Scott Anderson: 2x Emmy Award-Winner & One of Pittsburgh’s Top Keyboardists

Scott Anderson is a two-time Emmy Award-winning composer, music director, and producer, renowned as one of Pittsburgh’s top keyboardists. He has worked with national and regional artists, composed for film and TV, and teaches music in cinema at Point Park University.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
God knows it.

Speaker 2 (00:07):
This isn't n video.

Speaker 1 (00:10):
Oh and you are, Oh, bless your heart.

Speaker 2 (00:14):
This is the COVID podcast chronicle in Pittsburgh's music scene,
and welcome in. I'm Johnny heart Well your host. Along
with Andy Pugar. Today we talked to one of Pittsburgh's
best keyboarders and a two time Emmy Award winner, Scott Anderson.

Speaker 1 (00:29):
Scott Anderson, how the heck are you? I'm doing good, Johnny?
How are you? I'm great? All right, so we're gonna talk.
This is your life, Scott Anderson, I'm ready, all right.
What's your earliest music memory. My earliest music memory is
pretty early. My mother was in like take night school.

(00:53):
I was probably a year and a half old. My
father was caring for me and didn't really have much
of a playbook for how to deal with me. So
I remember he would just sort of carry me around
and play music. And the one song I remember his
memory came back to me when I saw this artist

(01:13):
and concert was the line Lonely People, and it was
eleanor Rigby or the Beatles. And when I saw Paul
in nineteen ninety, this memory came just crashing back. It
was this little apartment in Lower Borough and my dad
holding me in lonely people. And that's my earliest musical
memory a year and a young That is so young,
I don't have any other memories. Did you come from

(01:37):
a musical family. That's an interesting question. It's yes and no.
Not in the sense that my parents played music. But
my father was a voracious collector of music and a
deep lover of music, and also, as part of his job,
covered the music scene. He was a journalist and was
very close with a lot of musicians. You mentioned some
folks that you've had in here. A lot of them

(01:58):
were at our house for jam sets when I was
a kid. How they used to have this big Memorial
Day party and all these jazz musicians would come, just
about everybody you could ever name. It was in the
Pittsburgh scene. And they would play and went into the
wee hours of the night. And you know, there was
always music playing in our house, I mean all weekend long.

(02:18):
He just had he would stack six LPs and just
let him go. There would always be some sort of
theme or concept behind it. He had thousands and thousands
of LPs. And then when my mom finally let him
buy a CD, player hundreds and hundreds of CDs. He
would have got the thousands if you'd lived longer.

Speaker 2 (02:35):
So what was the first record do you remember buying?
Or what's the first song that impacted you? Like listening
to the radio is just like it meant something to you.

Speaker 1 (02:45):
Well, okay, I don't know if it's first, but the
biggest impact probably was Dust in the Wind. I remember
very clearly, lying in bed. My parents had got me
a clock radio with FM radio, yeah, and headphones, you know,
and I would listen in bed. And the night before

(03:05):
we were headed to a vacation in the Outer Banks,
which back then wasn't such a you know, it was
pretty isolated, it wasn't really redeveloped. I was listening to
the to the radio and I heard this song and
I had not heard it before. And there's this instrumental
section in the middle of the song's pretty famous viola
and violin to it, and I thought it was just
the most beautiful thing I'd ever heard in my life.

(03:26):
I was really captivated by it. And you know, no internet,
I didn't know what it was. And we got to
Nag's Head and I walk up the beach and into
town and found a record store like downstairs, kind of
like the old heads Together and Scroll Hill, you know,
you go down and it probably was a headshop too,
who knows. But and I went in and I go
to the guy and I'm like, hey, I heard this song,

(03:48):
and he said, oh, that's by a group called Kansas.
Their album is Pointing a Return. I bought the album.
We had no stereo or anything at the place we
were staying on the beach, so I just opened the
thing up and all the lyrics were in like parchment
font and the sleeve and I read all the lyrics
and I tried to imagine what it all sounded like.

(04:10):
I was really really and I had no way to know.
Two weeks later, get home, put the album on. Listen
to that song first, as good as I remembered. And
now I listened to the rest of the album. And
if you know anything about Kansas, nothing they ever did
sounds like dust the wind. Now all of it was
heavier and far more sophisticated and tricky, and musically just

(04:33):
really just led me down a rabbit hole. I was
really fascinating.

Speaker 2 (04:37):
Some casual fans would think they are a pop group,
but they were more progressive than anybody, right.

Speaker 1 (04:43):
And that led me into the whole progressive rock rabbit hole.
You know that found Yes, I found Genus is all
that kind of stuff, And I'd say that set me
on the course to be a musician, I think, probably
as much as any other thing. And I loved lots
of other music besides, but I really there's something about
this idea of this classically influenced rock music with these

(05:04):
sort of vaguely sci fi ish fantasy kind of lyrics
and spiritual lyrics and it and the idea that the
voice is just an instrument in the band and not
the only thing, which as an instrumentalist much more than
a vocalist, also fascinated me. I wanted to be Kerry Libren,
who's the guy who wrote this song, not Steve Walsh,

(05:25):
the guy sang the songs. You know, I really identify
with that. And you know, it was a strange process
because by the time I was old enough and played
well enough to play that music, it wasn't popular anymore.
And that's kind of how I moved into jazz. You know.
The next adjacent thing was like jazz fusion. Got into
that just when I got into a really great band

(05:46):
at that that got less popular. I went into straight
ahead traditional jazz and finally found my way back to
like rock and pop, kind of where I started.

Speaker 2 (05:53):
You know, it's funny, as somebody who's connected with music
all the time, people ask me what is the what
is your favorite concert? And I surprise him and I say,
I saw you and Pete at a theater in Zellianople,
the Strand the Strand Theater, and you did Beatles songs,
but you broke down the songs. And as a Beatle fan,

(06:15):
I never had that kind of experience before, where like
it was music for dummies, but it was so fascinating.
I was like I could I could stay here all
night and listen to you guys break down the music.

Speaker 1 (06:30):
It was such a fun show. I remember that the
Beatles and Beyond we call Yeah, and the first set
was devoted to music that influenced the Beatles, and the
second set music that the Beatles influenced as well as
the Beatles songs themselves. So we tied it into you
know whoever you know early you you two obviously love

(06:51):
each other.

Speaker 2 (06:52):
You're funny because you interact with the other people in
the crowd, and so it's a it's a good time,
it's educational and it's entertaining in the music is amazing.
Another show that I always Steve Howe was in the
Rex Theater. He did the same thing. He broke down
That's cool is some of his you know that it
was amazing.

Speaker 1 (07:12):
So I don't know as a music geek who doesn't
play an instrument and then they have somebody kind of
explain it to me and say, yeah, hey, this is
you know, for the pop age of you know, early sixties.
You know, early sixties rock and roll wasn't all that old, no,
I mean the whole genre really kind of started in
nineteen fifty six, I think roughly, and so by the

(07:33):
time the Beatles are doing it in England, it's seven
years old, which is nothing. I mean, think of what
you were doing seven years ago, it wasn't much different, right,
I mean it's like to think of how much changed
and how quickly in this span of the first few
years of rock, then in the span that the Beatles
did it. Yeah, you know, from you know, I saw
her standing there to the end, you know, which is

(07:54):
like the beginning and end of the of their way
the d I mean this song at the end, Yeah, exactly,
in the end. The love you take is equal to
love you make. Is like, there's seven years of music
that was astonishing you think about. They were the most
popular and the most artistically powerful group in the world

(08:15):
and perhaps ever, and at no point did they rest
on their laurels. They just kept firing themselves and creating
a new version. So we have mop tops, Well, you'd
ride that horse into the sunset, right, anybody would hope,
like within a year or so, now we're not doing
that anymore. This is a little more acoustic. You got
this rubber soul kind of vibe that's hugely successful. Now

