Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Home For The Holidays
Grady Nichols returns to JBU for one night only
Grady Nichols has a unique relationship with his alma mater. John Brown University was where he found his voice and his inspiration on the saxophone — specifically, in the school’s cathedral. Now, a couple of decades later, he can admit that he took rather extreme measures to play there.
“For the longest time, I would break in to the cathedral — it had a really lame lock on it — and then campus security would come and be like ‘Oh, it’s just you.’ And finally the music department gave me my own keys,” he recalls. “I would play until all hours of the morning, and they let me! That really fostered the passion I had for making music and playing the sax. As far as I was concerned, they gave me the keys to the city!”
Now, Nichols is coming home for a one-night-only Christmas concert Nov. 30, and he’s hoping to give back to what Larry Seacat says is an underserved community. Seacat is the founder and executive director of ALS Patient Services Outreach, a Tulsa-based nonprofit that helps meet the needs of people with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. The progressive neurodegenerative disorder is better known as Lou Gehrig’s disease for the baseball player who brought it into the public eye in 1939.
Seacat knew nothing about the disease himself when he was recruited to take a church service to a couple dealing with ALS. They had been devoted churchgoers, he was told, but the wife’s health no longer allowed it. She could move nothing but her eyes.
“She was completely locked in her body,” he remembers. After meeting the couple, who were in their 70s, and seeing the needs in their home, “I knew God had changed my life,” Seacat says. ALS Patient Services Outreach was born in 2011 to fill in the gaps in care, whatever they might be, in northeastern Oklahoma and occasionally Northwest Arkansas. The organization’s director of development, Bill Paddock, was Nichols’ manager in the early days of his career, and thus the collaboration came to be.
“When we began to develop the idea for a Christmas concert, we knew we wanted it to be something different, something fun, something with some variety, but still focused on the meaning of the season,” Nichols says. “Christmas shouldn’t just be Dec. 25 but 365 days a year. We should always be giving gifts of ourselves and being kind to one another and trying to look at somebody as a person instead of their ideology or what have you.”
Besides, he adds, a grin clear in his voice, “I’ve always thought Christmas was a very romantic time. I read somewhere that a ton of engagements happen at Christmas, so when we came up with [the title] ‘Falling in Love With Christmas,’ it was with the idea of that old-fashioned romance. I fell in love with my wife, Lisa, at Christmas, and we’ve been married 18 years.”
Lisa plus three sons — two teenagers and an 11-year-old — keep Nichols closer to home than the touring schedule he pursued after college.
“But I still feel like that person that got out of college and was adventurous and wanted to try this and do that,” he says, “and that’s kind of how this Christmas show came to pass. You take the opportunities to put yourself in different situations and do different things. And I had barely finished my first record all those years ago when people started asking me when I was going to do one for Christmas! I kind of had to analyze what I wanted to do before I could do it.
“That process was a cool journey back through my childhood and growing into an adult, thinking about what are those songs I still come back to every year? I wanted to create something that was meaningful and fun and captured the spirit of Christmas, and I feel like we’ve done that.”