Member since 2007.
Contributing Editor
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Greg Camphire is a musician/writer born and raised in Pittsburgh, PA who currently resides in Los Angeles, CA for some strange reason.
I grew up in both Pittsburgh and the Philadelphia area. I started playing drums when I was about 7-years-old, and began writing a few years later. I gravitated towards jazz after being exposed to my dad's record collection, and got deeper into the music after recognizing it as a major source of my favorite hip-hop samples.
At the University of Pittsburgh, I studied percussion, jazz history, African music and ethnomusicology, as well as journalism and creative writing. I studied abroad on the Semester at Sea program in 1996, which included music workshops at the University of Madras (India) and The Shanghai Conservatory (China), as well as several other countries around the world. I moved to Los Angeles in 2001 to earn a degree in Percussion at Musicians Institute.
Since 2001, I've worked as a musician, writer, journalist, manager and publicist for projects ranging from rock, reggae and hip-hop to jazz, electronica and traditional African and Brazilian drum ensembles. I manage a healthy addiction to vinyl and mp3's, and am currently digging the jams from the birds outside my window.