(08:36):
we're done with that. We're gonna go psychedelic. It's only
a year and a half later they were at Sargent Pepper, right,
and this is so impactful that it changes the way
graphic design looks and movies look. I mean, it's just
the clothing, you know, everything. It's astonishingly cultural impact. And
a year later we're done with that. Here's time for
the white album, you know, and we're going to break

(08:57):
it down and it's gonna be a little grittier and
we're not going to be psychedelic. We're not doing all
the overdubs and all that, and imagine it's hard to
imagine what would have happened if they'd have kept going.
I think it ran its course because it burns so
hot that it kind of burned the people in it out.
But artistically it's the most astonishing seven years. And I

(09:20):
didn't want this to turn into you know, the Beatles talk.
Oh sorry, now I got to ask, because you had
not one, you had two geniuses, three geniuses, arguably four geniuses.
Because I don't think Ringo gets as much love as people,
you know, because all his his drum parts are always
different exactly. I think his his great insight and contribution

(09:47):
and drumming is the way he collaborates in his song.
They're not drum beats, their parts, as you say, And
so you can always spot somebody who would like you're
sitting in like you're jamming or something, and somebody a
drummer hasn't really shedded this stuff, hasn't really listened closely.
They get the drum parts all wrong. Because you can't
just sit down and guess what to play on a

(10:08):
song like in my life. You know it's you're gonna
guess wrong. So where do you fall, who was your
favorite Beetle. That's a great question. I would say overall
Paul McCartney. It's pretty hard to argue the musicianship, the
incredible scope of his writing and singing and playing. But

(10:33):
it's difficult to pull anyone out, you know, because the
fatality of it exceeds any of the four. Certainly, George
Harrison's All Things Must Pass era is incredible, yes, but
it's one little blip, whereas McCartney's output just keeps coming
and coming and coming over decades. George Friction with John

(10:53):
added totally. Totally, and I mean John, I mean also
in the Beatle era, contributed like some of the most
like Strawberry Fields Forever is an unprecedented song. I think
that was That was John's genius. Is that a lot
of the music he brought in is the hardest thing
that is to do. It's great and it's unprecedented. And

(11:14):
you can't find a song that sounds like Norwegian Wood
before Norwegian Would or Sergeant Pepper or excuse me, Strawberry Feels
before Strawberry Fields. Like these these songs are unprecedent and good,
and that's remarkable. A lot of McCartney's songs are kind
of pastiche They're great, but their adaptations of other things,
whereas John was tinkering around with true originality and that confusion,

(11:35):
as you say, really it's what made it so great. Okay,
this concludes the bes I can walk out a lot.
I love it.

Speaker 2 (11:43):
I love the fact that you know it takes me
back to that concert and I'd learned so much. I
thought I knew everything about the Beatles, and then I go,
see you guys, I'm like, I know nothing about the Beatles.

Speaker 1 (11:55):
So when was the first time you picked up an instrument?
Was a trumpet? Actually it was the classic. There was
nothing extraordinary, Like the music teacher comes into third grade
near the end of the year, yeah, and shows pictures
of instruments. Trumpet looked cool, and I asked for a trumpet,
and my parents made a strange deal with me that

(12:15):
also impacted my life because they're like, we'll buy you
a trumpet, but you're not allowed to quit till you're sixteen,
and of you're eight, like, sure, you know, and by
eight and you know, one tenth. I mean, I hated
that thing so fast, you know, and really just I
remember kicking the music stand and just being so angry
at the whole project that I had was stuck with

(12:35):
this damn thing, And then you know, you get it
around it long enough that it's starts to be fun.
And there was a kid getting up to like seventh
eighth grade. Now, there was a kid a little bit
older than a year older than me who was a
really good trumpet player that I kind of liked, looked
up to, wanted to hang out with, named Dan, and
he I saw. I started hanging out with him, and

(12:57):
I started taking it more seriously and trying harder. And
he also played piano, and I'd had a couple of
piano lessons, but also wasn't really into that. And so
I got into that for all the like lamest reasons,
just peer pressure if you like, or peer peer, you know, accommodation,
not even pressure, just wanting to And for whatever reason,
I found that it came to me pretty quickly, like

(13:20):
it made sense to me. I could understand it in
a way that I became aware was a faster study
than a lot of my friends who were also tinkering
around with instruments. I formed a band of all my
close friends, none of them were really musicians, and I
just topped them all their instruments. I love this part.
I love this part.

Speaker 2 (13:38):
I love when musicians talk about their first band and
having it.

Speaker 1 (13:43):
So how old were you? So I guess the very
first thing I would have been I'm going to guess
thirteen fourteen somewhere around there. Please tell me you remember
the name of the band. Yeah. I think we called
ourselves Paranoid or something like that. It was stupid, and
we didn't. I mean, the first rehearsal is such a cliche.
We honestly played Freebird and stereod to Heaven and Johnny

(14:07):
Be Good. That was our set, and that's an ambitious set.
I'm not saying we played it well, but I remember
for a fact we got the end of Freebird wrong.
But it was the stuff that people played, you know,
everybody played the guitar, like on twenty five or sixty four.
I got a guitar for the same reason, just because
why not, you know, And I played that a little bit,

(14:28):
and then piano always came more easily for me. So
I still tinker with the guitar. But it doesn't I don't.
It doesn't make the same kind of intuitive sense to me,
you know, when I pick it up and play it.
I wish I did, because I love guitar. I'd love
to play better. What kind of musician do you see yourself?
I mean, I'm a I see myself as kind of

(14:51):
a versatile jack of all trades, master of none, kind
of musician. Like I think, I think, yeah, I think it.
It takes a good word for it. I do love
a lot of music, and so I play a lot
of music. And I've delved deeply enough to play some
hard music, you know, because I did go and get
the conservatory education and did study with some really amazing

(15:13):
people like David Budway, you know, who's also and more
so than me, just so goes so deep with so much.
So I got a really great classical education, really really
great jazz education. And but also, like David, I loved
rock and roll. I loved the Beatles, I loved, you know,
all the other music we talked about. I told you
how Kansas kind of got I love how challenging prog

(15:34):
rock was. Because I already wanted to be a good player.
You know, I didn't just you know, I didn't just
want to play. I was never influenced much by se
punk or anything like that, and then nothing against it.
It just wasn't enough content for me. I've always been
like drawn to music but has a lot of harmonic content,
you know, like more complicated cores. Whether it be a

(15:56):
George Harrison or whether it be Bach, it doesn't matter.
I'm a little bored by a lot of music that's great,
but I wear out on reggae, R, R and B
or anything like that, like tends to be the same
underlying harmony, you know, blues. I mean, I can really enjoy,
I can play it, and I love a single gig,
but I couldn't make it my career because it would

(16:16):
just not hold my attention enough so paranoid. It didn't
catch on because I've never know you never heard that
one and then the other the next one Vertigo, No,
not much of a hit there either. Do you remember
your first paid gig, Yeah, I do. It was we
had a band that I think was called screen Test,

(16:40):
and that was my first professional band. And our first
gig was a class reunion somewhere that I can't remember anymore.
It was not a nice venue, and I don't think
I made a lot of money, but I do remember
thinking Aron, I'm getting paid, you know, And that's still
hear me down that road of doing gigs. And I

(17:02):
mean I got from like once a week to you know,
working my way up after college and after when I
really was working freelance a ton. In nineteen ninety nine,
I added up that I did four hundred and thirty
five gigs that year, which was like, you still do
a lot of games. I don't as much as I
used to, because all right, no, not four hundred. Nobody

(17:23):
does that many. That was great. I was doing four
on a Thursday, you know, I'd be on the gate
We Clipper at eleven with Joe Eggrey, and then I'd
be in the William Penn Lobby at two thirty playing solo,
and then I'd be out at the Gallery of Mall
doing a kid's gig again with Joe at six point thirty,
take a break for dinner, be with Pete on Mount
Washington at nine o'clock. And that was just Thursday. And
then when we're done, we'd go to the Shiloh Inn
and sit there half tonight so like it was, and

(17:45):
then get up and play a couple more on Friday,
you know.

