🎼 Musical Beginnings

My parents, Joseph and Shirley Carley, had both been professional musicians during their younger lives, but when I was a child, my father was an Air Force pilot. We moved around a lot, and every new place had its own mysteries to reveal. During the early sixties, when I was in grade school, we lived in Libya, on the Mediterranean coast.

My father would practice jazz clarinet when he was at home, playing along with "Music Minus One" albums, recordings that allowed the musician to fill in the missing melody. He also taught me quite a lot about music theory, and he gave me a deep appreciation of music, particularly that of Count Basie, whose band had the most amazing sound and feeling. "Just listen to that beat!", he would say as he tapped his foot along with the album "Basie One More Time", and a genuine thrill was in his voice. I loved that music, and it became part of me.

🎺 Discovery of the Trumpet

When I was 10, living near Washington, DC, a young friend showed me how he could play his new trumpet, and I was supremely confident that I could do it too, already being a music expert in my own mind. I was shocked to find that I couldn't get even the slightest musical sound out of it – I was able to make only the sound of air leaking out the end. Naturally I told my father that very day that I wanted to learn to play the trumpet. He said, "If that's what you want, I'll help you." Help me he did. With his assistance in finding teachers and places to play, I was able to launch a professional music career at age 13.

At that time my father decided to offer, in his spare time and without compensation, his considerable talents as a music educator to the local high school (Bowie High School in Maryland) as the founder and director of the Bowie High School jazz orchestra, which he named the "Starliners". The amazing work my father did for that band provided me (as well as many other young music students during the following 10 years) a rich and authentically professional environment in which to learn and grow as jazz musicians. From there I went on to study jazz music at several top universities, including North Texas State University, Indiana University, and the University of Miami.

🌤️ Challenges and Transition

I loved playing Basie's music more than anything, but after three years with him, I had the sense that it couldn't go on for much longer. Basie's health was declining, and I also knew that I couldn't stay on the road for many more years – it was a very rough life. I knew too that there was something more for me beyond this way of life, but I wasn't able to imagine what in the music world that might be.

Lacking a new dream for the future, I began to lose touch with my momentum and drive that had served me so well up to that point. I had been playing First Trumpet with Basie, which is one of the key positions that sets the style for the band, and it requires a great deal of concentration to do it without hurting yourself. That had not been a problem for me before, but in 1983, after an unusually long break due to Basie's illness, I hurt my embouchure (the muscles in the lips that produce the sound of the trumpet) while playing with Basie and Joe Williams at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco.

𝄌 End of an Era

I told Basie that I needed a leave of absence to recover, but he told me that he felt it would be a mistake to leave. He asked me to stay and play the jazz solo parts that I had recorded over the last three years. He was becoming more ill, and I knew I couldn't refuse him. So I stayed for two more years, playing well enough, but far below my previous ability. It was an emotionally painful time.

In April of 1984, Count Basie passed away. For me as well as many others in the world, this marked the end of an incredibly beautiful musical era. Though the Basie band continued playing after Basie's death, I soon left the band and stopped playing professionally, moving into the computer software development field (with my father again, who had already become a well-known pioneer in that field) and eventually becoming a specialist in business-to-business electronic commerce.

🌟 Spiritual Awakening

But it was during those last two years with Basie that my spiritual awareness had started to open. One part of this was reading Shirley MacLaine's beautiful book, "Out on a Limb," in she described the phenomenon called "channeling." When I read that, it was like an electric current was passing through me – connections were being made inside of me, linking my early experiences to some unknown yet irresistible future. From somewhere beyond me, I was beginning to get the message, "Pay close attention to this."

Through synchronistic meetings with several key people, I came to know more about channeling, and I began to explore some of the information that was coming through certain channelers. At that point I was seeking only to heal my personal wounds in a fundamental and lasting way, and I found that the channeled non-physical beings I was drawn to, such as Lazaris (channeled by Jach Pursel) and Bashar (channeled by Darryl Anka) had a consistently beautiful and loving perspective – beyond anything I had experienced before within myself or other humans.

🎐 Learning to Channel

Through my close friend from Basie's band, drummer Gregg Field, I met Shawn Randall, the wonderful channeler of the being called Torah. Shawn is also very adept at helping others to awaken their own channeling abilities. Shortly after we met, she suggested that I had that ability myself. I was reluctant to believe that, and I resisted for quite a long time, but in 1987, after several reminders from her, I decided to work with her on it.

It was like opening a door to another world. As soon as I "put out the invitation" the magic started to happen. It began with a deepening rapport with my personal spirit guides (it appears that we all have at least two, one masculine and one feminine). That evolved into a telepathic communication that was conversational, and from there into full-trance channeling.

For 3 years I continued to channel as a daily practice and met weekly with Shawn Randall and a wonderful group of channeling students, and among them were the amazing channels Annie Bossingham and Sharyl Noday. As my own channeling ability developed, I found that I could sit down with people in private session and allow their personal spirit guides to come through and speak to them. This deeply intimate work became the foundation of my channeling for others during the next 8 years.

💫 Meeting Baratta

One evening in the fall of 1998, I sat down to channel for musician, channeler, and medium Tysa Goodrich about a major personal issue she was facing. Before I entered into my trance state, I had been expecting that one of her personal guides would come through for her. But as I was entering my altered state of consciousness, I could feel that a new guide was coming to assist her, and there was a powerful sense of a very expansive and loving being coming in.

This was the moment when the being known as Baratta first came through, and it represented a major shift in my channeling. During that session Baratta shared that I had come to the point in my channeling where I could allow a greater level of loving energy to come through, and this was why Baratta could begin working with me.

Over the next few months Baratta participated in more and more private sessions, and I was soon invited to organize workshops with Baratta. The response from attendees was so powerfully positive that I decided to focus my channeling work on this relationship with Baratta. During all the years since then, Baratta has spoken with thousands of people in private sessions and workshops in various countries around the world. It has been a tremendous joy and honor for me to be a part of this.

🚚 The move to Mexico

In April of 2011 came another series of major changes in my life. For some time I had been feeling strongly that I wanted to begin a whole new adventure. For the previous 2 years I had been traveling to Mexico to do workshop and session events with Baratta, and I was so moved by the people and culture there that at this point I decided to see what it was like to live for a limited time in central Mexico.

My time in Mexico turned out not to be limited at all! During my first year I took private lessons 3 times a week with a Spanish language professor, hoping that one day I would be able to do my channeling work for the Mexican people in their native language, so that Baratta's work could touch them at the deepest levels of their consciousness. In late 2013 I was able to realize that dream, beginning by teaching channeling classes in Spanish. Soon thereafter I was able to do all of my work here in Mexico in the Spanish language. This continues to make me very happy.

🎭 Acting

In the the last 9 years I have also been very active with another personal passion of mine, that of acting. That aspect of my life actually began in Los Angeles 20 years ago, when I spent 4 years studying acting with several wonderful teachers, attending workshops and participating in student projects with active professionals.

During my first years in Mexico my passion for acting was reawakened, and I chose to enter that work professionally, excited to take on the challenge in both English and Spanish. In the years since then I have had the privilege of working with many incredible actors and directors in film, TV, and theatre. It has been, and still is, a very enjoyable part of my life.