Michael Caloroso is the latest addition, bringing his keyboard talent to round out the refreshing sound of Tom Egan & The Mojo Boogie Band.  After progressing through a series of classic rock and top 40 bands, he has found where he belongs: Rhythm & Blues.  It almost never happened.

Mike just happened to land his eye on a newspaper ad in a section where he seldom frequents: "Keyboard player wanted for Blues Band".  He thought that a blues band would be a different twist from anything he'd done.  It became the most satisfying experience he has ever had.

Winding up our Wayback Machine, when Mike was in his "terrible twos" he could be found picking out melodies on the family piano after planting himself in front of the home stereo speakers for hours.  His father had a large model railroad layout and a bench full of tools, where Mike learned to fix things and make little projects.  In fact, Mike's first intelligible word was a curse word (much to the dismay of his mother), which was attributed to hearing his father's frustrations trying to keep the train from jumping the track.  Back to the piano he went.

Piano lessons began at age five and continued through college. Mike wrote his first song when he was seven, a silly song about his cat that to this day his mother never ceases to tease him about.  Along the way he participated in school orchestras, jazz ensembles, volunteer bands, choir, and informal jams with friends after school.  In addition to honing his arranging and playing skills working with groups, he developed a keen awareness of what other musicians were  playing and learned what to play from the heart.  When you hear the Mojo Boogie band play Rhythm & Blues, it comes from the heart.  It's real music.

Paralleling Mike's musical education was his engineering skills. On one occasion a neighbor called to ask Mike's father if he could help wire up his train set, and in his absence  seven-year-old Mikey was sent to help.  Mike got the train set wired up and running and the neighbor was quite delighted until it occurred to him that this seven-year-old boy was helping an adult wire up a simple train set.

Having been fascinated with tinkering with toy trains since childhood, Mike discovered the inside of a radio and took it apart to learn how it worked.  Imagine his father's disgust when the radio no longer worked after Mike put it back together.  That progressed to building circuits from magazines and designing his own fixes for things that broke. An engineer in the making.  When he reached college age, Mike pondered at the crossroads: a career in music or a career in engineering?  It was the age of Disco.  He wisely chose engineering.

Mike's older brother had taken piano lessons and then took up guitar, and the two of them  formed their first band together.  They were hooked when they performed on the stage with that band for the first time in 1981.  Those were the days when the drinking age was still 18!

Mike earned his Bachelor's degree in Electronic Engineering Technology and worked in bands to help pay for school.  Both his musical and engineering skills progressed during this period and by the time Mike had graduated, he was an accomplished multi-instrumentalist (piano,bass, drums, and guitar) and an experienced technician at keeping his electronic music gear running.  Even after entering the profession, he continued to wear dual hats: by day he was senior engineer, by night he was rock-n-roll rebel.

Mike maintained a passion in old analog synthesizers since he built one from a kit in 1981.  When they fell out of fashion during the 80s he bought many dream keyboards at bargain basement prices, knowing full well that they were better sounding instruments than the latest fancy digital dinner bells that everybody else was clamoring to buy. Today those old analog keyboards are worth a pretty penny, while the value of the "digital" keyboards have dwindled to near nothing.  The old analog keyboards also offered another engineering challenge to Mike: how to keep them working when parts are scarce and how to keep them from going out of tune.  Applying what he learned from his profession, he got them up and running like they were brand new.  Through sharing his experience on the internet to thousands of budding analog keyboard tinkerers
hungry for technical information on the "old stuff", Mike was offered a position on the beta test and sound design team for the new Alesis "Andromeda" keyboard, the first polyphonic analog synthesizer built since 1985.