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First issue of the Australian Musician Magazine (1995)

Keyboard section: Interview with Allan Zavod

In his teens after gathering all the legitimate training that he could in Melbourne, Zavod found his musical taste gravitating towards Jazz. On the recommendation of Duke Ellington, whom he met at a private party during an Australian tour, he found himself studying jazz at the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston, the first Australian to do so.

"I was just amazed really at the opportunities to learn and the personalities and their teachers, their attitudes.. the whole psychology of music, was something I hadn't encountered until I got to America. When I say Psychology I mean the way you approach music and how you think about your self in relation to the world, that is to say, the musicians around you, your peers all around the world, you realise that it is a big world out there. I found out that the greater the musician was, the more humble he was about his music."

(Also, Daryl Steurmer, Phil Collins guitarist of 15 years, is exclusively interviewed elsewhere in this same edition by Zavod himself. Click to read the Daryl Stuermer interview.)