Speaker 2 (17:48):
All right, so let's get into your your college years. Yeah,
all right, so tell us, tell us.

Speaker 1 (17:53):
I went to Bucan University, a major in music, dual
major of jazz and class school because you had to.
I really didn't want the classical part. It's again case
of I'm glad that my wishes were not followed. You know,
they made you if you wanted to make back in
those days. I don't know if they still do. You
had to get the classical education if you also wanted

(18:16):
to learn jazz. So and by the again, same stories
that you know the trumpet like by the time I
was done, I loved that I had it. I sang
in the advanced choir. Even that's kind of a funny story.
I don't know how much time you had.

Speaker 2 (18:29):
Well, well, let me ask you about those earlier bands.
Did you sing in those?

Speaker 1 (18:33):
In those bands, I did not sing much, A little
bit harmony. I remember singing high harmony on Lola, but
I didn't think of myself as a singer and didn't
really start singing until the college years, and even then
always in like a supportive capacity. The only time I
was like lead vocalist for a whole night would be

(18:57):
like when I was I went through a phase of
playing like cocktail piano, like the Shiloh thing, you know,
working the tip jar, singing all night and the piano
man kind of gig, you know what I mean. And
that was the only time that I was and I recorded.
I thought I sounded really good, and I recorded a
gig and listened to it. I'm like, I mean, there's
some good moments, but this is clearly not. You know,

(19:18):
I'm a better player than I am a singer, and
so you know when I you know, I do a
lot better working with great singers and just backing them
up right, all right. So you're a freshman, yes, freshmen
freshman college, very tough adjustment. I come from Edgewood, which
is a really small school, and there weren't hardly any

(19:43):
I don't remember anyone who was really seriously into music. So,
like I said, I browbeat my friends into being in
a band. I mean, nobody else played, and it was
a really small pond, and I was the big fish
in the in the tiny pond. And arriving at Duquane
right from day one and hearing people play, I don't
know what I thought, but I think in my mind

(20:05):
I must have thought unconsciously that a lot of the
way records sounded was because of the studio. I didn't
realize it was the the players can really sound that good.
And I don't know what that why. I didn't think
that because I'd heard guys jamming in my living room
since I was a kid. But it just blew my
mind that guys that were only a couple of years
older than me were playing at such a higher level,
and it was very I did not draw inspiration from it.

(20:27):
I found it really intimidating. I kind of retreated it first.
Took me a little while, a couple of years to
find my footing and start to find my place. It
was an eye opener. Did you work hard at it? Eventually?
But not at first. I think I had a strange
desire to make everything look effortless, and so I didn't

(20:48):
want to be seen to be putting forth the whole
lot of effort, which is a weird psychological thing I
figured out years later. But so I just didn't work
really hard at first and didn't get great results, you know,
and then matured in some fashion and decided, you know, okay,
I can do this, you know, And there's something about

(21:10):
that you got to get good feedback. I'm now more
much more of an educator than a player. I own
a music school in McMurray, go to Anderson Music Academy,
and we have like twelve teachers and work with in
hundreds of kids. And I've kind of learned the absolute
importance of building a pattern of success when you're teaching.
So you got to give someone a task that they

(21:31):
can succeed at so that they know they can do it,
and then you keep going, keep building complexity into the task.
And I think rather on coached. I walked into this situation,
didn't meet with initial success and just was like, I
don't know if I belong here. It was a tough
couple of years. I was really drifted. You were overwhelmed,
and I was overwhelmed, and I was underperforming. I wasn't

(21:51):
showing up for class. I was not a good student first,
and then I changed. That's a great question. I mean
the whole time I I was still playing, but I
was not playing with the best players. I was scared
of them. And then somewhere on the line, I feel
like the first really good professional jazz gig I got
was with a group called Matt Ferranni and Modern Times,

(22:12):
and they put me on a he Matt had me
on a gig. He knew me from Dukane, but I
don't think I was thought of at that point as
like one of the really sought after players. He put
me on a gig in Market Square and on the
band was you know, Steve Trettle was the drummer, Jeff
Kuhne was the bass player, Ken Karsh was on guitar,
and Matt himself, who wrote most of the material for
the band, was the sax player. And I was in

(22:36):
over my head and I remember like the big group
in time at that point was the Dave Harder group.
It was a really successful jazz group in Pittsburgh, and
their keyboard player, Scott Griswold, came down to em me
play and it was kind of intimidating, and I kind
of rose to the challenge, you know, and belonged on
that stage. By the you know, I certainly wasn't not
playing ken Carsh, but you know what I mean, I

(22:56):
certainly felt like, Okay, I can do this, and it
turned things for me, like the ship started to turn
and I and then I started to work, and then
by the end you know, I had a key to
my teacher's studio and he would let me come in
the evenings. I'd play on his Steinway, and I practiced
my brains out and prepared my senior recital. And by
my senior year and by the time I graduated, I

(23:19):
knew that I could do this. Were you still were
you gigging while I was still gigging, But I was
not gigging in a really I wasn't in any great groups.
I was like, you know, playing weddings and clubs, and
I was like covers and things like that. You playing
jazz some, yeah, definitely some The Balcony and Shady Sider

(23:39):
played with you know, I played again with Matt Frannie,
I played with Lee Robinson. I did some various jazz
gigs and it was definitely but it was mostly after
college that things started. Two things kicked in around the
same time. One was right out of right in college still,
I got hired to be the keyboard player for the Vogues,

(24:00):
which was, you know, a Pittsburgh group that legit had
hit records back in their day. You know, they were
a sixties group. They had four particular top twenty songs
which is a heck of an actual tracker. You put
that up against almost anybody that came out of Pittsburgh.
They really did it.

Speaker 2 (24:16):
Just a handful of you know, Pittsburgh bands that actually
had really.

Speaker 1 (24:20):
True I mean that really yep, the Skyliners, Vogues, you know,
and you know, I mean Donnie Iris, you know, there
there's He's, but you know there's yeah, and they, you know,
they weren't as creative as that. Donnie was a writer too.
These guys weren't that, but they they had hit songs
in a genre I wasn't familiar with, and so I
familiarized myself with it. I listened to the ninety four

(24:43):
point five, which back then was was you know, it
was playing oldies, and I just listened to it all
the time to like kind of soak up the genre.
And I really got to love that gig, and eventually
I became the music director, and eventually I got hired
by the national touring. There's like long story, not worth it,
but there's more than one on version of the band.
You know, I had nothing to do with all that.

(25:03):
Take it wherever you want. So the original lead vocalist
Bill Burkett was doing like shows on a national level,
which were higher level shows, and he hired me. I
left the local version Chuck's group and worked with Bill
and we would just fly to different cities every weekend
and I'd be the music director and whatever band was
in whatever city, I'm running that show. And then the

(25:25):
promoter started to hire me to be in the back line,
you know, to back up whoever else. So I played
for everybody in that genre, just about. I mean, like
who like Lou Christie or another one. Yeah, exactly, you
know the you know, there are shows with the Drifters
or you know, I did a version of the Temptations
Leslie Gore. I mean, it's a long list. I can't

(25:45):
even remember it all right now. I remember it was
a lot of fun, you know, doing those shows. Never
in Pittsburgh, interestingly enough, like Pittsburgh kind of had already
local guys that they always used, and so I would
always get the gig in Rochester or San Francisco or wherever,
but never never in my own hometown. And what was
that like, being a traveling Oh I loved it. I

(26:06):
absolutely loved that gig. And I was very much the
fish out of water. I think I was twenty seven maybe,
and the rest of them were fifty, you know, and
so I had like just loved being on the big stage.
I loved I had a lot of energy. And then
we would always go out after and find someplace to
close and you know, just be up late into the
night and you know, try and find any younger, let's say,

(26:30):
female audience member maybe that you could talk to. You know.
It was it was a lot of fun. And and
then during the week I got a gig playing piano
at the top of the Triangle restaurant, which was used
to be on top of the US Steel Building, and
that was you know, during the week nights, and that
was hugely impactful in a very different way. It was

(26:52):
a much humbler gig. There's never anybody there listening to me,
you know, they were eating dinner. It was nobody in
the bar, and I had to fill four hours. And
that really is where I started to accumulate, I think,
a pretty big repertoire just sitting there having to come
up with crap to play every night, and amused just
myself because it never's never so much as a single handclap,

(27:12):
you know what I mean. Never. And eventually they offered
me the job to like book the room. So I
would they did a jazz happy hour on Fridays, and
I would, you know, bring in Kenny Blake or Randy
Purcell or whoever you know, and sometimes I'd play with
them and sometimes just hire them. And I kind of
got another view of the business from that. And so
between those two gigs, I was getting two different sides

(27:35):
of the business and accumulating a lot of really useful experience.
You know.

