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I have another life away from jazz. My late wife Rosa and I were married for nearly 45 years. She died suddenly April 17, 2008 after a four-year battle with lung cancer. She was a never-smoker. Rosa was a high school librarian at Affton High School. She was the 1999 recipient of the St. Louis Educational Technology Association's V. C. McClure Award. We have two grown children. Dan is a network architect for IBM. He is a music graduate of the University of North Texas (percussion). Dan was on the UNT drum line that won the national championship at PASIC in 1993. Anna is an athletic trainer with a B.S. and M.S. in kineseology from Indiana University. She works with dancers and other performing artists. Anna has danced since she was a young person. In high school, she was on two dance teams that won national championships. Anna also toured the former Soviet Union and Scandinavia as part of a cultural exchange program. She currently works for St. Vincent's Sports Medicine Clinic in Indianapolis, the Butler Univrsity Dance Program and Dance Kaleidoscope. | |
Both Rosa and I are originally from California. I was a research scientist. We moved here in 1969 to accept a position with Monsanto. I retired in 1996 from Monsanto as a Senior Science Fellow after a 27 year career, going directly into consulting at Monsanto and part time teaching. From January 1998 to August 2001, I taught accelerated Organic Chemistry and accelerated General Chemistry at Logan College of Chiropractic (22 semesters of teaching in 3-2/3 years--whew!). I then returned to part time teaching at McKendree College in Illinois until 2003.
I have been interested in jazz since I was about 15 and have been a student of this music since that time. I became obsessed early and began collecting records around 1959. Some of my memories of that time are hiding the good stuff in the "Country and Western" bins until I could get the money together to buy it. Several friends in St. Louis told me the same story. In the late 1950's and early 1960's, Los Angeles was a place where you could hear some great music. I was able to hear in live performance just about all the giants who was still alive around that time: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, Bill Evans, Benny Carter, Wes Montgomery, Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Thelonious Monk, a very young Bobby Hutcherson and many others too numerous to mention. The crowd I hung with went to coffeehouses and jazz clubs rather than other, less positive teenage hangouts. I became a student of this music very early, when I read Marshall Stearns' book on jazz history. My search for this music went both forward in the present and backward to the earliest music. The important thing is: like all great art, the really great music in this form is timeless.
In graduate school, I took my first and only musical training: saxophone lessons from Frank Chase, a former bassoonist with the NBC symphony. Benny Carter told me later that Frank was known in New York during the 1930's to 1940's as a great teacher. Paul Desmond and the comedian Sid Caesar studied with him. Frank was interested in astronomy in later years, so I exchanged lessons in atomic spectroscopy with him for saxophone lessons. Frank went on to become a research associate at the JPL observatory in Wrightwood and published an atlas of spectra of double stars. He died in November, 1998 at the age of 92. Frank was active at JPL and in teaching music until his middle 80's.
Moving to St. Louis in 1969, we began to establish our family and my research career. Around 1975, I met Charlie Menees, a St. Louis radio personality and jazz historian who began to fill in some gaps in my knowledge about jazz in the Midwest. This was before the glut of reissues of classic jazz recordings, so Charlie filled in the gaps in my listening with things I had only read about. There were a number of others such as Walter Parker, Don Wolff, Syl Boxdorfer and Bob Roberts who, like me, were interested seriously in the history of the music. I was the maverick in the group, however, in that I was never afraid to listen to the avant garde music of the 1960's. I even gave a lecture on avant garde saxophonists for Charlie. The lecture started with an excerpt of the most extreme portions of Flip Phillips' Jazz at the Philharmonic solo on "Perdido." The audience recoiled in horror at that music until I identified the soloist's name. This taught me that we can become conditioned to expect things in our listening. I never could understand why people would wildly applaud the white saxophonists in Woody Herman's 1970's band (who all sounded like Coltrane), but wouldn't cross the street to hear the originator of that style.
I eventually began my radio career with Romondo Davis, who took over Charlie Menees' show on KWMU. He asked me to bring some modern things to the show. I found that I enjoyed it. When Romondo left, Jim Wallace took over the show. He asked me to continue guest producing until April, 1983. I took over the production of Jazz Spectrum at that point and co-hosted it with Jim. On my recommendation, Walter Parker came to KWMU in 1985 to produce and host Jazzstream, a show featuring traditional and mainstream jazz. I moved to Sunday nights with Bebop and Beyond in 1985. Wallace, Rod Abid and Sean Collins, who engineered for me during the 1985-1992 period have all moved on to NPR in Washington. I have done my own engineering since 1992. The Jazz Unlimited format started in 1988. All shows are now pre-recorded to avoid the occasional glitches and embarrassments. The show has been awarded "Best Jazz Show in St. Louis" for the past three years by the Riverfront Times.
Charlie Menees taught a class on St. Louis jazz history that led me to do a lot of research into the subject. We obtained a grant for the research. This led to a documentary on St. Louis jazz that ran for 18 hours of air time in 1987. During this research, I met Mr. Eddie Randle, Sr. Eddie, without doubt, was one of the major influences on my life. He was probably the wisest person I have ever known. Eddie was a former bandleader who had a band called the St. Louis Blue Devils. Ernie Wilkins, Miles Davis and Oliver Nelson are just three of the people who passed through his band. Until his death in 1997, he was a funeral director. We hit it off immediately and spent a lot of time together over the next 10 years. When Miles died, one of the TV stations called me to do an interview. I told them that I wouldn't do it unless Eddie was included. A few days later, Eddie called me and asked me if I would accompany him to the memorial service for Miles in East St. Louis. When I went to pick him up, he informed me that he would be speaking and that I was to accompany him to the rostrum to speak also. I nearly went home right there, but finally he convinced me that I had something to say. This was an example of his version of the "Golden Rule." It went like this: "When someone does something to you, get them back. But get them back only if it was a good thing. If it was a bad thing, getting them back lowers you to their level."
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In 1988, I began fooling around with synthesizers. With these things, you can be a one person band and I compose, arrange and improvise things for fun. I have done arrangements on a number of famous jazz tunes. Some of these arrangements probably have their composers spinning in their graves. I began my study of Ellington's scores using synthesizers and discovered just how "out" Duke was. From early times, he was hiding some of the most incredible dissonances in his scores. Eventually, I taught a class on Ellington's music that was followed by a concert. For that concert, I had a band that consisted of Paul DeMarinis and Rob Hughes (reeds), Randy Holmes (trumpet), Brett Stamps (trombone), Carolbeth True (piano), Ric Vice (bass) and Jimmy Merity (drums). I used the synthesizers to cut down big band arrangements of "East St. Louis Toodle-O," "KoKo" and "Blue Light" to fit the instrumentation. The rearrangements must have worked, because the musicians enjoyed playing them. |
I am also interested in photography. With the acquisition of a digital slide and film scanner (and now digital cameras) I can now present photos of musicians in performance from my files going back to 1972. These are found un the Jazz Unlimited Photo Galleries. They were exhibited at the Sheldon Art Gallery in 1992 in a show called "Festival Jazz!" I had my own exhibit in 2005-6 at the Sheldon called "In the Moment--Jazz Musicians in Performance." My photographs have been shown on web sites around the world (mostly with my permission, but some have been stolen), on album covers and in music textbooks. My book, City of Gabriels-The Jazz History of St. Louis 1895-1973 was published in September 2006. It won an "Award of Merit" in Jazz History from the Association of Recorded Sound Collections in 2007. Keep listening!