Quest was Doug Knapp's band after the two of us went our separate ways musically after high school. This band could improvise like very few groups can. They started playing together during the rise of MTV and, unfortunately, were attempting to be a famous hair band. In the privacy of their rehearsal space, the house we took over when the bass player's mother abandoned it and it was going to be foreclosed by the bank, they came up with some music that was really beautiful, mostly made up off the tops of their head, which was a requirement if you played with Doug. Unfortunately they wasted a lot of time learning songs by Dokken, Ratt, Judas Priest and the like. I always thought if they stuck to writing their own stuff and improvising both freeform and around basic themes, they could have been interesting in the same way Phish and Ozric Tentacles are.

You've already read about the guitar player, Doug Knapp, in his section, so let me fill you in on the other 2 members of the band.

Kirk Jackson, the bass player, is a guy I always found very interesting. An incredibly talented metal artist, his background for the bass was augmented by his position in the high school marching band as a tuba player (!), something I always had the impression he did simply because it was so goofy. The guy is incredibly solid and can switch up very quickly. These days he plays for fun, but for a living he still does metal. He sold his large shop a few years back because he got tired of running a huge business (he had to generate $200,000 worth of work a month just to meet the overhead) and now does custom work at a much more relaxed and profitable pace.

Tim Berkibile is one of the most musical drummers you will ever hear. He ranks up there with Vinnie Coliuta, who Frank Zappa always singled out as his favorite stick man. Most drummers follow the rhythm. Tim follows the melody, which allows for more interesting patterns. He really gained his chops in this band, having also had a background in the same high school marching band that Kirk was in. After Quest broke up, he decided to make his living playing the drums, first as the house drummer for the show band in a giant night club called J.J. Whispers in Orlando and then as both the drummer and the musical director for The Backstreet Boys from the beginning to the end of their existence. We rib him a bit for that, but none of us have played on the 8th, 21st and 41st best selling records of all time. Or been the musical director for said albums. Not that that fact is going to stop us, but it's still pretty impressive.

Quest's 3rd trip to the studio and pieces toward the end of of the discs will have a keyboard player on it named Tony Alonge who joined the group towards it's end. I promised him I'd re-master the tapes with him playing on them about 3 years ago and never did it because I changed the way I'm going about re-mastering and getting this music out, so this gives you an idea how far behind this project I am. But Tony is a cool guy, a superb musician and I like to think of him as the 5th Beatle.