Speaker 2 (27:39):
I was at I went on a vacation a couple
of months ago, and I was at a airport I
think it was I think it was Atlanta, and there's
this guy playing piano in between, like you.

Speaker 1 (27:49):
Know, the restaurants.

Speaker 2 (27:51):
One is like, you know, a Burger King and the
other one is like a Chick fil A and he's
just playing away and it's just like, you know.

Speaker 1 (28:00):
Just those gigs are lonely. I mean, but you learn
a lot from you have a thousand people and nobody
is there any part of it. It's really true, I mean,
and like a piano bar, you are the game, right.
But this was not that, this was background. I mean, no,
this actually helped form my I kind of gained an

(28:20):
understanding of that, there's like basically three roles that live
music or music of any sort can play, and you
have to know which lane you're in. So there's ambient music,
there's background music, and your job is not to seize attention.
Your job is to provide some kind of texture and
that conclude that can go up to film music on
the big level, or it could go to just being

(28:41):
a guy playing cocktail piano. But you got to know
which lanyard. You can't be resentful that you're not getting
attention because you're not supposed to do. And then there's
music for people to move to, which is another another
use of music. And like when I was from you know,
like anybody fill in a freelance calendar, they played thousands
of weddings. Is keep the night going, keep it moving again,

(29:03):
it's a different kind of attention. No one cares about
your solos or you don't stop and talk about the beatles.
You know, you just play what they're what's going to
make a move. And the third and my very much
my favorite is music to be listened to. Music that
is the primary focus of attention and when you're in
that lane is the best lane for me to be
in I love that. The other two eh, you know,

(29:24):
you gotta do what you gotta do, and you got it.
But this is like when you can do things like
the Strand show that you talked about, when you can
take a minute to unpack the music and you can
present it however you want because the audience is just listening. Yep.
And those are the rarest opportunities too for most of us,
you know, they're so you got to kind of treasure them.

(29:46):
Do you do you ever write music? Yeah? And when
did you start doing that?

Speaker 3 (29:51):
You want some Emmys for your music, haven't you?

Speaker 1 (29:53):
I have Yah? I didn't know I had an Emmy
winner here, That is true, yeah, the Emmys. Where there
was a period of time where I was working with
a lot with WQD in the two thousands. We did
a series of shows called Live from Studio A and
they were music kind of what we called variety shows.

(30:15):
They were we did holiday specials and that still lives on.
I do a holiday concert every year called the Holiday Jam,
which is kind of the offspring of the QWD work.
But also we did shows where we'd feature specific artists
like Billy Price and Donnie Iris and Roger Humphries and

(30:36):
Joe Negri and we'd profile them, and I put a
studio band together, sort of along the Paul Shaffer lines
like that could back up everybody really great, like all
all star kind of heavy hitter band, and those those
were great times. And then an ancillary to that, then
producers at the station began to hire me to provide music.
And one of the opportunities was for a documentary called

(30:58):
From Pittsburgh to Poland lessons in the Holocaust. Then it
was pretty heavy and really amazing documentary, and I wrote
a lot of music for it, and that one won
an Emmy, and then I won again the next year.

Speaker 2 (31:13):
Let me get a little deeper in that, because that
could be a very touchy subject. Yes, and you have
to have the right tone the touches.

Speaker 1 (31:21):
Yes, And you know, I would love to take all
the credit, But I worked with a really good producer
and especially a really good editor. And in television at
least in this like when you score a movie like
Star Wars, the whole movie's done and then you write
the music. But in this kind of situation, it's we're
working collaboratively as he's putting the thing together. So I'd

(31:44):
get a call, Okay, I need thirty seven seconds of
sad music, followed by some sort of beat on one
and a half second intervals for them, followed by forty
six seconds of even sadder music. And so I'm writing
without any knowledge or what what you're seeing? Yeah, what
I'm gonna seek. So I'm sitting at home in my
studio and I did that. And then this was before

(32:06):
you could send file sizes that big over the internet.
So I lived over by Frick Park. I just jump
in the car, drive to the station, give Paul my
DQ the CD exactly, burn it on a CD here
and he'd put it in and then I'd see what
it was and I'm like, oh, that really worked. Or occasionally, no,
it didn't really work. I'll have to come back to
the drawing board. But the best, you know, having a

(32:28):
great editor give you really succinct emotional balances to write
to made it not hard in a way. You know,
it's writing on demand. It's not like the song of
the heart, like what do I want to write today?
It's you have to give me forty seven seconds of
really sad music, okay. Or there were on a bus

(32:49):
ride and we need something with a little tempo and
feel of motion to it or you know whatever. You know,
they just give you really specific instructions and you sit
down and write it. And I did latch Onto. A
couple of themes that I thought were in retrospect were
pretty haunting and pretty effective, and I think that's why
it won.

Speaker 2 (33:05):
So, so when did you start writing your own music?

Speaker 1 (33:08):
When I started in high school, Yeah, I wrote songs,
and I still remember them all. I'm not so sure
anything were that good. None of them certainly got anywhere.
And was it jazz or was it No, this was rock.
This was rock pop, you know, strumming the guitar songs
kind of thing. And then in college I wrote various

(33:28):
I wrote some instrumental pieces that were I would classify
as sort of prog adjacent, prog rock adjacent. And I
wrote some pieces that were jazz, Yeah, definitely. And I
was in groups that did original music, and so, you know,
I would contribute, not I was never the primary writer,
but I would contribute a piece or do here and there.

(33:50):
And I didn't write songs again until about a decade ago.
So I was teaching at Point Park and an old
friend of mine very you know, I've known since elementary
school was also teaching there, and he and his wife
had an idea for a musical, and so he asked me,
would you And he'd worked as a producer also, he'd
hired me to write a score for a movie that

(34:12):
was that came out that I wrote, and I don't
think the movie did much, but the score was a
blaster write and it was you know, it was a
good commission. And he's like, what about songs? And I'm like,
my problem with songs has always been lyrics, and he's like, well,
we're going to The original plan was to adapt like poetry,
and then he started contributing lyrics, turned out to be

(34:33):
a really gifted lyricist, and we wound up writing this
whole musical and that's actually still floating around in the ethos.
There's a theater in Florida that presented the first act
a couple of years ago in a festival, and now
they're interested in putting a full production of the musical
up and probably not till twenty twenty six. They're renovating
the theater right now. But so that got me back

(34:54):
into songwriting. But again it's it's I've never been the
kind of writer that sits down to write a song
and out pops yesterday. You know, like you know what
I mean, Well, yeah, that's a little extreme, No nobody
else is. But what I mean is by that is that,
like I am always writing with a specific intention. So like,
if you look at the structure of a musical, you're

(35:15):
gonna have an opener, right, and that has to have
a big energy to it. You know that when you're writing,
you need a song what's called an I want song.
Every every musical has and I want song very early
and the main protagonist sings their their their desire and
you knew that. You know that's going to be like
a showstopper kind of ballad. And so you kind of
know a bad guy, you have an antagonist, his song

(35:36):
has to be kind of menacing. So you know, you
try not to do these things. You're trying to make
him subtle. You don't want to be like two on
the nose with it. Yeah, exactly, here comes the bad guy, right,
he's got to be motivated. He wants some subtlety and
his stuff. But you know, you're not just writing any
old nothing. You're you're you're you're writing for a per
I think I'm good at that. I can write a

(35:57):
good melody. But like if somebody said, hey, let's write,
let's sit down and stare at each other. And that's
what I was going to ask you. Do you ever
write for Scott? Do you do you ever dream of songs?
Do you ever hot off? And know? Pete and I
wrote maybe one song together, and we had a couple
of CDs that each was, you know, each of us
had an original song on and so there's there are

(36:20):
those couples like written. I wrote a song that was
on our first CD, a song that's on our second CD.
And those are just songs I just wrote, like for Scott,
if you will, But that's not my usual. Those were outliers,
not normal, like that's not my thing. All right?

