My big break? Becoming a composer
For the last 20 years I’ve interviewed musicians, most of them jazz, for the Post-Gazette. They all had in common that, despite their hard work and commitment to their art, they got some kind of break in that someone in the position to help them make it did so.
On Sunday, it may be my turn.
That afternoon the University of Pittsburgh, my college alma mater, is sponsoring a jazz composers concert during which members of the Pitt community are having their original works performed by the Pittsburgh Jazz Orchestra. But I’m not writing about it.
Reason? I’m one of the featured composers. Kind of a conflict there.
• I’ve been writing original music since early childhood but attended small private schools without comprehensive music programs, so my musical experience until eighth grade was generally limited to private piano lessons. My dad, a jazz bassist, hoped to form a family trio, with my brother the drummer, to play standard jazz tunes.
But when I listened to Dad’s jazz records I always gravitated toward the tunes the performers themselves wrote. Then I found a couple of big-band records by bassist Oscar Pettiford — and, looking back, the die was cast because I had become enamored of the power and colors that it exuded that a small combo just can’t execute.
Maybe that’s why I consider myself a composer/arranger, even though I have virtually no formal training. I wrote my first chart at 25, for the Homewood Jazz Workshop, but started writing for real in 2009, two years after I was invited to join a big band in which I play today and to whose book I’ve since contributed 12 charts.
• Sometimes you need just a little extra push to get things rolling, occasionally taking you out of your comfort zone. In this case a woman named Kelly, whom I met two years ago at a swing dance at the Elks Club on the North Side, provided it.
That July she inspired a tune I composed and later granted me permission to put her name to it. The following December I submitted the arrangement, with a nod to Thad Jones and by this time called “Kelly O’Swing” — she’s of Irish descent — to a 16-piece band that plays that dance on the first and third Thursdays of the month. Though I had never written a piece primarily for swing dancing, I thought it was decent, so when the band agreed to play it for the first time last January, with Kelly as my partner, I felt confident as I counted it off.
My belief turned out to be more than justified. Afterward, a member of the band called it “a fun chart” and one of the other dancers responded that it “rocked!” The next time the band played it, in February, folks even started Lindy-hopping to it.
I learned later that Kelly had written songs in her own right, and she gave me one of hers to chart for the band. It would be my first arrangement with a vocal, but after I finished it she was pleased with the computer sketch (although it has yet to be performed live). On top of that, three other women, perhaps jealous of her status as a muse, asked me, “Why don’t you write something for me?” I don’t yet have the time or energy to do that, so I came up with the Basie-influenced “The Girls at the Elks,” which I’ve since rewritten for my band. And those guys liked it, which I appreciate because they’re the ones who would have to play it.
• I learned about the composers concert just before Christmas at Alphabet City on the North Side, where a Pitt grad student I met during the Louis Hayes concert the previous week at the New Hazlett Theater was performing. While there I fell into conversation with one of the professors, telling him I was a composer; at that, he invited me to submit something, so I mailed in my “masterpiece” — an impressionistic 2011 arrangement of “Summit in the Snow,” inspired by a 1986 heart-toheart talk in Mellon Park with a student at Chatham University whose hand I wanted but wouldn’t get. Again, I felt that it represented quality material.
And he apparently agreed. That’s what you’ll hear on Sunday.
While I’m not giving up my day job, this might be the start of something big.