 Born on April 3, 1958 in Encino, CA, Summer grew up in Los Angeles, California playing piano, guitar and, from the age of nine, cello.From the beginning he was very interested in alternative genres, and as a teenager playing in a rock band called The Purple Testament, later known as The Plague.Summer studied cello with Edwin Geber of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, then with Geber’s wife Gretchen Geber, and graduated from the Cleveland Institute of Music, continuing his studies with the Geber family with Stephen Geber as a cello performance major.