Pianist Kevin Gift's alter ego Wendel Patrick is rapidly making a name for himself as a producer to be recognized. Wendel Patrick fuses together different elements of jazz, electronica and Hip Hop to create lush musical collages that are entirely and undoubtedly his own. Wendel Patrick’s cd Sound: began as a cathartic project…late nights spent flushing out sounds and intricate rhythmic patterns that had built up in his mind over the course of the day, a day usually spent at the piano improvising or rehearsing for jazz and classical performances. As the late night recording sessions started to yield more and more interesting results, Wendel Patrick began sharing the tracks with other musician friends, who would repeatedly ask, “What are you going to do with these?”

Twin brothers Kevin Gift and Wendel Patrick were born a month premature on February 23, 1973 in Washington D.C. to a Jamaican mother and Trinidadian father. Wendel Patrick did not survive past the first week. “Throughout my childhood I would think about the fact that I was fortunate just to be alive, and would wonder what it would be like if my brother had lived.”

Kevin began studying piano at age four in Caracas, Venezuela, and by age six, he and his sister were performing in concerts and competitions. “There was a tremendous amount of music played in our house. My father had a huge record and reel to reel collection and was always playing Mighty Sparrow, BobMarley, George Clinton, Miles Davis, all sorts of music. We didn’t have a TV in the house, so playing music or listening to music was our entertainment. I would always fall asleep to the jazz or classical radio stations.”

At the age of eleven the family moved to Kingston, Jamaica where Kevin and his sister played in a reggae band. Nobody in the band was over 15. “We had no money for gear, but there was a record producer who let us use his keyboards for our gigs. We would rehearse at my friend Zachary’s house. He played drums, and from time to time his brother Jeremy, who was fifteen, would sit in on guitar. We would all talk about how we were going to do big things in music when we got older.” (Jeremy is now Sean Paul’s producer and manager.)

At age fourteen, Kevin returned to the U.S. By this time he was heavily immersed in the music of Eric B. and Rakim, Big Daddy Kane, UTFO, RUNDMC and other Hip Hop acts of the time. This Hip Hop immersion coincided with a steady decrease and disenchantment with classical music. “At the time I think I was just going through the same thing many kids who take lessons intensely from a young age go through. I was burnt out from recitals and competitions and looking for other musical avenues to explore. I only intended to stop studying piano for a few months, but I ended up not touching a piano for four years.”

Kevin’s reintroduction to the piano came unexpectedly in college in Atlanta, Georgia. He signed up for an electronic music course because it “sounded interesting” but had no idea where it would lead. “I was completely lost the first couple of weeks, and I had no idea what any of the technical talk meant. MIDI meant nothing to me, but after a few classes I realized I could do things nobody else in the class could do because of all of the years of piano study. As a result, I started to get excited about making music again.”

Kevin soon resumed piano lessons and began spending long hours in the music library listening to recordings of John Coltrane, Keith Jarrett, Andre Watts, the experimental musings of Cecil Taylor, and reading anything he could get his hands on. And he began practicing again, late at night. “In college there was a security guard who would come to lock up the practice building every night at midnight. He would come to my room first, tell me to stop playing and then kick everybody else out of the building. Ten minutes later he would come back and tell me to play as long as I liked. I would stay there playing until four or five in the morning.”

The late night sessions continued after college in music school, and continue to this day. By day, Kevin teaches music lecture courses at a university in Baltimore, by night, Wendel Patrick can be found frequenting local Hip Hop spots in Baltimore and D.C. and collaborating with and producing for local emcees.“I consider myself to be extremely versatile. Virtually everything you hear on Sound: is played by me. The album is 99.9 % sample-free. I’ve played Mozart with orchestras, free improv shows with trios, solo improv shows, I’ve collaborated with some amazing hip hop artists, jazz artists, classical artists…and I think this versatility comes out on Sound:. At the end of the day, it’s all music.”