Bio

I'm a 'Hamburger'. 

By that I mean that I was literally just born in Hamburg (another story), raised in Essex England (and another), emigrated to Canada when I was 6 (and yet another), but have spent half of my adult life in the US (and still another!). It's a metaphor for my musical life which is somewhat just as unconventional in that I have written pop, film, dance, jazz, musical theater...and can easily jump from loving Leonard Bernstein to blasting a pop or rock song on XM.

It's all good.  Okay the standard bio would look something like this: Philip is a composer for musical theater, film, television and instrumental music. His internationally-acclaimed show "TAP KIDS" for which he was co-creator has toured nationally and internationally for over a decade, and received a 5-star review at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. His show "Scrooge: In Concert" played off-Broadway at the Lamb's Theatre NYC and Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theatre, and has toured nationally. He has been commissioned to...(yawn...but to read on click here)

I have been so busy kind of scrapping around in the music world that it was only by some constant jabs of people asking where can we find your music, that I realized I'd not  released much at all. 

Better late than never right?

I'll be mixing, as well as recording a whole bunch of material over the next few years, which should be fun as some of the stuff is unreleased from the archives and some totally new. So, I hope you will join me on my journey and I hope to find out about yours.   

By the way, my hamburger is now plant based.

Truly. 

Philip (with one L)

p.s. If you feel like reading more I'll be writing a bit of 'personal' history in a kind of fun way (I think?)But, somehow, it'll all be shaped with the perspective of the music part of my life...Here's a link below...

...the story continues...

READ on if you feel like....

I love this picture, even though I can't really remember this all all. I'm the little boy in the striped t-shirt on the far right, kind of shyly there behind my father.  We are on the Empress of England traveling from Liverpool to Montreal. My older brother (by one year) is to my right then my Mother,  my big brother the tallest one in the center (he stayed in England) and our Au Pair Girl  (who came to Canada with us).  On the left are my Aunt  and  my cousins (they weren't on our voyage, just for the picture) My sister isn't in the picture.   

Here's the story, we are at Liverpool about to embark at a very posh restaurant (according to my big brother)  

Waiter: 'and you sir what would you like with your chips?' (translated French fries)  

Me: 'Ketchup'  

This hasn't changed.  

But there's a miracle or maybe more of the mystical power of fate that changes our personal histories and futures-how things happen, why they happen. But here's my father a Jewish-German immigrant who landed in England in the early 1930's, and my mother daughter of Estonian immigrants, living in Hull, living through wartime England, but they wouldn't meet until the 1950's.

I digress for a second, what a wonderful time this was recently at POWERSTATION in NYC with this group of awesome singers putting together the HUMBUG album. This show has been around for a while, and had its first incarnation in 1998 at the Lamb's Theater.  The awesome fellow on the far left in a red shirt is Carl Danielsen, and he music directed that Lamb's performance ( I was the VERY reluctant conductor) 

(Side bar:Not many people know this, but I have suffered panic attacks my whole life, and the thought of having an attack during conducting the show caused crazy anxiety)  

Anyway, also in this picture is Chris Gilroy, engineer, at the back 2nd from the right. He went on tour with HUMBUG back in it's touring days, and that was I think he told me that tour was his first pro NY gig.

Digression over....