My name is Alan Oehler, and I’m a rock/blues/jazz 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’m interested 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 picked up the guitar in my mid-teens, inspired most notably by the playing of Eric Clapton in Cream (in particular, it was his break at the end of the live recording of “Sittin’ On Top of the World” from the Goodbye album that galvanized me). Once I developed a bit of facility, 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 ceased focusing on musical goals.

For some years after, I was 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. (Recently we’ve been talking about doing another Kurt and Al project – stay tuned.)

In the early aughts I returned to performing, as a solo guitarist, in some guitar duos, as a sole accompanist to jazz vocalists, and with some small jazz combos. In 2006 I began frequenting some of the local blues jams like the Wednesday jam at the Club Fox in Redwood City.

Health issues in 2007 and 2008 sideswiped and derailed me for a time.

In spring of 2009 I joined the rock/soul band SNUG, and I played for a brief while in the classic rock cover band Tehya in 2016.

In late 2016 I started a duo with jazz/blues vocalist Sharon Lea, which morphed into a trio with bassist Jeff Moles.

In 2017 I started playing with No Static, in a guitar duo with Jeffrey Kamil, and occasionally sat in with fingerstyle guitarist Jon Rubin.

Over the years I’ve studied with a couple of private teachers, and I studied 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, Robert Fripp, Adrian Belew, Bill Bruford, Tony Levin, Jane Siberry, Joni Mitchell, Beatles, XTC, The Neville Brothers, James Brown, Jack Bruce, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, the Allman Brothers, Robben Ford, Derek Trucks, Mike Stern, Ollie Halsall, Allan Holdsworth, Bill Connors, Chick Corea, Steve Swallow, Mick Taylor, Wayne Krantz, John Scofield, Lettuce, Snarky Puppe, Mark Lettieri, Bill Frisell, Kurt Rosenwinkel, Richard Bona, Gretchen Parlato, Tal Wilkenfeld, 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…

Other major influences of mine include my wife, my kids, science fiction, pizza, pot stickers, craft beer, burritos, baseball, chicken tikka masala…