Dan, 17 years old, plays keyboards for the Groove Merchants.
He has been playing piano since time out of mind, but only started to take the instrument seriously in recent years. With his first lessons from Chris Meyers in Suzuki Piano, and subsequently Lisa Mescon he started at the beginning and worked from there.
The first song he ever learned was, of course, Heart & Soul. And the first band he was in was the deadly duo of Dan Parke and Andrew Thorn, but their enthusiasm could not overcome thier age (about 7 and 8, respectively) and their limited technical skill. Dan vowed then and there that he would never allow lack of talent to stop him from playing in a band again. (It stopped very few others, why should it stop him?)
His first great epiphany in music occurred junior year after school. During Mr. Windheim's 9^th period music theory course he, Joe, and Ken would all sit with their four other classmates alternately freezing and boiling in room 142 in Nottingham High School. The experience remains a common bond between Joe, Ken, and Dan.
While Windheim's class was his biggest theoretical trip, Dan's musical influences are not drawn from a single source. Herbie Hancock to Dave Matthews, Bach to Brubeck to Beethoven to the Beastie Boys, all of them are inspirations but that is only the B's.
                A big fan of the organ sound and a synth-a-holic, Dan always enjoys an opportunity to play around with a sound or effect. He's just starting to explore different chords above and beyond the triad and dominant seventh but owes his expanding knowledge of the jazz sound and improvisation to Bill DiCosimo, his piano teacher who also works at Onondaga Music.