A Music Trip

I hope not to bore you all with all this old stuff about me, but maybe you’ll get to know me better and know where this drivel originates.  I know some of you older people, like me, remember having to sit through hour upon hour of the family slide show of the same pictures of someone standing in front of the elephant cage at some zoo you visited.  Someone was ridiculously positioned in front of his trunk.  A friend of mine recently sent me a video of a rather well endowed young lady from Australia standing in front of an elephant who had just removed her bikini top with his trunk. I guess he was just looking for peanuts in all the wrong places, but I digress.

I’m attempting to convey some true-life stories about my life with a sort of message, a chuckle, and maybe a tear or two that I am a firsthand witness.  Where I’m the central character, kind of like the Forrest Gump movie, where Forrest, who just shows up, sometimes as an extra, sometimes in a cameo,  and sometimes as the main character in a life’s journey through the 50’s to the 21^st century.  If you just started following me, you were subjected to my first attempt to recall my time in Haiti,  more on this in the future.

This time around, I want to share my early music background, my other passion, with a piece I wrote in 2006.  I wrote this little history to show my appreciation for what my old school did for me in a different era with different values.  Incidentally, in my senior year, in the height of the Vietnam war, the draft was done by lottery.  That year, they put out the numbers for the next year, I was number 88 out of 365, and they called up to number 86.  I literally and figuratively dodged a bullet.  Unfortunately, many of my classmates weren’t so fortunate.  I guess God had a different plan for me, and I’m still trying to figure that our 50 years later.  Pray for me to figure that out sometime.  Join me in my Music Trip…..

2006

My days of playing from high school forward were always memorable times.  My years at Eau Gallie High School were some of the fondest of my memories.  I remember my sophomore year with Nat Baggarly as our director, and we barely stretched across the field in a company font with just 64 kids.  Nat had a way of motivating us and making us a team.  In my junior year, James Moody was our director, and it was sort of a rebuilding year.  My senior year was a great year.  Under Joe Johnson, we learned how to pull together.  The band was about 100.  We played Tchaikovsky’s 4th Symphony https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qKn5ShUcr4 for the band contest, all the other powerhouses at the time, Merritt Island, Melbourne, etc., didn’t think little old Eau Gallie (a new school at the time) could cut that piece and that we played way over our head.  We got superiors and a standing ovation.

!The Jazz band was pretty good as well.  I played ride tenor and alto sax in the Concert and Marching Bands.  It was cool to go out and do paying gigs with the local band directors.   The leadership and dedication of my teachers in Concert Band, Jazz Band, and Music Theory were to serve me well in my later years, and I owe them so much.   I graduated in 1970 (incidentally, I still think that we had the coolest band uniforms, with the marine jackets and cross belts, and yes Mel Hi marched backward off the field as their big finale to every half time show even back then!)   Here, I would like to say how totally impressed I am at the quality of the music program at Eau Gallie High School and Johnson Middle School. These kids play far better than we could have hoped for, and I believe that this is a direct result of caring, compassionate, no-nonsense, leadership provided by Mr. & Mrs. Singletary. (directors at the time of this writing ) While I would like to think of my generation of band kids were pioneers and on the cutting edge during our time, the quality of character and musicianship of the kids in these schools today is nothing short of awesome!  50 years have passed since I was a proud member of the Eau Gallie High School Commodore Band, and practically everything has changed except for one thing – the love and compassion of the band directors who lead this program.  I guess some things never change.  GO COMMODORES!

I went to Brevard Junior College (BJC now EFSC) on a tuition waiver for music (even though I was an accounting major), played lead alto sax in the jazz band under my old friend Nat Baggarly.  We had a pretty decent jazz band, and one of the greatest moments was doing a joint concert with the late great Stan Kenton and his band.  Our sax section did Opus in Pastels (a piece written by Stan Kenton featuring the sax section) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9KOYv4UHTI as a dedication to Stan.  That was pretty cool.  Many from our group that year went on to become part of the Airmen of Note and other military bands. 

Jim Bishop directs Band at BCC now (aka EFSC), and Kenny G was one of his students when he was an intern at Northwestern. Jim, however, sat second chair behind me at BJC (just had to rub that in Jim!) I went on to finish my accounting degree at the University of Florida (GO GATORS!). Oh, before I go on, I took private lessons while at BJC under Charles Colbert, who was a great teacher and a real taskmaster pushing me to practice hard. The climax of that experience was playing the Paul Creston Sonata https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaxNpfT1p9E (which is a complicated piece) at a recital pulling it off without losing my cookies.

On to UF, I played lead alto in the number 1 Jazz band for two years, under the direction ofhm out of North Texas State. The music department at Florida was pretty relaxed, but the jazz band had to pick up the tunes quick and had a heavy concert and tour schedule. We backed up the Temptations on a 3 hour notice one time, they came in with written charts, and we had one rehearsal about 2 hours before the performance, which took place in the old Florida Gym. We played a concert to a captive audience 😊 at Raiford Max Security Prison, where the Notorious Murph the Surf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Roland_Murphy carried my horn cases in for me.

I paid for most of my tuition at UF by playing Frat parties, proms, and clubs while I was there.  The highlight of the UF Jazz band experience for me was when the band was invited to tour Romania for 3 weeks as an Ambassador of Friendship group to help thaw out the cold war with a cultural exchange of American Jazz.  Going behind the Iron Curtain at that time was a pretty big deal, especially for a bunch of “long hairs” from UF.  We were treated like celebrities wherever we played.  One of our not so glamorous moments was on our last night in Romania. They took us to a Biergarten kind of place, we proceeded to get very drunk. The local band made the unwise choice of inviting a very drunk group of American musicians to sit in. After a very poorly played rendition of “Tequila” that seemed to torment the rest of the patrons for hours, we poured onto the plane that would take our very hung-over bodies back to the US of A.   

After I graduated from UF, I sat for the CPA exam and passed it and went to work for my Dad’s mining company in Melbourne. I played clubs, did some recording, and learned the entertainment business while doing my day job.  In 1976, I formed a Band called Topaz, and we have been playing around the stat3e ever since with a long Alumni of varying members.  We opened for the Commodores in the early 2000s, and back in 1986, B.J. Thomas opened for us on the 4^th of July (I was writing the check, so I pulled rank).  I started leading the praise band in the early 2000s, at the church, my family helped start (Crossroads Community Church).  I enjoy music as much as anyone can. 

My latest ambition is to build a 5-story building on the property that I own here in Melbourne and dedicate the bottom two floors to a jazz club, multi-style state of the art performance facility.  In addition to having a resident house, multi-style musician group, the 20,000 square foot facility would have a particular time available for local school groups to perform in a commercial setting to experience the feel of that kind of audience and performance.  With my background in performance, running my own small recording studio supplemented with training from Full Sail Recordings in Orlando, my dream was to make Club Rio a place to come to for a great performance of music and a good time.  My dream of Club Rio never materialized due to funding and the ever-present government red tape.  Oh well, I dream big, most of the time exceeding my pocketbook.