Speaker 2 (36:36):
You mentioned Pete, yes, and you've worked with him for
a long long time ago. How did that relationship?

Speaker 1 (36:42):
I met Pete at a gig that he was on
at Jeans Bar on Route fifty one, and he Pete
was recently back from like I think Billy Joel and
touring and stuff and and had been doing a gig
at the Balcony on Wednesday nights that I had come
in here a couple of times him and Frank were
you familiar with with I heard Pete with Billy Joel,

(37:04):
like when he was touring you know, Innocent Man album
and I remember that song because there was a guy
that's saying the high part and I remember that, and
he introduced him with someone from Pittsburgh and certain measure
of the audience reac I didn't mean anything to me yet,
but I so. The first time I heard him was
when he was torn with Billy Joel. I just didn't
know it yet. Saw him again with Billy and the

(37:25):
Bridge tour. Met him at Jean's. He was doing a
gig with Robbie Klein and I went in there with
a friend, a great musician, Eric Defade. We were in
there together having a beer and you know, listening to
Pete singing, and it is just, you know, he's he's
one of these very rare artists that, like I think

(37:47):
everyone from any genre at any age turns their head
and notices when he sings. There's like a thing to it,
like whoa yes, yes that.

Speaker 2 (37:56):
Yet it pisses me off because he makes it look
so damn easy.

Speaker 1 (38:00):
Well he try to, you know, sing with him. It's
not as eas Yeah, he does make it look easy
and there is an effortlessness to it, but it's actually
he's he. I've learned from him that he puts an
awful lot of thought into what he's doing, like where
he's placing things and how he to make toge why
he and it's very I think unconsciously, like he's just

(38:22):
such a natural musician, like he can make he understands innately,
like how to reproduce the way other singers make their
vowel sounds, for instance, the big difference between like a
Van Morrison vowel sound and a Paul McCartney vioel sound
and a Billy joel like and so he can do that,
And so he can if he chooses sound like other singers,
because he imitates the tone of their voice and the

(38:43):
way they sing their musical phrases, details like whether or
not they use vibrato that a lot of singers don't
really control so well, they just do what they do.
He can turn that on. He can choose to sing,
you know, almost any way he wants. You know, he
can do hilarious impersonations of like Johnny Cash, or he
can sing country with this twang you wouldn't believe, and

(39:04):
we just don't do much of that except for a laugh.
But it's like that's a pretty remarkable thing. Anyway.

Speaker 2 (39:12):
I feel like I'm at in Xiellanoble at the show.

Speaker 1 (39:16):
Yeah, I guess I'm an analytical kind of person, all right.
So getting back to what yeah first, so yeah, so
going to Jeans and he's singing, and Robbie invited me
up to play, like to sit in with the band.
We played Freedom jazz Dance, I remember, and at this
point piece just playing, you know, and he sought me
out to give me a compliment, which was really nice
that it sounded great, and I just said, hey, thanks,

(39:39):
what's like working with Billy Joel? It's just an obvious question.
He's like great, He's just like an ordinary guy, really
cool to work with. We had a little brief conversation,
and then by coincidence, he turned up on a gig
that I was leading, a wedding actually again just a
freelance kind of gig and an agency will hire you
to like, so I was like running this job and

(40:01):
Pete comes as the one of the guitar you know,
the guitar player singer for the thing. I'm like, well,
I just met this guy and we had a little
brief conversation before the gig. I'm like, what songs do
you sing? And you know, if you know Pete, he's
got a sort of laconic, very laid back kind of style.
I remember he's like, like, what what can you sing?
He's like he goes Unshanined Melody, ron Girl, pretty much

(40:29):
anything by the Beatles, and I'm like, okay, it's enough
to get started because we are other singers on the gig,
you know, And I hope he doesn't mind me telling
this story, so I hope he does, so he Yeah,
So the first song I give him to sing was,
you know, the first ballad. You know, when you do
a wedding, you want to get to fill the dance
store with a ballad. Early on, and Unchained Melody was
really big at this point. It's just like early nineties

(40:50):
because Ghost brought it back, you know. So he sings
Unchained Melody and it's like unbelievable.

Speaker 2 (40:55):
Yeah, it's not not exactly and easy's not at all.

Speaker 1 (40:59):
And i mean I'm like, I've never and I'm you know,
working with like with the Vogues and working with other looking.
I've never I've worked with some really good singers and
I've never wat anybody. It sounded like that. I was
like wow. So immediately I'm like, all right, he said
he'd do any of the beatles. We need to pick
it up. I'm like, you twist and shout and he's like, yeah,
what key and I said D and he thought I

(41:20):
said gee. So he just starts the song on guitar
and G. The bass player leans over. He notices at
first because none of us are play says a guitar
and show and he's like he's in G. I'm like,
oh crap. And then Pete steps up to the mic
and he starts to sing and it clearly he's like
that doesn't work, and he steps back from the mic.

(41:41):
Let's the chords go around by the cycle, and then
comes back up belts the damn thing, a fourth hire
up in G and it and like the whole way through,
sings this song in the stratosphere insanely high. And then
in classic Pete, he turns his song's over. He turns
and looks at us with like a kind of and
he's like, you guys, do that song too high?

Speaker 2 (42:06):
And that was our first gig together. So do you
ever replicate that and just give him something?

Speaker 1 (42:14):
I think that I got one. I get one one
gut out of jail in thirty years on and I
use it on the first gig. So yeah, I would
not put him in that position again. You know.

Speaker 2 (42:24):
It's kind of funny, you know when you talk about
your college days. Early in your college you said you
didn't you didn't stretch yourself, and then you're working with
someone like with Paula, it was like, really, he's going
to stretch you. Yeah, so that you know you got
rid of that. Oh yeah, absolutely like that. One of
the great joys I discovered was singing harmony with him

(42:44):
because it's it makes you sound better for one thing,
so it's more fun, you know, and it's he's really
easy to sing with, not just because because this is
the intangible thing. I mean, it's not just a great voice.
All of his choices musically makes sense to me at

(43:06):
an innate level, so it's very easy to anticipate, like
his phrasing and worry breathes and all these little subtle
things that when you're singing harmony you're kind of key
and on and sometimes you'll be singing with a singer
that's a great singer, but you're just not clicking. You're
having a hard time finding there. They're phrasing, like the
vowel sounds again, the little things that you try to match,

(43:28):
they just all click in the gear. It's very intuitive
singing with Pete because his choices all just make in
any kind of unconscious sense to me. So I discovered
I really loved that, and that I still do. I mean,
we performed last weekend and now we're going to get
back with Pete. But you know I didn't I kind
of bookmark something in my head. You talked about playing

(43:49):
with Joe Nagrey. Yeah, who's a you know, a Pittsburgh
jazz legend. Obviously he's known for you know, mister Rogers neighborhood,
but you know he's one of the great, one of
that great. And what was he like to work with?
What Joe was a blast to work with.

