ccex

At age 4, in a small town in Minnesota, I wanted to become another Leonard Bernstein. I dutifully took piano lessons for a few years in grade school (hating Bartok, Bach, Kablevsky and others my piano teacher insisted had to be played with correct fingerings.) I didn't touch a piano for 5 years. I learned cornet and trumpet in Jr. High and High School. The ragtime craze of the mid-1970s brought me back to the piano, although I started by picking out blues tunes by myself. Scott Joplin led to Jelly Roll Morton, James P. Johnson, Fats Waller, and especially Thelonious Monk (an obsession for the last 30+ years).

I could not afford trumpet lessons at my high school (in Andover, MA), so the music department chairman asked me if I could play piano. I lied and said yes, so he gave me a scholarship to play a 38-bell carillon at the top of a WWI memorial bell tower, wreaking havoc on the ears of all those within a one mile radius. Dave Brubeck, Don Ellis, and Monk were strong influences then (as now), but no one ever complained about the bells playing stuff like the Flintstones and Munsters theme songs in 7/8 time when I was supposed to be playing hymns or traditional Belgian carillon etudes.

Classmates in high school (especially Thomas Chapin and Bob Merrill) introduced me to a few lifelong personal bad habits, as well as bebop, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Sidney Bechet, John Coltrane, Stanley Turrentine, Freddie Hubbard.

When it came time to choose a college, I decided to go to Oberlin, OH, because of their music conservatory. During freshman orientation I had to audition on trumpet right after Michael Mossman (who soon went on to play with Anthony Braxton, Horace Silver, Tito Puente and others). I was so nervous that I failed my audition and was declared incompetent for the purposes of the music conservatory. I stubbornly persisted to continue play trumpet and piano and absorb music on the fringes of the conservatory, learning Mandinka kora and South Indian mridangam from master musicians who lived there. I also became czar of Oberlin's concert committee, booking the likes of Art Blakey, Sonny Rollins (twice), Muddy Waters, Art Ensemble of Chicago, and Larry Coryell for the main stage. When it was time to give the grand concert hall to local bands, (a perennial fiasco) I booked Tiny Tim as the M.C. with a 50 cent cover charge, but every pre-professional musician refused to play with Tiny Tim. A homeless punk rock drummer, a bluegrass bass player, and yours truly provided a pickup band for musical mayhem behind the greatest pop tunes of WWI through the 1970s described by the Cleveland Plain Dealer critic as "the greatest spectacle in Western Civilization since the Hindenburg Disaster"

At age 49, I'm still unsure what I want to do when I grow up. After college, I joined the Peace Corps in Ghana, where I tried to repair and tune termite-infested pianos, when not enjoying palm wine, akpeteshie, fufu, or teaching math and statistics. Every local high-life, juju, funk, or traditional funeral band welcomed me. I'm still grateful that Ghanaians taught me how to enjoy life to the fullest without money or lots of contraptions.

After a few detours marketing Soviet jazz in CT or teaching calculus in Bloomington, IN, I ended up on the South Side of Chicago, where I've been for the last 20 years. I pay the bills by recycling obsolete computer parts, and enjoy my lovely Liberian wife, her daughter, and a 5-year-old grandson who has finally learned not to play my grandma's old piano with his feet, but who is already busy scribbling music with me.

South Chicago is a lively place for any type of music. I like the Velvet Lounge, the New Apartment Lounge with Von Freeman, and especially a big band of senior citizens in a park in the Englewood neighborhood. Last year an 80-year-old tenor saxophonist there (who played with Sun Ra in the 1950s)
got me my first paid gig, in a park in Mayor Daley's old formerly segregated neighborhood. The music scene in Chicago is alive and kicking, no matter what your tastes (polka, blues, free jazz, hip-hop, noise, bebop etc.)

I'm still having too much fun discovering music.