"Since moving to the New Hampshire Seacoast, I've played sax and piano with dance bands, wedding bands, jazz, funk, and blues bands. And I've worked with my own group - Small Group Projects - playing clubs and functions.

At my studio - 'Reeds and Keys' - I teach woodwinds and piano. A sax player first, I teach all levels of sax and intermediate clarinet and flute. I also teach jazz improvisation. A pianist as well, I teach beginning and intermediate piano. Starting on clarinet in grammar school, I took up sax and piano in high school so I could play with dance bands and jazz groups. Although music was not my major, I did study sax and flute while at the University of Connecticut. More recently, I have studied with Tommy Gallant and Jerry Bergonzi among others. For many years, I taught at the Southern New Hampshire Community School and, for the last six, from my home studio.

From small group jazz to big band swing to rock and funk, I've played sax, reeds, and keyboards with a variety of bands north of Boston. Now, I'm fronting groups in various combinations - duos, trios, quartets, quintets - performing at clubs, restaurants, dances, festivals and concerts throughout northern New England.

My passion is small group jazz, - the sound I grew up with, typified by classic recordings of the Blue Note years: Wayne Shorter, Joe Henderson, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Dexter Gordon and others. Growing up in the Hartford, CT, area you could hear great music almost any time. In those days, clubs would book bands by the week; some would hire groups from New York on a Sunday afternoon or bring up soloists to play with a house trio on Monday nights. It was easy to hear Dizzy Gillespie, Coleman Hawkins, Stan Getz, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Zoot Sims, Dexter Gordon. We'd sit in the underage section all afternoon or evening. Times are different, but there are a lot of people who want to hear live music and quite a few venues that offer it because there is nothing like being there when the music is being created.

As any musician will tell you, it's good to be versatile: I also play cocktail piano, and work with local dance bands, swing, rock, wedding, and funk bands on sax and piano. I've recorded with a couple of these bands and was working with a local blues band when we won the Portsmouth Battle of the Blues Bands competition and went on to compete in a regional competition in Memphis.

Small Group Projects is the group that I've been leading for the last few years. We work as a quartet, trio or duo depending on the situation. But however many of us there are, we specialize in 'straight-ahead' swing, ballads, blues and Latin." -John Franzosa