Nick Menza - Early Life

Early Life

As the son of jazz musician Don Menza, Nick began playing drums at the age of two, at which age he performed at his first public concert when during the intermission someone sat him down on Jack DeJohnette's drums and he proceeded to play. His influences stem from being nurtured around the tutelage of such notables as Buddy Rich, Steve Gadd, Nick Ceroli, Jeff Porcaro and Louie Bellson.

Beginning his professional musical career at the age of 18 drumming in the band Rhoads featuring singer Kelly Rhoads, brother of the late Randy Rhoads, Nick released his first record with Rhoads called Into The Future in Europe.

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