A whole life around music.

Alex Nishi has spent his whole life around music. Raised by a mother who taught piano, he sat down at the keys at the age of five. At twelve he picked up the guitar, and by sixteen he was performing professionally as a solo guitarist. Two years later, at eighteen, he won a jazz competition in the Santa Ynez Valley with his arrangement of Tommy Emmanuel’s “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”

At nineteen he joined a band on drums, playing two nights a week, every week, for a full year. Around the same time he spent a year as a second engineer at Erickson Sound Labs in the Santa Ynez Valley, learning the craft of recording from the other side of the glass. Over the years that followed he performed with dozens of bands across Santa Barbara County. At twenty-three he moved to Tokyo and played throughout the city, then made his way to Thailand, where he helped start a music bar on the beach in Koh Phangan, playing and hosting live music there for a year.

He returned to the United States and spent 2016 performing in San Antonio, Texas, before heading back to Santa Barbara, where he played bass in a reggae band alongside David Segall. All told, Alex has played music in five different countries.

For his final three years in Santa Barbara, Alex taught music full time, specializing in guitar, bass, drums, vocals, and piano, and leading teen rock bands that gave young musicians their first real experience playing together. Today he lives in Thailand, where he continues to teach music online to students around the world.