STACKING THERAPIES. Not one magic fix. A collection of small, sometimes frustrating, sometimes surprisingly joyful interventions that gradually give the nervous system more places to land.I have learned that I need tools that can interrupt distraction and return me to something grounded. So I collect mantras, catchphrases, mnemonic devices, vocabulary, games, creative projects, and anything else that helps me remember where I am.One day at a time.I can't stop the waves, but I can learn to float.The universe is made of waves.Use my hands. Use my mind.Be full of wonder and awe.See the facets of the jewel from more angles.Baby steps.That last one comes courtesy of the movie What About Bob?, but the underlying idea is essentially the Japanese concept kaizen: small, continuous improvements that compound into transformation.And transformation really has happened. I busted through the worst of the anxiety and panic. It felt a little like a snake shedding its skin. I'm still figuring out the rest. There are still spirals, unanswered questions, and parts of my trauma and attention that I want to understand better. But every once in a while, something remarkable happens: I get a vacation from the sensation.For a little while, I notice the world more than I notice the noise. Those moments matter. They have also changed what I want to do next.I am reinventing my professional life. I still have a regular band, and music remains deeply embedded in my hands, my heart, and the parts of my brain that understand music theory truly instinctively. I still miss the enormous collaborative energy of theater and larger creative teams, and I hope some version of that world remains part of my future.But I've also spent years climbing those mountains. They were extraordinary mountains, and I am grateful I got to climb them. Maybe the next chapter is about something different, about feeding the soil. I’m interested in creating experiences, creative projects, communities, and practices that make wonder more accessible. I’m interested in mindful creativity and multimodal experiences—things that engage the hands and the mind and the senses in ways that help us become a little more present. I’m interested in scientists, doctors, researchers, farmers, artists, forward thinkers, neighbors, and anyone else who is trying to figure out how to live a rich life inside an imperfect nervous system.I’ve changed my algorithms accordingly. I listen to different podcasts. I follow different people. I make things with my hands. I took up diamond art, which happens to pair wonderfully with podcasts and playlists. I’m getting to know the people and possibilities around me in southwest New Jersey. I’m building relationships with neighbors and thinking more intentionally about what makes a community feel alive.And yes, I'm also getting healthier: gaining strength, losing weight, and training my routines to be fun practices making me more perfect, and I'm curious to see what becomes possible as my process continues. I suspect there is still plenty of music ahead of me.Maybe it will be in meditation spaces. Maybe it will be with bands. Maybe it will be enormous anthem songs, or deeply personal original material, or some creative form I haven't imagined yet. Maybe it will be something entirely different.What I know is that I want to keep making things, keep learning, keep connecting, and keep finding ways to curate the soil of a good time—to create circumstances where wonder has a little more room to grow and where I can notice the noise a little less. I've spent enough of my life chasing the next mountain. This chapter is all about building and chilling in a really nutrient-dense garden.If you're somewhere in the Northeast or Mid-Atlantic, maybe we'll find something fun to do in person. If not, perhaps digitally! A creative project would be amazeballs. A collaboration would be even better. But honestly? Even just having a tasty time together would be a pretty great baby step.
Healthy Frequencies: Sounds Like a Happy Place
Stress reduction and default mode network regulation are part of living LA DOLCE VITA.Songs and their singers come and go, and yet, the sympathetic resonance of a well-tuned piano played with improvisatory craft, this mode of listening to music is proven again and again to mitigate in a most medicinal manner.Imagine, just for a moment, giving yourself that gentle reward of time spent slowing down our responses to the hectic pace of life, using that time with your ears to wash away the road dust of accumulated stress.When you form a pattern of incorporating these deliberately grounding moments as routines or rituals to practice in your busy life, you can begin to deeply notice the blossoms of health and beauty within you and around you. These experiences are some of life's sweetest energy and it can spread to one's neighbors and community so effortlessly.Sometimes these inner journeys enjoy a gentle guide using vocalized vocabulary, and sometimes it's best to trust our own mind to choose its healthiest journeys with wordless frequencies. For these times, I love to make instrumental luxurious soundbath music to support you in this work. These sessions are available online as well as in person. Please feel free to reach out via the email button at the top of this page.In addition to my solo work, as of the fall of 2026 I remain a committed member to several lovely projects. Broadway's Rock of Ages Band continues to tour with the ultimate anthems of the 80's. Munalome, the southern New Jersey meditation music group, has welcomed me as their fourth member. The sensational vocal group The Company Men has added more dates with me on the keyboards, but the thing I'm most excited about is the community we are building to support and connect folks with hearing health issues in a music-focused, sound-positive way. Say What? Hearing Health Support has been growing by leaps and bounds, and is one of my favorite parts of my garden. Please enjoy this quick introductory video to consider if anyone in your sphere might really benefit from finding folks with these sufferings in common. click for short video
Versatility in service for your la dolce vita
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