In previous columns I’ve shared stories regarding the people who paved the path I’ve traveled to become, musically—and sometimes so much more, who I am today. From my piano teacher Jay Hickerson to banjoist/vocalist Bob Price to the entire Galvanized Jazz Band, mentors kept appearing at exactly the right time to get me to the next level. While this column will not represent my final reminiscence of past influences, it concerns, by far, the most flamboyant cog in my musical wheel.
I started college in September, 1985 at Connecticut College in New London, CT. A week prior to matriculating, I endured what I thought was the hardest thing I’d done during my first 18 years of life: giving up my four-nights-a-week residency, both with Bob Price and as a soloist, at the Yankee Silversmith Inn in Wallingford, CT. I reluctantly decided that I’d not be able to concentrate on school if I were making a one-hour-each-way commute several times a week from school to Inn. My first six months of college were dismally bereft of performances of any kind. I used the “down” time by choosing the Greer Music Library as my work-study option, enabling me to illicitly record virtually its entire (and vast) collection of pre-bop jazz from LP to cassette tape. However, I was yearning to be back at the piano playing for appreciative, inebriated (or ideally both) patrons in some establishment of dive
