Born and raised in Batavia, NY, half way between Buffalo and Rochester, NY.<\/p>\n
At age eight I was the first third grader to be allowed in the Batavia, N.Y. Elementary School Band. After five years of formal drum lessons, I had advanced beyond all my teacher’s abilities. In high school I was a National Honor Society student excelling not only in music but math and science as well.<\/p>\n
Pursuing a life long love of Astronomy, I went to college in 1978 to study the cosmos. After two years I was offered a job as drummer for the western New York band\u00a0Law Street<\/em>, which I couldn’t resist. My talent and creativity with music then began to blossom.<\/p>\n In 1981 I returned to college at SUNY at Stony Brook and then University of Buffalo as a philosophy major. While in college I played with many local country, jazz, pop\/rock and blues bands in the Buffalo – Rochester, N.Y. area. I also did recording sessions for many local artists.<\/p>\n In 1990 I moved to Nashville, TN and began working for Vanderbilt University, as well as continuing to work as a free lance drummer\/percussionist with the American Federation of Musicians Union local #257.<\/p>\n In\u00a0my spare time, I enjoy working in my vegetable garden, landscaping and also \u00a0recording and mixing music in my home studio.<\/p>\n I love to get out and hike and explore our National and State Parks and any other scenic and peaceful places on this planet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Born and raised in Batavia, NY, half way between Buffalo and Rochester, NY. At age eight I was the first third grader to be allowed in the Batavia, N.Y. Elementary School Band. After five years of formal drum lessons, I had advanced beyond all my teacher’s abilities. In high school I was a National Honor…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":196,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":40,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/donaldpickert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/donaldpickert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/donaldpickert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/donaldpickert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/196"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/donaldpickert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/donaldpickert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":156,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/donaldpickert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4\/revisions\/156"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/donaldpickert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/donaldpickert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}