Fred is a multi-talented musician and is also the band's 'official' Vocalist.

Born and raised in Lodi (CA), he started playing brass instruments when very young and was a Church Trumpeter in High School and Junior College.

Sometime in the late Fifties Fred was smitten with the jazz bug by a Dukes of Dixieland recording, and says that he was 'intrigued that the Dukes could improvise like that and make it sound so good'.

A veteran of the Riverbank Blues Band, which he joined around 1971, he started attending the Sacramento Jazz Society Sessions where he listened a lot to the old recordings of King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Lu Watters and Bob Scobey. He played the Sacramento Jazz Jubilee with this band for 7 years straight, then in 1981 joined the Black Diamond Jazz Band, to play Sacramento with them for a couple of years.

He also grew to love the compositions of Fats Waller and is especially fond of 'two cornet traditional bands' and tries to listen to as many as possible

He became a member of Cell Block 7 in 1992 and has been with them ever since, playing all 14 of the Sacramento Jubilees they've played (as at 2007).

Fred enjoys meeting everyone involved with the Traditional Jazz field and strongly feels that 'without the dedication of the musicians and the sacrifices of the volunteers, most Jazz events would not occur.'

In his life away from music Fred has worked for 34 Years in a unit of the State Board of Equalization called "Tax Area Services".