SKIP WALKER

Biography

Skip Walker is a drummer, composer, producer, educator, and Episcopal Priest. He is a graduate of Boston’s prestigious Berklee College of Music (the world’s foremost institution for the study of Jazz and modern American music) where he studied with renown drummers John Ramsay, Skip Hadden, and Ed Uribe.

Skip got his first break at the age seventeen touring Europe as the drummer for the New York based funk group “The Fatback Band,” but after hearing great jazz drummers such as Art Blakey, Max Roach, Roy Haynes, Elvin Jones and Tony Williams, Skip slowly began falling in love with Jazz. According to Skip, “although I started out being heavily in to R&B/Funk music, the more I listened to Jazz and studied Jazz History, the more I realized that this music is American History with its roots firmly planted in the African American struggle for identity, freedom and justice – I had to get into this music.”

Along with keeping a busy performance schedule, Skip is also Associate Rector at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church (Greenville, NC), an online adjunct professor of religion at Methodist University (Fayetteville, NC), an annual workshop leader and lecturer on “Jazz, Spirituality and Race” at the Absalom Jones Center for Racial Reconciliation (Atlanta, GA), and formerly an Adjunct professor of Jazz Studies at the University of North Carolina (Pembroke).

Skip is creator and host of the Thinking Sheep Podcast – A Podcast that interviews experts and everyday people about the three “R’s” of life – Race, Religion and Relationships in order to think more deeply about them.