Speaker 1 (44:06):
I actually think there's a commonality, there's a common thread
because both of Pete and Joe are both kind of
naturals in the sense that like what I'd just said
about Pete vocally, I would say about Joe instrumentally, Like
all of the lines he plays, you know on the
guitar just feel like compositions. You know they're improvised, but
they all just make sense, you know. There's it's just

(44:29):
a fluidity and a beauty to his playing always like
I think a bass player friend of mine, Bryan Stehirsky,
described as like every note has a bow on it,
like it's like a gift. You know. He just plays.
So it was great fun and we we did. I
did some gigs with Joe that were straight up jazz gigs,
but I also did a lot of gigs of him

(44:50):
that we called Jazz for Juniors, which was for kids,
and so we would sing too, and Joe would sing
a few songs like Mister Rogers neighborhood songs, and he
would have me do some rockers like Scooby Doo and
Grease Lightning and tunes at the kids at that point liked.
I don't know if they still know those songs, but
but back when we did these gigs, so that was

(45:10):
my part. I also was an entertainer. It was an
entertainer's gig and a jazz gig, so because it was
for kids and and he had a great just great
sense of humor much like funny in you know, in
the way that almost every musician is funny. There's a
sort of caustic humor, like a little bit of a
little bit of cynicism and a little bit of a

(45:32):
little acerbic quality. But what comes from Joe. It's so
funny to you know, you know, to hear it. Oh
you know, babe, you know, and then he says some
really snarky thing and it just cracks you up, like
this handyman Negri and he's just another guy on a gig,
you know. And Joe had like a superpower because everyone
knew him. He was a celebrity, so you didn't get

(45:54):
the same kind of crap. Like we'd be at a
gig at a country club and they remember one gig
that he's sat down and you know, they had like
box lunches with like nasty little sandwiches that are all wet,
and Joe just like pulled the manager over, We're going
to eat that food instead, and he's pointing to a fang,
thanks babe, and like like there was no he didn't ask.

(46:17):
Nobody's gonna tell him. So we just off we go
and we get the real food, and like I didn't
have that card to play. You know, Hey, dude, we're
gonna go over there. No, you're not sorry. You know.
With Joe, it's like, oh okay, yeah, sure, you know,
he just had that magical power of celebrity and charisma.

Speaker 2 (46:36):
All right, So you talked a little bit about, you know,
playing those gigs where you're just providing background.

Speaker 1 (46:43):
You have you ever had a gig that you just
absolutely loathed? Oh yeah, I would say, you know, a
couple of thousand. Yeah, definitely. I mean, boy, like what
would be Yeah, there's just I mean, you in a
long career, it's just like anything else, you tend to

(47:03):
self select the good memories and just push down the
ones where you're just like, oh geez, I'm four hours
closer to the grave for that.

Speaker 3 (47:11):
You know. It's just you know, and yet you haven't
done anything except music for a living, right.

Speaker 1 (47:18):
Yeah, not really, not since I was very young.

Speaker 3 (47:20):
I mean, it's like any other job. There's great, there's
days that you just don't want to be at work, yeah,
and then there's days that shine.

Speaker 1 (47:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (47:28):
All right, tell me about some of those days that
shine though, some of those performances that really stand out
in your mind that you just yeah.

Speaker 1 (47:35):
I mean, boy that they come in a lot of
sizes and shapes. There are the big gigs like that
just stick out for whatever reason, because there was a
lot of attention, a lot of focus, so like arbitrarily,
like I remember, I don't remember what year this was,

(47:59):
but there was some sort of anniversary of Donnie Iris
that they were celebrating. I let's say it was twenty
five years or something like that. And we were the
opening band. It was me and Pete and some other
guys that were in the live from studio a band,
and it was the audience was just really primed for
and this gig actually combined both sides of the bad

(48:19):
experience and the good experience. The sound check was miserable,
it was pouring rain. Donnie's stage manager was not the
most pleasant human being, and like there was a lot
of like getting to the gig, getting through the afternoon
was really unpleasant. Like I thought, this gig is gonna suck,
and you know, you're opening act, You're never really what

(48:41):
anybody came to hear anyways, and then we actually played
a great set and the audience really dug it, And
that was just stuck in my memory. Is like, Wow,
this one turned around like just it and then you know,
the energy was just there. And then Donnie's I stuck
around for his set was just sinceaeal and it was

(49:01):
just a really fun night. And it embodies both sides
of the business, you know, all in one gig. It
happens though, yeah, totally, and you know, some nights then
it'll just be. There's a place Pete and Ike played
for eight years in Carnegie used to be there. It's
not there anymore. It's called Chow and it was a

(49:22):
funny little hole in the wall place. The owner, you know,
he might be listening, let's just say, an interesting dude,
a little offbeat, and it certainly didn't fit like I
remember the first time I went in there. Pete knew
him somehow in it, and we went in there to
play a duo and I looked around. I'm like, well, jeez,

(49:43):
I'm never gonna be back here because it looked like
kind of sorry to say it there, Nick, but it
looked like a dump, you know, and it was it
looked like and there was not a lot of people
in there, and I'm like, what's this wound up being
our mainstay Monday gig, and we built a huge part
of our audience and I met my wife there, you know,
I'm I mean it turned out to have enormous impact
on my life and our partnership and everything. It was

(50:06):
a great Yeah, you couldn't find a scene in the place.
And the audience was so tuned into what we were
doing that it was a concert every week. It wasn't
like a bar gig. It was it was like I'm
talking about that quadrant where you're being listened to. We
were we had rapped attention of a great audience of
people that were like up for whatever we wanted to do,
and so they were so again, that was a smallest

(50:28):
it's about a small stage as it can get. All
our power came from one little broken outlet behind us,
Like literally the guy never even replaced the outlet, even
after the Carnegie flooded, and you know, it was very
inauspicious and it was a total blast.

Speaker 2 (50:42):
You know, I've seen you a couple of times and
at the same venue. It's I can't remember the name,
it's a it's in Cranberry. You played there quite a bit.
Oh it could have been Frescos maybe I.

Speaker 1 (50:53):
Can't remember, but I've seen you in a number of times,
and there was time that there was a really good crowd,
and then there's people that it's not so. But you two,
when you perform, it's almost like you're performing for each other.
Am I wrong? I think that's fair to say on
a good night? Yeah, I mean there's always I don't
ever Pete never phones it in. We never phone it in,

(51:13):
but certainly nights where you're more engaged, and I think
the objective is to make sure your worst night doesn't
slip below an eight. Even if your best night never
gets the ten. You know you want to be in
a narrow band, so like your nines in your mind
stick out from your ads. But that the average listener
thinks you sound good all the time. So I think

(51:34):
when we're playing well, we're really tuned into each other
and we can we do a lot of musically ambitious
things and long improvisations, and you can steer the ship
where it's lean. There's only two guys you can take.
You can turn on a dime, throw together. Pete throws
together spontaneous medleys sometimes, and there's one in particular that

(51:54):
we do a lot that just kind of flows free
associatively from his mind whatever he feels, you know, cobbles
together superstition, followed by filling the blank, you know, led
Zeppelin or you're not prepared for that. I mean, we've
done it enough times now that I have a good
idea what's coming. But when we first were doing no,
I had no idea what was coming next, and I
just would react, you know, to whatever he threw out

(52:16):
me next. And it still can be that way. I
mean the last time we played it, I can't remember
what he threw in, but it was something new, something
I didn't see coming, and there was I love that
kind of Had he worked that out prior now I
doubt that. I mean, it's possible he sits home and
secretly practice all this stuff, but I don't think so.
You know, it's it's you know, it's listening, you know,

(52:38):
it's tune in listening good ears and just going with
the flow. You know. So how did the recordings start?
How did you work on that?

Speaker 3 (52:46):
Uh?

