About
I gave my first “show” in a Baldwin piano store at the tender age of 7 in Corpus Christi, TX, just 2 and a half hours up the road from the my border-town birthplace of Brownsville, TX. It was a recital put together by Mrs. Mellenbruch, primarily a piano teacher who also played a little guitar. I was her sole guitar student and while her piano students performed works of Bach and Mozart I played and sang the cowboy-chord folk gems she taught me, “Red River Valley” and “I Was Born 10,000 Years Ago”. I played them nakedly acoustic. No mic. Solo. Honest, scared and awful. 
Despite the rough start I kept playing the guitar and eventually outgrew dear Mrs. Mellenbruch. I started with a local music store teacher of the finest caliber and soon was learning the ways of an ecletic mix of music: Talking Heads, Rush, Arlo Guthrie, Brouwer, Tarrega, Villa-Lobos etc. and by the time I got to High School I dove deep into Jazz and Classical guitar music. It was around this time I heard the music of Charlie Parker and became infected with the rare and aggressive disease of bebop. I decided it was time to get the f out of C.C. (sooner than later) and started music studies at The University of North Texas a few months after my 17th birthday. And so I went, spiraling into a world of metronomes and 8 hour practice days in order to realize my dream: to play ‘boss guitar’ in the tradition of Wes Montgomery, Pat Martino, and Grant Green. This long and painful journey of bebop guitar would finally end in New York at the age of 25…more on that later.
While in college during my musical what for. I happened into a mambo band with the unfortunate moniker of “The Latin Pimps”. We did really well in our hometown of Denton, TX and became quite popular with the dance folk. We recorded a mambo-y CD entitled “Mambo Infierno”. I got really obsessed with cuban music around this time; first mambo, then son, then changui. I started to take apart the lines of Aresenio Rodriguez and Nino Rivera and picked up the tres cubano (cuban guitar). Not too long after I would pick up the rest of my things and head for New York City.
Not long after I moved to New York City I recorded a jazz record, in a Brooklyn apartment of a friend. It was simply titled Robert Gomez Trio and although it was well received I started to grow weary of the whole jazz thing and began doing what so many of my friends at the time were doing. Started writing songs. I got back into singing and made Etherville. Released on Basement Front Records an imprint I started with some dear friends.
New York was great for the long cold 4 years I was there. I ended up in some great situations albeit very different stylistically. It seemed like for every call I had to go buy a new guitar to realize the music correctly. I hooked up with Nelson Gonzalez, AKA the best tres player in the world and took my classical playing to new hights with Frederic Hand, the principal guitarist in the metropolitan opera whom I met when I worked there as an usher (coolest “day job” ever). I also had the pleasure of playing in a quartet realizing the music of Astor Piazolla and touring with Turkish sensation, Omar Faruk Tekbilek.
This was fun and all but I was miserable in that city never sleeps (Perhaps she never sleeps because she’s up all night constantly kicking your ass?) so I went back to Texas. Denton, Texas that is. My collegiate stomping grounds. I finished the project started a few months earlier in New York with my former bandmates the second and final “Latin Pimps” record. The former mambo band morphed into a slightly weirded-out latin, american and west african free-for-all that focused on no style in particular. It went on to get picked as one of itunes best of 2007 latin releases and quickly disentegrated into nothing.
Around the same time while waiting to release of the record Etherville I was asked to play in the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus. A friend of mine in the band recommended me. I took it. So my wife, my chihuahua and I packed into our new place, a 6×6 foot room on a train and ran away with the circus so to speak. Through the aftershock of sequence attire and elephant dung I started writing the songs that would become Brand New Towns. After about 6 months of some hard train yard slave-driving circus times I quit. I went back to Denton and couple of years later in the spring of 2006 finished Brand New Towns. My compatriots in Midlake (some more University jazz buddys) passed it along to Simon Raymonde of Bella Union. He liked it and wanted to release it. He did. It was released in Jan 2007 and after a few tours with Midlake both here in the US and abroad I started the next installment. Things died down and I started work on the current record in July of 2007. It was completed a few days ago September 30th 2008. (These things take a while)
In addition to making my newest offering I’ve gotten to be a part of some other records, South San Gabriel’s Dual Hawks, John Grant’s (The Czars) Queen of Denmark (in production) Sarah Jaffe’s upcoming full length record and a new duo I’ve started with the great Anna-Lynne Williams (Trespassers William and Lotte Kestner) which we began in Marfa, TX just this past Feb.