Born in Colorado, Vaughn spent much of his working career in Atlanta before moving to the DC area in 2014.
Vaughn channels the mood of the music through his bass, creating the heartbeat for the band as he finds the harmonic and rhythmic center around which the sound is built. For him, soul music is pure emotion – pulling from the broad range which jazz provides, wrapped together in a form you can dance to. Fun fact: Vaughn has won four Emmy awards.
Vaughn has played in pretty much every type of band out there. His first band had seven guitarists, inspiring him to pick up the bass instead, and he went on from there to play psychedelic funk, indie-rootsy fusions, jazz standards and hip hop. Vaughn's from Colorado and spent much of his working career in Atlanta before moving to the DC area in 2014.
As a thirteen-year-old in England, Martin picked up guitar after receiving a used folk guitar for his birthday. Quickly realizing he couldn’t sing to save his life, he started taking lessons in classical guitar, on a much nicer nylon-string guitar imported from Spain. Classical guitar continued through high school in a rural part of New Jersey, * where he moved with his parents in 1974, and then into college, where he took lessons at the New England Conservatory extension school while getting a degree in Physics at a well-known tech school down the road. Realizing jamming with friends was much more fun, Martin bought an Ibanez archtop guitar and started trying to play jazz with his fraternity brothers.
Married life, a job, and raising two wonderful kids took precedence over playing guitar until, one Christmas, his wife Cathy signed him up for jazz guitar lessons with Tom Lawrence in Columbia, MD, where they had moved in 2010. Then, after discovering the Levine Music School (https://www.levinemusic.org) in the DC area Martin started playing more regularly, taking jazz combo and music theory classes. Martin met Vaughn and Mark at Levine and started jamming with them, and later with Dan, Enrique, and Gary, including enjoying masked-and-socially-distanced sessions in Mark’s back yard during the Covid era.
Then Vaughn had the brilliant idea to branch into Neo Soul, which led to him finding Moon and her good friend Ro via Craig’s List, and the rest, as they say, is (recent) history!
Martin rocks a 1977 Ibanez knock-off of a Gibson ES-175D archtop, and a Godin LGX-SA solid-body he found on Reverb for a steal.
* His teacher used to joke that they were the two best classical guitarists in the county, which was, you know, pretty easy, since they were the ONLY classical guitarists in the county.