Speaker 1 (52:47):
With Pete? The first one I had invested in a
home studio. Whenever it was getting I always had had
like four track decks and stuff like that. But like
in the era of pro tools, when that started to
become a thing like digital workstation's late nineties. I made
a big investment and had a studio in my apartment,

(53:10):
and I felt like, well, Pete and I and also
our drummer Joe was Loski, who's you know with that time,
was playing a lot more gigs with us, Like it
was half the time of trio, half the time of duo.
Now it's probably a lot more slanted towards duo, just
because you can play more places with two guys. But
in any case, I felt like I needed to record

(53:32):
this moment because I didn't know how long it was
going to last. I remember being really acutely thinking like,
this is a great thing we've got going here, and
it could change at any time. I want to have
a record of it, so I have a studio I hired.
I wasn't confident enough in my mixing ability at that point,
so I hired a great engineer, Dave Brown, who was

(53:53):
also guitar player I worked with, and he worked with
Rested Rude and with a lot of folks build Dez
the Gathering Field. He'd done a lot of you know,
he was much more adept, probably still is mixer than me.
But I've learned a lot since then. But so Dave
mixed the record. I recorded the stuff with Pete and
Joe and then Dave mixed it. And that I thought

(54:17):
was because we I didn't know how much time we had.
Now that was twenty four years ago, so it turned
out we had time, but you know, you don't know.
And most of its covers of stuff that we did
that people really liked. We could we could go to
places that a lot of other like nothing that we
never go to a gig, and I'm not disparaging the song,

(54:38):
but we don't go to a gig and play Brown
Eyed Girl, Like we don't go to a gig and
play with every Mustang Sally or anything like that. And
we know those songs, of course, but we try to
play stuff that is more interesting to us, but also
that people will go, oh wow, you know, like, so
you play maybe I'm amazed. You know that's that gets
like a whoa kind of reaction as opposed to, you know,

(55:00):
much more down the middle kind of song that people
would request. If you kind of let them steer the ship,
you're gonna get the same ten songs that that everybody
always requests. And we kind of don't really solicit much
from our audience. We kind of just do what we
want to do, and hopefully there's songs that like if
it's a Beatles song, it might be something way more
offbeat than they would ever think to ask for themselves,

(55:21):
like what, oh geez with the Beatles, we go pretty deep,
so I'll be back, or things we said today or
you know, you know, no reply, you know, not I
want to hold your hand, or she loves you? You
know occasionally what do she loves you? But pretty rarely,
but we do, like you know, it won't be long.

(55:41):
Nobody thinks to ask for it won't be long, But
when they hear it, they're like, oh, I love that song, right,
you know what I mean? And I think that's fun
to do it like that, like play the songs you
wish you'd thought to request. How often do you record now?
Not very often? No, why, I don't know. That's a
great question. There's a certain amount of an I mean

(56:04):
right now. The answer is I don't have any time
anymore with those business that I've opened that has become
kind of my my life.

Speaker 2 (56:11):
All right, So tell me how did you get What
made you decide to go into teaching.

Speaker 1 (56:17):
That's all right, that's interesting. I yeah, because, like anyone
right out of college, you need money. I did some
teaching music stores, took on a few private students, and
I hated it. And I didn't think, you know, I
just I had nothing to say. I was in my twenties.
I so as soon as I was successful enough to
not teach, I stopped. And I didn't teach for a
long time, and then I met my wife. We moved

(56:41):
Upper Saint I moved up for Saint Clair. Her son
was in that school district. And my friend Eric Defate
I mentioned earlier. We had him over for dinner and
he's like, why aren't you teaching? You're in the suburbs,
you know you why not? And I'm like, I don't know.
That was such a bummer before, but you know, he said,
you might want to think about that. And it's by
curious twist of fate. I talked to my wife. I said,

(57:02):
you know, maybe I could convert the studio downstairs to
like dual purpose, and may I have a teaching studio
and a recording studio in the same space. And like
three days later, I got an email out of the
clear Blue sky from a teacher in the school district
that I had knew from college, and she's like, I
have this kid. He's eight years old. He's perfect pitch.
His parents don't really know what to do with him.

(57:23):
He's really musically talented. And I heard you were in
the South Hills somewhere. Do you teach? And I'm like, wow,
if you'd written me a week earlier, i'd just said no,
And that had been the end of the conversation. Like well,
as a matter of fact, I was thinking about it.
Then the mom my number, we'll talk, We'll think about it.
I was still in the fence. I met this mom
who's now a dear friend, Julie Hotton, and her son

(57:45):
is now finishing up his master's degree in music. I
mean as a marvelous musician. But anyways, he was this
eight year old, quirky kid, really fun real funny. And
I always say, if Robbie had n't been the first student,
there might not have been a second, because he was
not the typical board kid that like doesn't practice. He
was voraciously curious and his mom was the kind of

(58:07):
dream parent you want. She's running around the neighborhood telling
everybody I'm great, and so I would suddenly have this
like boutique studio of all these really talented kids, Like
I had three kids with perfect pitch and a bunch
of different kids who are trying to learn jazz and
the jazz band and stuff. Ask you why you're great,
I'll ask you why did she think you were great?

(58:28):
I think she would say that I had an ability
to have an ability to meet students where they are
and figure out how to reach them and figure out
how to motivate them, even though even if they're coming
from very different places. I think that was what she
would say, and that she really loved that because I

(58:49):
understood him, understood how his mind worked musically, how to
harness that, and how to keep motivating him without being
like not but pool, if you know what I mean,
I know.

Speaker 2 (59:02):
Exactly what it is. That was my experience at the strand.
You were educating me. You were a teacher that night.

Speaker 1 (59:08):
I guess. So, yeah, yeah, it's true. That was Yeah.
I didn't really think about it that way, but that
is kind of true. That is kind of my m
you know, And so I, you know, I had it
developed into a decent sized pool of kids and a
friend of mine, another old friend, kept encouraging me. He's like,

(59:29):
why don't you open a studio and like make this
a business? And I have them had for a little
while that seemed pretty daunting, and then finally I thought,
all right, maybe why should you know? And then it
took two years to find the right space and to
get the business plan together and the funding together, and
it was a big deal and opened the doors on

(59:49):
August of twenty nineteen to the Industry Music Academy. And
I had a major health event, you know, January first
of that year that put me down for a little
bit of time. And I was back up just in
time for the world to have a major health event
that put everybody down. Well what was that? You may

(01:00:10):
have heard of COVID, and you know that was a heck.
I thought, like Jimmy Stewart, you know, in a wonderful
life when he's about to go on his honeymoon and
the great Depression starts and he's just like, what do
you need? You know, like, you know, giving his money away.
Like I was dancing between the rain drops, trying to
keep this business open, trying to keep people from quitting,
like trying to just you know, because like I've got
everything I got invested in this thing, and here we

(01:00:31):
are going through this massive cataclysm and you were going
through and I'm going through my own personal thing, which was,
you know, a big deal and it was an amazing time.
But it gave me an opportunity to step away from
perform It didn't mean there wasn't an opportunity. There was
no choice, there was nothing to do, There was no

(01:00:51):
gigs to go play. And if I didn't have this business,
I don't know where we'd be living right now. Like
I was able to focus my full attention on growing
one of the few businesses that could be grown in
that environment. Turns out because you can teach remotely, and
then even when we didn't have to remotely anymore, we
had big rooms with high ceilings and good ventilation, so

(01:01:11):
when we could go back to in person we did,
whereas a lot of my competitors were in smaller, unventilated
little rooms like in the basement of music stores. They
couldn't go back to in person teaching for a much
longer period of time than we did. So the Corus, Yeah,
because exactly so, we were able to get a leg
up and we grew very rapidly actually during that period,
and I didn't play a gig or a note of

(01:01:33):
music for sixteen months, and I discovered, to be honest
with you, I discovered I was completely burned out and
I didn't know it. I was playing all the time.
We talked about the four hundred and thirty five, but
even when I was down to two hundred gigs a year,
it was most nights in my life two fifty. Really,
it was most nights of my life. And you know

