 Hello! I'm David McCray. I was born in Glen Ellyn, IL. I started with the alto saxophone at age eight, and picked up the guitar and started writing songs in high school. I also soaked up some piano at the family baby grand growing up. I earned my bachelor's degree double majoring in music and religious studies from Cornell College, in Mt. Vernon, Iowa, about twenty miles north of Iowa City. I started playing sax in my first band, Friends of Gideon, comprised of Cornell students, in 1989. We were a blues, funk, and R&B cover band playing around Iowa. From 1991 to 1993 I played with an original band out of Iowa City with a "space-rock boogie-funk" sound called Captain Barney. Having some success playing around the
Midwest, Barney moved its headquarters to Boulder, Colorado upon my graduation in 1992, where we played the Colorado ski scene and towns in New Mexico and Arizona.
After Captain Barney broke up in 1993, I had the opportunity to play with a trumpet player in a mini-horn section back in Iowa City in an original funk rock band called Dagobah, after the planet from which spacy guru Yoda hails. Dagobah had a good run around the
Midwest for a few years until about 1997 when I got the itch for adventure and went to live in a tent in Alaska. Living in small Alaskan towns for a few years, I continued to write music, host a radio show on a local public station, do occasional solo shows, and sit in with any band that came to town. In the year 2000, I went to Portland, Oregon, to earn my Le Cordon Bleu diploma in culinary arts at Western Culinary Institute. Upon graduation from Western in 2002, I returned to Alaska to work in the resort kitchens at Alyeska Resort, a ski resort in Girdwood, Alaska, about 40 miles south of Anchorage. There I met some local musicians and helped form Sticky Wicket, an original folky, rootsy, Alaskan jam band. The Wickets toured up and down the Alaskan roads playing festivals, bars, and roadhouses in 2004 and 2005. In Alaska I learned from a roommate the art of home
computer-based recording, and I began to record my many original songs, both old and new.
In 2004 I self-produced a CD called "Bootstraps". In 2006 I returned to Illinois to attend Northern Illinois University's graduate program where I am currently working on my master's degree in composition and jazz arranging. In 2007 I produced another CD called "Prospect Street" which is currently for sale on
www.CDBaby.com . Please help me out and buy a copy! There are more CDs that are very close to completion on the way soon, so if you like what your hear, there's more where that came from! I also play tenor sax in a band called West Of Chicago, playing the music of the jazz rock giant, Chicago, (just the early stuff as well as old R&B and soul tunes). Check out
www.westofchicagoband.com , my page for "Prospect Street" on
www.CDBaby.com , or my own site
www.bootstrapsrecording.com Thanks for your ears and interest!
Press
Release:
Northern Illinois University graduate student David McCray releases a CD of original music on
www.CDBaby.com . Alto saxophone player, songwriter, guitarist, singer, and multi-instrumentalist David McCray offers a bit of everything good about American music, a bit of blues, jazz, folk, with just a little rock edge. Have a listen. Buy the CD at
www.CDBaby.com |
