This is a short list of the music I’m most glad to have heard in my life. It’s in no particular order, though number one is at the end. Writers are so manipulative.
At a Music Educators National Convention in Los Angeles in 1958, I heard my lifelong friend Bob Winn perform as principal oboist in a national high-school honor orchestra, playing Howard Hanson’s SONG OF DEMOCRACY as conducted by the composer. It was only the second performance ever of that piece, which incorporates text from two poems by Walt Whitman. The orchestra was huge, and there were several hundred young people in the choir, so the sheer sound of the final measures was heart-stirring. Like everyone else in the concert hall, I leaped to my feet, overwhelmed. Every so often, I play a recording of that piece, and every time, I am moved to tears–partly because of Bob, partly because I believe in democracy, and partly because I was a writing teacher: “Only a lot of boys and girls? Only the tiresome spelling, writing, ciphering classes? Only a public school? Ah more, infinitely more.”
In a hotel lounge at Green Lake, Wisconsin, with just four other people in the room, I heard pianist John Harmon play “A Child Is Born,” solo, in his own world, playing for the music, not for the audience. As a person, I’m hardly spiritual, but the music was.
At the Blue Room in Kansas City, not long after moving to the Kansas City area in 2010, I played baritone sax with Kent Rausch’s Vine Street Rumble big band in concert, so I had the gift of hearing that hard-swinging music from inside the band. Of course, this was also probably my worst musical experience ever, since I was only able to play at most 70% of the music while sitting next to the masterful lead-alto player Mike Hererra, who I knew was aware of every bad note I played and every good note that went by too fast for me to play. Yet he very kindly gave guidance and encouragement throughout the night. A really good musician cares most about the music, and Mike Herrera is a really good musician. The last chorus of One O’Clock Jump is always thrilling to hear, but to hear it while playing it in that band simply cannot be described.
At the Old Coast Hotel and Restaurant in Fort Bragg, California, in the 1990s, I heard pianist Kent Glenn playing “It Might as Well Be Spring.” Kent could be a difficult person to be around sometimes, but his playing of that ballad was always tender and exquisite.
At the Casper Flats Inn on the North Coast of California, in what was as much a public workshop as a playing gig, I played “These Foolish Things,” accompanied only by Kent Glenn. When we finished, he said, “Do you know what you did going into the bridge?” I thought a moment and said “No.” He said, “I didn’t think so. But it was pretty good.” At the mid-way point during this ballad, a drunk stumbled over from the bar and tried to throw a few coins into the tip jar, which was sitting on a small stand in front of the band. He only managed to knock it over, so that a large batch of coins made a racket hitting the floor. My life in music. Still, hearing myself play the melody of a beautiful song while Kent Glenn made it wonderful was really something.
At Shelley’s Manhole in LA in the early 1960s, I heard the Modern Jazz Quartet. Sitting just two feet away from Milt Jackson’s vibes, I could see the subtle eye contacts, head nods, and body motions as they signaled one another wordlessly.
At a small concert for 60 or so people in a second-floor room over the Arcadia Music Mart, I sat two feet away from Ben Webster as he played “Danny Boy” without a microphone, accompanied only by pianist Jimmy Rowles. In those days, I only had eyes for Stan Getz and other tenor players of the same school, so I inwardly groaned when this old timer began to play such a corny song. But then, again sitting just a few feet away, I could hear every smeared entrance, every subtle, heart-felt variation of tone, every breathy vibrato continuing after the horn was no longer making a tone. When he finished, I knew I had heard a master.
At Joe Tondu’s elegant jazz bar, The Fox Note, in Wisconsin, I heard my band Safe Sax give a concert of my arrangements, ending with a standing ovation and four encores. The sound of applause after music is definitely something to hear.