(01:01:53):
it's a privilege, right, but it still is work. And
you know, creativity, if you look at anyone who's really
successful classical rock doesn't matter. They take breaks. You know,
you don't just keep plugging away if you don't want to.
It's actually really you know, Dylan does, but most people don't,
like they take a break. They go for months and

(01:02:16):
then recharge the batteries and then go out on another tour.
And when you're grinding it out, you know, the way
we were, you can't take the break. You know, you
got to keep this like a shark, you got to
keep eating, you got to keep moving. You're making a
living doing this, and so the enforced break of COVID
made me realize, like the creative energies were dissipated, and

(01:02:37):
you know, creativity will refill, the glass will fill up
just enough to get through one more night and then
be empty, game and just and you keep repeating this cycle.
And I don't know how many years it was like
that for me. And this is no reflection on the
gig I was doing, which was great for the audience,
was great. It just was too much, too much playing
over too many years, and all of a sudden, I'm

(01:02:59):
not playing. And a friend of mine asked me, you know,
in August, like do you miss it yet? I remember
we were at the beach and I said, no, I
don't know when I'm going to miss it, but I
don't miss it yet. And then that finally came, you know,
like by April, I think of twenty one or something
like that. We we did a gig. It was something

(01:03:21):
that actually Johnny Angel arranged and we did this gig
together and it was our We hadn't played in all.
It was like remembering how to plug my mixer in,
you know, like what do I do with my monitor?
Like I actually like really had to rethink because my
gear hadn't been touched, touched, and it was all like
unpacking this and looking at it like, oh, you know,

(01:03:41):
where's the keyboard? What patches right? Like it was funny
experience like remembering, and then it started to slip into
like bicycle riding kind of cliche. And so Pete and
I talked, and you know, he he had also gone
through a health experience that, you know, I think he
was inclined to not dive back in head first. I

(01:04:03):
was like, I just have filled my time now with teaching.
I don't have the nights free anymore. And we both
kind of agreed on a much more relaxed schedule, which
we've maintained to this point, which is, you know, getting
back to teaching. Do you enjoy it now? Yeah? But
that's a great point. I So what I discovered with
teaching Robbie and the other kids at the very beginning
is so now I have something to say. I'm forty

(01:04:26):
something at this point, and I've done a lot of work.
I've done a lot of playing. I've figured out some stuff,
I've made observations, I have some I have an idea
of how this works. It's not like when right out
of college and I just wanted to be anywhere. But
in that room now it's like I can help. I
can say stuff that matters to these kids, and next

(01:04:48):
to show them, I can self select, you know, what's
going to be effective and what is And I just
was and I discovered it was very rewarding. So yeah,
I wound up really enjoying it, obviously enough to create
a business out of it. But yeah, I mean it's
it's it's just a different season of life and I
have a different perspective on it because of that, because

(01:05:11):
of being more mature and more patient. What are you
working on now? What do you want to work on
in the future? Right now, my primary focus is the
school and growing it. I have some specific growth goals
that I want to get to. Well. It has to

(01:05:33):
do with attendance numbers and financial numbers, and truthfully, you know,
I'm building the kind of business that if if we're successful,
we'll touch hundreds of lives, but also eventually will be
something that somebody else might want, which is what you
don't get in music is a retirement plan, you know

(01:05:54):
what I mean? Like, so I'm not ready to retire,
don't get me wrong, but like I'm building something that
I can look at and go if we continue to
be successful and do good work, I also could reach
a point where I could see, at some point down
the road this could be valuable maybe one of the
other teachers that wanted or maybe some outside investor would
want it or whatever. And it gives me a way

(01:06:16):
to like look at being done if I.

Speaker 3 (01:06:19):
There's somebody that did that with the dance school. Yeah,
and she actually ended up handing it over to a
group of her teachers that used it as a you know,
l LC exactly, And I guess that's.

Speaker 1 (01:06:32):
What that's kind of the vision. So I mean, I'm
I'm building with an eye towards that. Not only I mean,
obviously it's it's but it's interesting to have that, like
if you it's not something I ever had playing, you know,
when you hang up your spurs and you don't play anymore,
which nobody ever really does.

Speaker 2 (01:06:50):
I was just going to ask you, Yeah, people, don't
you ever see yourself not playing?

Speaker 1 (01:06:55):
I don't know, you know, I probably not, but it's
not is easy an answer, Like, as long as Pete
wants to keep doing this, I'm going to do it
to work with him, and he's you know, a few
for years further down the road than me. He might
I don't see when he would ever stop. But but
but if he does, I might say, all right, well

(01:07:15):
I can take a breather, or maybe I'll go just
play some jazz gigs, or but I'm not going to
try and form another duo as somebody. I'm not going
to try and recreate what we've did for twenty five years.
When that time or power many it'll be by that point,
you know, and you never know, I mean, not on
you know, every tomorrow is never a promise. So I'm
really mindful. I'm especially mindful of that, having gone through

(01:07:36):
some of what I went through, which is that like,
don't boast about tomorrow, you don't know what's coming. Do
we leave anything?

Speaker 2 (01:07:45):
Is there any story or any experience that that we
didn't touch on that you think we want We want
to we want to record everything in your career, and
obviously you can't do that. But is there anything in
particular that we'd left on the hottingroom floor that we
think we need to to address.

Speaker 1 (01:08:05):
That's a good question. Honestly, I feel like as I look,
as I sit here and think about my life and career.
You know, you were excellent questioning. You kind of got
to all the key points, like what were the moments
that everything turned on, earliest musical memory, first saw that Really,
you know, those are things that I happen to have

(01:08:26):
answers for because they really happened right college, first gigs,
out of school, you know, making the partnership with Pete,
like all those big events. And I guess the only
other thing is I feel, to whatever extent, you know,
I've made a successful career as a player, you know,

(01:08:49):
at a local level, and it's not you know, a
big national level. But whoever extent, it's all tied up
in the people I've worked with. And I've only mentioned
a couple of them here, but I've really been fortunate
to just be with the best people, not just the
best players, just the best people. When you gather together
a group of the folks that I've performed with for

(01:09:11):
like a Christmas party, you're the best time. I mean
that there's just no drama, there's no none of the
classic pitfalls that rock bands walk into. There's no spinal tap,
you know what I mean. I really have been incredibly fortunate.
And it's the same thing with the teachers at the school.
I think I'm really blessed to be with great people

(01:09:33):
and so be as good as I could be. And
that's I mean, it's made it easy. It hasn't really
been a slog. What is your legacy then, Well, musically,
I would say my main legacy is probably still tied

(01:09:55):
up in the work we did at WQD. That those
shows don't get replace anymore, but sometimes they dust them
off and play them. And I'm really proud of that work.
I think it's the best work I did as a
music director, as a pianist, as a you know, a
band member, as a writer. I mean that was so
that's and it lives on, as I said in the

(01:10:17):
Holiday jam concert I do every year, which is an
eclectic and fairly remarkable show. I'm really proud of that work.
That's kind of my musical legacy. And also, of course
the work that Pete and I have done and the
vives that we've touched. And then the legacy that will
live on probably longer is the students, because I mean

(01:10:37):
I've already seen you know, I've been doing it now
long enough that I have kids who have graduated college.
That where my students that are living their lives, you know,
starting their careers. And I have, you know, kids that
I'll see like later today, who are on the first
steps of that path, and their memory and their experience

(01:10:58):
will live on long past, and hopefully they'll remember things
I've said to them in the same way that I
remember some of the things that my professor said to
me that I've never forgotten. And the nuggets of wisdom
that formed the that form the bed that it all
lies on, that the all, you know, the things I
refer back to and say all the time when I'm
teaching that I learned from doctor Jenkins or David Bubway

(01:11:19):
like these. That's that's probably my longest and of course
my own kids can't take that. I mean, that's built
in legacy, right, So I guess I have a lot
to be thankful for in that regard.