A lage start as a jazz musician

 For decades I played piano just for myself, hammering out melody and chords from a “fake book” of jazz standards. If someone came into the room, I would stop.

I wasn’t getting any better. So my friend Ron Worthy invited me eight years ago to join a group of accomplished jazz musicians at the basement of someone’s home in Washington, D.C.

Every week, a drummer opened up his house to two trumpet players, a saxophone player, guitarist, bassist and Ron, a professional pianist. This was a pure, private jam session, the kind you hear about but never see.

I got to fill in on about every third song. It was an enormous thrill comping out chords to this great music. But these guys were too good for me. I couldn’t keep up.

I had heard of classes in the Virginia suburbs where you pay a jazz musician to assemble a group to learn to play together. I wasn’t sure I could get into Jazz Workshop in Tysons Corner, Virginia, at first, so I decided to go to Blues Alley and see the leader, Paul Pieper, play guitar in a group.

I was watching intently, hoping to chat with Paul, when I accidentally knocked over a glass on the small table and it shattered on the floor. The lady sitting next to me was Paul’s wife. As we commiserated over the broken shards and an attendant swept them up, I told her why I was there.

Somehow I was able to get into his next class quickly. Was I good enough to stay? Could I really  learn to play accompaniment chords differently than on a solo?  But  Pieper liked my playing on the easy “Summertime” and I participated for a year with this group. So thrilled, I wrote a front-page article in the Senior Beacon newspaper about these classes.

But after I took a summer break, my schedule didn’t work for the next fall, so I joined another group, Jazz Band Master Class, hosted by Jeff Antoniuk in Annapolis, Md. Despite the 45-minute drive on Saturdays, I really enjoyed this group.  Then the big moment arrived. I had only been there a few weeks and they were going to perform at Twins, a prime jazz spot in D.C. Did I want to join them with so little practice? Does a hungry dog want a piece of steak?

This was the thrill of a lifetime! A bunch of my friends came, two of them driving an hour to see me. (I guess that’s why the club let us play there.) Antoniuk introduced me as the newest member and too eagerly, I stood up. “Sit down, Mike!” he admonished me.

I felt like Dave Brubeck, Oscar Peterson and Thelonious  Monk combined. One friend was recording my improvised solos and they weren’t bad at all.

I would have kept this up, but the pandemic came, the club closed for good and a jazz group practice over Zoom became impossible. Meanwhile, we moved to southern Virginia.

That didn’t end things, though. The new Tunnel Creek Vineyards opened near Roxboro, N.C. and I asked if I could sit down and play their nice grand piano. When I plunked out a song, the owner, Larry Dale Holler, liked it.n“I used to play at Twins Jazz in D.C.,” I said. “Can you come back on Saturday?” he said. When I played there during the pandemic, Antoniuk  told me, “You are one of only 10 jazz musicians in the world with a job.” I gave most of my earnings to a foundation helping unemployed jazz musicians.

I stayed only a few months because my 80-year-old hands couldn’t play for hours as the job required. Now I just play for friends and B&B guests at our home.

But not just for myself anymore.

 

 

 

Memories of my dad: mostly good

 

We weren’t particularly close, but these were some of my recollections of Philip Doan this Father’s Day. Was he Atticus Finch or Homer Simpson? I’m not sure. (Maybe I was Bart Simpson?) A few examples:

--Eating forbidden cookies in a box and then running away as he chased me. Finally, he ran out of breath. “Let’s forget about this,” he said.

--Angry about his micromanaging my chores, I “inadvertently” positioned a hose to squirt water into an open car window. Whoops!

--Thrilled when he set off illegal fireworks on the Fourth of July outside our motel in Olympia, Wash. When the explosion was much larger than we expected, he made us get in the car and flee before the cops came. Homer Simpson would have done that.

--Getting a boxing lesson from him when I was about 10. I landed a right hook on his head and he immediately declared the lesson over. Oh that felt good!

--Forced to go with him to a record store and listen to a record of Mario Lanza singing “The StudentPrince.” I  loved it. When he asked what I thought, I said, the way a teenager would, “It was OK, I guess.”

--Him recruiting me to appear in the opera “La Boheme” at the L.A. Shrine Auditorium. I was a non-singing 10-year-old street urchin stealing food from a vendor.

--Hearing that he intervened when I signed up for study hall in the 12th grade and got the counselor to enroll me in physics instead. Atticus Finch would do that.