On the first night of my first year at the Tritone music camp, I didn’t know anyone (because Joe Tondu had not yet arrived), so I started out of the lodge to drive back to my motel room. In the short hallway by the door, a guy was crouching down and playing an acoustic guitar, so I stopped to listen. It was hard to process the complexity that I was hearing. The guy finished playing a song, looked up at me, and said “Know that one?” “My One and Only Love,” I said. This was repeated for nearly an hour. Since I love songs even more than I love jazz, I felt very pleased with myself for knowing each tune he played, until I finally missed one. It was “Traumerei,” which I still feel was cheating, although it was recorded by Claude Thornhill. That was my introduction to Gene Bertoncini: my own private concert from one of the greatest and most unique guitarists who ever played jazz.
In those early days of the Tritone jazz camp, the lodge had only one grand piano, located in what was at the lodge’s auditorium/dining room. One afternoon, when nobody was in the room, I sat down and started noodling some songs in my non-pianist way. After a while, I played my own song, “Only Halfway to Dawn,” several years later re-named “Evening Star” when I added lyrics. As I played, I was not aware that Bertoncini had come into the room and stopped to listen. When I finished playing, he came over to the piano. “What was that?” he asked. “It was a song of mine,” I said. “Play it again,” he said. I did, and when I finished, he called across to John Harmon, who had just entered the room. “Listen to this,” Bertoncini said, and asked me to play it again. Harmon liked it, too, and asked me to give him a lead sheet. I have always be struck by the fact that, when you decide to play a record you like for a friend, you hear it more critically than you ever have while listening on your own. In this case, hearing yourself play your own song while master musicians also listen is. . .complicated. But definitely nice.
Still at the Tritone camp, but several years later, I heard my friend Lucy Horton sing “Evening Star” at a Tritone concert, accompanied by Harmon. Her cabaret-style voice thrillingly filled up the room. Afterward, Harmon came over to me and said, “You know, unfortunately, I don’t think it’s likely you’ll ever make a nickle from the songs you write. But people like us really appreciate them.” People like us. My life in music.
Even so, the thing that I am most grateful to have heard occurred on the Mendocino Coast very early in the 1990s. My youngest daughter Emily was in a school play for her first-grade class at Mendocino elementary school. Dressed as a green frog, she sang “Bein’ Green.” Unfortunately, I was unable to see the show because I was at a College of the Redwoods meeting in far-off Eureka, CA. Emily has always acted as if I had been drunk at Fort Bragg’s Tip Top Bar or, worse yet, simply grading papers in my college office. Whatever. At the end of that week, though, or soon after, I was “playing piano” at a Fort Bragg Center for the Arts First Friday show. These were held in a magnificent old wooden building with, inside, a huge open space like an atrium with a broad interior balcony running along each wall. The downstairs was a department store, but along each wall of the indoor balcony were displayed paintings, photographs, ceramics, and fine furniture by local artists. At one corner was a raised platform with a grand piano. There I would play simple chords with the left hand and pick out a melody with the right hand. If people were drinking and talking, they might think I was “playing piano.” At these affairs, few attendees would stand near the piano platform—not so much as a comment on my playing, I hope, than as a wish to be near the artistic action.
I had played for an hour or more, and as I finished one song, Emily suddenly jumped onto the platform, came over to me, and said she wanted to sing “Bein’ Green.” I fumbled through a piano intro, and she turned away from the piano and began to sing toward the atrium in her clear child’s voice. This wonderful natural sound cut through the chatter of the crowd, and gradually more and more people stopped talking and moved over to the platform to listen to her. When she finished, thirty or forty people were crowded in front of her, listening, and she received long, very warm applause—deservedly so, as she had sung with great feeling (to say nothing of timing, phrasing, and intonation). A woman in the audience approached her and said “The man who wrote that song is my friend, and I’m sorry that he wasn’t here to hear you, because I know he would have loved to hear it very, very much.” I couldn’t agree more, then or now. It’s the music in my life that I’m most happy to have heard.
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Afterthought on “Knowing the Composer”: How many people could be expected to know Joe Raposo, composer of “Bein’ Green”? Well, if I remember correcty, the woman who liked Emily’s singing of that song turned out to be Susan Jule, the principal writer of Fraggle Rock, and a frequent collaborator with her husband Jerry, who was the screen-writer for The Muppets Christmas Carol (and with Frank Oz was one of the earliest collaborators with Jim Henson).
