Making his own noise

Dave Liang was born in 1979 in Lawrence, Kan., the older of two boys. The passion for music was instilled in him from the day he was born. His mother was an accomplished amateur singer in Taiwan. Both parents immigrated to the United States from Taiwan in the early 70s to pursue their doctorates.

“It is always inspiring to think that they came here with so little and created such great opportunities for themselves and their children,” he said.

His father was a math professor at the University of Kansas before the family moved to New York when Dave was 3. Living in Ulster County, he recalled his mother taking him to see many music teachers.

“They would take me to a bunch of different teachers, like many Asian American parents do,” he said, “but my parents had the idea that the music wasn’t about the discipline so much as it really was about the music.”

In West Hurley, N.Y., one teacher was able to plant a seed inside him.

“[She] was very focused on helping improvisation and creativity,” he said, “instead of the standard, learn the notes and play them back.”

“That was extremely informative for me because here I am, a 5- or 6-year-old and I could do any direction of music that might feature less emphasis [on] type reading and just learning the notes on the page, and more emphasis on understanding [and] creating from scratch. I was improvising jazz-type lines when I was very young.”

In middle school, he was introduced to the guitar in his music class. Being a music lover, he immersed himself with it. With his piano background, the most difficult part of learning to play was developing the calluses on his fingers.

He said most of his classmates didn’t listen to classical music in high school. His social circles were more interested in acts like Van Halen, Phish and U2.

“I would listen to a lot of those records and transcribe them,” he said.

During a summer in high school, he attended the Berkeley School of Music in Boston. The program reinforced the jazz theory he had learned as a child and taught him to be able to create any genre of music.

He attended college at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. Here, he forged many friendships. Some would help him in his career, in particular, Ryan Leslie. continue >>