School, and old-school, music

This is the 1936 Heights High Marching Band. My father is in this picture. Do you see him? He's right over there. More than 40 years later, my son was in the band, too; while my daughter, like me and my mother, was in the Heights Choir. 

I’m pretty sure that I write about school every September. It still looms large. It was always traumatic, every single year that I went to school, from kindergarten through 12th grade. There was nothing I wanted to do less than going to school. I didn’t mind learning—in fact, I loved learning, and craved it—but I just didn’t want to be in school.

The last week of summer vacation was the worst—just this unshakable feeling of impending doom, and dread. However, one thing got me through, and I’ve written plenty about that, too: music.

Through elementary school, at Coventry, I had to provide that music for myself, which I did through learning how to play the guitar, at age 7, and getting into little bands, starting at age 9. By sixth grade, the CH-UH elementary school system’s floating music teacher started pulling me out of class to go with her to other schools to accompany their choruses in concerts, which I loved (it just didn’t happen enough).

At Roosevelt Junior High, music in school got a little more serious. And at Heights High, the music program was great. What made it all good was the music instructors—teachers who, I realized later, went out of their way to help and encourage their serious music students.

At Roosevelt, I was in the band, directed by Wilbur Turner. I played the sax because my family had one. It had been my father’s, and before that, his brother’s. His brother David was born in 1910, and that sax came into existence around the same time. My father played it in the Heights High Marching Band in the 1930s. I still have it. (I got it all refurbished several years ago, and it still plays well, even if I don’t, particularly.)

Here’s the thing about Mr. Turner: When I was in eighth grade, I told him that I wanted to become an arranger, so he suggested that I take a lesson or two on every instrument, so that I could really understand what they do, and what they can do, and what their ranges were, and so on. Plus, he corralled the best kids on each instrument and asked them to show me how they worked. So, I got a lesson or two (or more, in some cases) on every instrument. At this point, I’ve worked as an arranger for the past 54 years, and I still use what I learned in those after-school lessons.

In high school, since I was singing in a few bands, I joined the Heights Choir. That turned out to be one of the best decisions of my life. I’ve written many times about how that experience saved my life. But I’ll say this again: It was the one and only thing that kept me in school. It’s the only reason I ever set foot in Heights High (until my own kids went there). 

And it was really all due to the choir’s dynamic director, Clair McElfresh. He was beyond supportive (of me, and many others). He let me play and sing my own songs, solo, in choir concerts; he let me arrange works for small groups to sing in concerts; he had me accompany choir pieces on guitar; he sat and talked to me after school and on choir bus trips about the music business; and more. Within a year after leaving Heights, I was working in the music business in New York City.

And Mac wasn’t the only music teacher at Heights High who helped me. In 11th grade (the last year that I was officially in a grade), I went to one of the instrumental music directors, Vince Patti, whom I didn’t know, and told him I had an arrangement for a jazz version of a Christmas carol that I’d written for a brass quintet. And—completely his idea—he said he’d get the necessary players together after school one day, so they could play it, and I could hear it. And he did. And I got to hear it, which was really the only way to find out if an arrangement worked, and to learn how to do that. (Today there are computer simulations, which help—though it’s really not the same.)

And the other instrumental music director at Heights, Kaarlo Mackey—an old-school European orchestra conductor, with old-school disciplinary methods, and temper—taught a good music theory class, which I took for two semesters, and actually learned from.

I was in two rock bands and a folk group at Heights. Two of those were made up of other Heights Choir, and Orchestra, kids, and one wasn’t. Every one of those Choir and Orchestra kids went on to become professional musicians. The others did not, and some of them had fairly troubled lives. Maybe just a coincidence, but probably not.