Deveau, recognized my youthful musical fever. To my great good fortune, the school’s music teacher, Mr. My parents faint hopes wrecked on the shoals of be-bop, I returned to Salem High to try to get through my senior year doing the least amount of work possible. I’d spend my lunch breaks there, enthralled, listening to them rehearse, eventually taking bongo lessons from the club’s porter. The school was across the street from a jazz club “The Stable’s” the long-standing home of the Herb Pomeroy Quintet. Junior year of high school my parents, with a faint hope I might have some aptitude for science, packed me off every day onto a train to an engineering prep school in Boston’s Copley Square. I preserved the tape onto a CD, transcribed the tune and have it on my list for an upcoming trio recording.īeing of a somewhat rebellious nature, my grades all through my early school years were in the lower range. The tape is one of my most cherished possessions. One of the rare “circles closed” that occur in one’s lifetime. At the end he stood up and asked “Any questions?” Speechless, I managed to mumble “I got it” as he rode off into the sunset. George fluently played the tune in it’s original key (E natural!) took a stunning chorus on it, stopping afterward to go over a few chords that were crucial to the tune. This being a moment I’d been waiting for for over 40 years I borrowed Jill Wood’s cassette recorder and hurried to the stage. Give me a few days and I’ll get back to you.” A couple of days later I got a message to meet George on-stage at his sound check. He said, “Wow Hal, that was a long time ago. I asked him if he remembered how “Changing With The Times” went. I seized the first opportune moment to tell him his tune was the first jazz tune I’d ever heard and was one of the primary musical events that set me on the path to playing jazz piano. This was the first time I‘d met George in person. However, in 1987 I was playing with the Phil Woods Quintet on a Concord Records package tour in Japan along with George’s duo with bassist Neil Swainson. I tried to figure it out but never got to imitate more than the first 4 bars of it in Eb. The song was composed of many time signatures, 4/4, 3/4, and 5/4. I was hooked! There was a tune on that record called “Changing With The Times” that totally blew me away. Once I heard that record it was all over for me. This was the one with Margie Hyams on vibes and Chuck Wayne on guitar. I wasn’t exposed to it until my sophomore year of high school when my brother returned from a summer waiter‘s job in western Massachusetts hotel with a coverless purloined LP of the George Shearing Quintet. Salem, Massachusetts was a yawning chasm of jazz. One was a shuffle blues tenor solo called “Soft” by Tiny Bradshaw’s band (who I got to hear in person at the same Newport Jazz Festival I attended where Paul Gonzalvas played that famous 20 minute solo on Ellington’s Diminuendo in Blue), the other was a Latin song by Joe Loco‘s band, the title of which is to far back in the mists of time for me to remember. I didn’t play anything for a while in my early teens but had two great 45 records in my collection that I played a lot. She still has a copy of it in a drawer somewhere. The only song I learned from him before she‘d had enough of his “bad influence” was “That Lucky Old Sun” which he’d written out in big notes, floating in space, without a staff. Much to her disapproval, he wore loud plaid sport jackets, smoked incessantly and had tobacco stained fingers. Won a few local and regional competitions over the years but eventually convinced Mom to pay for a “popular” music teacher. Never did become a great reader because I could memorize so easily. I can still hear her yelling at me from her kitchen, “Harold, stop playing by ear and read the music!” I was always amazed how she could tell. I started studying classical piano with a local teacher, Mrs. Tell us something about your early musical & and non-musical background?
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