A Brief Bio

My name is Alan Oehler, and I'm a jazz/rock/blues guitarist and an off-and-on composer. I like to fiddle around with sound design and I occasionally dream about getting into music and sound for visual media. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area.

My compositional efforts are usually born from one of these motivations:

As an improvising guitar player, I always like thinking up vehicles for improvisation.
I have a strong interest in writing music for visual media—film, video, dance, etc.

I was born and raised on Long Island, in Hicksville, a suburb of New York City. I started playing guitar in my mid-teens, inspired by the playing of Eric Clapton in Cream. After a couple of years of this, I started playing in some groups in New York, first at SUNY New Paltz (in the Hudson River Valley, west of Poughkeepsie), and later back on Long Island. I moved to the West Coast not long after, and played in a band or two in San Francisco before I decided I needed to "get serious" about life. I went back to school and more-or-less put any professional music goals to sleep. But starve it though I did, somehow my musical self never died, and somehow I even improved as a guitar player in spite of (or maybe because of?) cutting back playing and practicing to almost nil.

During the years since, I have been mostly an armchair musician, working on writing and recording as a hobby, first with a cassette portastudio, later with computers and MIDI instruments. In the early nineties, as one-half of the duo Kurt and Al, I released a cassette tape of originals and a couple of covers in collaboration with Kurt Kaupanger.

In the last year or three I've performed sporadically: as a soloist; as an accompanist to vocalists Carol Emerson, Bonnie Thomas, Janna Mordan, and saxophonist Bob Olson; and occasionally filling in with Jason Davis' Jazz Pirates quartet in Alameda. Now, here in 2007, I'm beginning to make a concerted push to play more often and more regularly, and I'm currently exploring a variety of playing situations, from jazz duets to blues bands.

Over the years I've studied with a couple of private teachers, and over the last few years, I've been studying composition, theory, and improvisation at the JazzSchool in Berkeley and at the Community School of Music and Arts in Mountain View, CA.

Artists whose music I strongly like, and who have influenced me in one way or another (not always overtly), include Wayne Shorter, Joe Zawinul, Jaco Pastorius, King Crimson, Miles Davis, Sting, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock, Sonny Rollins, Wes Montgomery, Jim Hall, Pat Martino, Joe Pass, Weather Report, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Jane Siberry, Joni Mitchell, Beatles, XTC, The Neville Brothers, James Brown, Jack Bruce, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, the Allman Brothers, Robben Ford, Mike Stern, Ollie Halsall, Allan Holdsworth, Bill Connors, Chick Corea, Steve Swallow, Mick Taylor, Wayne Krantz, John Scofield, Bill Frisell, Kurt Rosenwinkel, Richard Bona, the Police, Björk, Kate Bush, the Chemical Brothers, Prodigy, Caetano Veloso, Milton Nascimento, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Frank Zappa, Bach, Beethoven, Debussy, Stravinsky, George Crumb...

Film composers I particularly admire include Mark Isham, Carter Burwell, Danny Elfman, Bernard Herrmann...