About

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Felix grew up in New Jersey and went to Rutgers where he studied piano with Kenny Barron. He played in several bands in the New Brunswick area and graduated with a BA in music and a minor in history in 1999. In June of that year he moved to Oregon where he formed OM Trio with fellow NJ natives Ilya Stemkovsky and Daniel Fusco. 

The band released three albums with Fusco: The Clarified Butter, Jazz Trio and Meat Curtain. In 2000 the group relocated to the SF Bay Area and fellow New Jerseyan Pete Novembre replaced Fusco on bass. That lineup released two albums: Live (2001) and the critically acclaimed Globalpositioningrecord (2003). The band toured relentlessly between 2001-2004, sharing the stage with artists such as Tower of Power, John Scofield, Umphrey's McGee, Joshua Redman, Wayne Krantz, Karl Denson's Tiny Universe and others. The group disbanded in December of 2004. They reunited for shows with Umprhey's McGee at the Fillmore Auditorum in SF in February of 2008. In addition to the five albums, the group left behind a trove of live recordings including the two DVD set Pummeling Angle (2016), which features eight hours of live and behind-the-scenes footage. 

After the breakup of OM Trio, Felix settled in Chicago where he began a Master of Music degree in Jazz Studies at DePaul University. During this time he played in local groups including Drop Q, Orange Alert, Ernie Hendrickson and the Make Believe, and the Sparklemonkeys. Felix earned his MM in 2007 and continued on to pursue a Doctor of Musical Arts Degree at the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign. 

In 2008, Felix began teaching as an adjunct professor at Kennedy King College in Chicago, where he taught Music Appreciation and Jazz History and began work on his co-authored  (with Pete Carney) Music Appreciation text Interactive Listening: A New Approach to Music. In 2010, Felix completed his doctoral thesis, "Rock Becomes Jazz: Interpretations of Popular Music by Improvising Artists in the 1960s" and received his DMA degree in August of that year. 

In 2011, Felix accepted a position in the Department of Music at UNC Asheville, where he teaches classes on jazz theory and improvisation, jazz history, keyboard skills, music business, the Beatles and the Grateful Dead. His work has been published in Jazz Perspectives, Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, and Grateful Dead Studies, and he maintains an active performance schedule in Asheville, where he lives with his wife Bridget and his sons, Sean and Gavin.