Biography
Patterson was born in Red Bank, New Jersey. His father, John Patterson, was an amateur pianist and organist. His mother emigrated from Cuba in the late 1950s and became a school teacher in Rumson, New Jersey where she met John Patterson. David Patterson attended several schools in his youth including boarding school, which he later left to more seriously pursue musical studies.
As a youth, Patterson studied piano and violin as well as the guitar. Among his many teachers were jazz guitarist Harry Leahey, theorist and arranger Dr. Henry Melnik, and classical guitarist Francis Perry. He went on to study at New England Conservatory of Music, where he received both his Bachelor's and Master's degree with distinction in classical guitar performance. His teachers were David Leisner and Neil Anderson.
Patterson's influences include: Jimmy Page, John McLaughlin, Julian Bream, John Williams, Miles Davis, Jeff Beck, Paco de Lucia, Beethoven, Bach, and Heitor Villa-Lobos.
Read more about this topic: David Patterson (guitarist)
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
—André Maurois (1885–1967)
“A biography is like a handshake down the years, that can become an arm-wrestle.”
—Richard Holmes (b. 1945)