--Taking us at my birthday parties to a submarine, a bowling alley and an ice skating rink.

--Hearing that he boasted to my uncle about what an obedient teen I was. My uncle responding, “Well, what about the time he let that broad drive your car and they crashed into a traffic island on Arlington Boulevard?” I knew I shouldn’t have told my cousin about that!

--Forcing me to get off my butt and find a job the summer I graduated from high school and wanted to loaf. He liked that I found one in San Francisco’s seedy Tenderloin district, probably a dangerous place for a 17-year-old at night.

--Traveling around the country with him on trains, his true passion, for a month when I was 19.  He loved to sing “The Wreck of the Old 97” but never got to visit the site in Danville.

--Seeing him angry with me when I refused to cut in line at the White House tour. I think he always wanted a more aggressive son.

--The time a fly ball from Ken Aspromonte’s  bat was heading for my head at a San Francisco Seals baseball game. As I ducked, my Dad  stuck out his hands and caught the ball and the crowd applauded. I still have that ball!

-- Climbing within 500 feet to the top of a Sierra Nevada mountain peak with him, when he had trouble breathing and lay down. After I prayed for him, he declared, ‘You’re a good boy, Mike.” And we made it back down.

--In a nursing home, finally getting up the courage to tell him I loved him. He seemed to like it, but maybe it was too late.  By then his memory was mostly gone and I don’t know if he really got it.

(Drawing by Ron Miller)

 

 

 

 

 

Waiting for the Axe

I have this irritating tendency to let other make the decisions I should have made myself. Best example:

On the way to Europe for a vacation, I stopped to visit the New York headquarters of The Associated Press. As a 28-year-old editor in the San Francisco bureau, I was given the rare opportunity to meet with the top man, General Manager Wes Gallagher.

“What would you like to do?” the great man asked me. “Uh, be a writer or an editor,” I said indecisively. “Well, which?” he asked impatiently. “Uh, editor,” I responded, as if flipping a coin.

“We need editors in our Washington and New York bureaus. Would you be interested?” he asked.

“Yes,” I responded, unconvincingly.

San Francisco was a great place to live. My family was  there, and I loved all of the famous sites. But this was an opportunity. I had learned to grab them when they came.

So within a few months I was off to Washington and an editing job. Within two years, I was “night editor,” actually running the afternoon news desk, which edited and cleared most of the Washington news  for morning newspapers. In 1973-1976, that included an awful lot, especially Watergate and the Vietnam War.  Why would they pick someone so young? Because the news desk was filled with old, jaded news veterans, just hanging on until retirement. It  was a heady position, but after four years I was burning out. I wasn’t writing anything myself.

The head of the congressional staff had offered me a job on Capitol Hill and I stupidly turned it down. I told him I had promised to be an editor.

Then in late 1976, I was unhappy that I wasn’t getting overtime when others were getting extra pay working late. I turned down an offer by the union leader to accompany me into the bureau chief’s office to complain. I just went myself.

I made my case to Marvin Arrowsmith, well respected but ailing man running the bureau. For years he had been the White House correspondent and looked particularly distinguished, more like a president than a newsman. As he aged, his hands shook and he seemed like he was too old for the job.

With his hands folded, he said, “I need to tell you this. We are making a change in the night editor by year’s end.” I was being fired from that lofty position! What a shock! What was I going to do?

I can’t remember being more upset about anything, ever. I had no family there. Not many friends. This was my whole life. Arrowsmith swore me to secrecy, and I unwisely agreed, keeping it bottled up. I complained to my doctor about  chest pains.

Finally, over Thanksgiving dinner with strangers, I passionately unburdened myself, probably ruining this great meal for all of them. I started going to church (where, fortunately, I met my future wife.)

Because I couldn’t get overtime, I had built up a lot of compensatory time off, and I took it on a trip to visit family in California. Nursing my wounds, I was awaiting a call from my friend Jack Smyth, who looked over the January schedule for me.

“They’ve assigned you to the Hill,” he told me. Meaning Congress. Really? The whole bureau had a shakeup, and Arrowsmith himself retired.

The first week I got back, I sat in the front row across from Jimmy Carter’s inauguration as president.  I covered confirmation hearings, rushed around visiting famous people. The place was alive with interesting young people. And I got bylines. Then I was assigned  to Treasury, which launched my business writing career.

Why didn’t I agreed to leave that position earlier? Why did I wait for other people to make decisions for me?

 No more.