Many things have caused major changes my life - seeing Bryan Ferry and Roxy music in the mid 70's was one

Many things have caused major changes my life, and over the next few weeks you will see one of them: Freakout! Montreux. This was a multi-act show that I curated at the 2012 Montreux Jazz Festival. When I was a youngster I took to the guitar like a duck to water. I didn't pick up the instrument until I was sixteen years old - but by nineteen I was a working session jazz guitarist touring with TV's Sesame Street.

At around twenty-three years of age, my then girlfriend and I walked into a disco and I heard continuous music for the first time. It was the beginning of the disco revolution and my personal evolution. In a matter of a few short months I'd evolve into a composer, arranger, and producer of funky dance based groove hits. In less than a decade I was honored as Billboard Magazine's # 1 Single's Producer.

This year, the CEO of the Montreux Jazz Festival Claude Nobs wanted to honor me, but I wanted to honor the music that changed my life. A basic characteristic of anything is to evolve. As I absorbed more technical information my musical calling became clearer and more heightened.

When I entered the dance music scene it was open to everybody. I saw it as the highest form of communication between human beings. We all spoke the same language and had the same philosophy: If it moved people's souls to get them up and dancing - it worked! We didn't need critics and experts to explain it to us. The people are the experts!

As dance music evolves, the genres are as varied as single-celled organisms - but It Never Dies, It Multiplies.

A lo-res snippet from Freakout! Montreux of "Tell It To My Heart" by Taylor Dayne, diva of freestyle AKA Latin hip-hop and electro: a form of dance music that blew up in New York, Miami, and New Jersey in the early 80's.