50th Anniversary

A few posts back, I evoked the three pillars of my life—Orff, Jazz and Zen. This morning it struck me— they all began in one remarkable year. 1973. Which makes this year the 50^th Anniversary of all three disciplines.

In the Winter of ’73, I was completing the last six months of a college-sponsored job apprenticeship teaching at The Arthur Morgan School in the foothills of the North Carolina Black Mountains. It was a small boarding school for some 30 Middle School kids connected to an intentional Quaker community called Celo. In February of that year, I created and led a school Jug Band with 17 of the students and three teachers and organized (at 22 years young with no Internet or cell phones) a two-week Jug Band tour of the South, driving a rented yellow school bus from North Carolina to Miami and back. We performed at schools, community centers, one urban club and one radio station, stayed in people’s homes and church basements and camped, playing music inspired by Jim Kweskin and his jug band that included blues, ragtime pieces and old jazz standards. It was my first public foray out of my classical piano background into the universe of jazz that awaited me and also prophetic of my vision of school as community, tied together by joyful music-making and fun at the forefront.

In the Spring of the same year, I returned to Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, lived with three friends a couple of miles from campus in the country (all three of whom I’m still in touch with), rode a bicycle to school and took a semester-long class with a guest teacher named Avon Gillespie. The class was an obscure pedagogy known as Orff Schulwerk and both the approach and the teacher were destined to define the life I’ve ended up living. 50 years ago that was!

Summer was my first trip to Europe singing the Renaissance sacred music that would later be the doorway into meeting my future wife (that’s another story). But it also marked the first journal I kept, a practice uninterrupted for the half-century that followed and marked me as destined to write and later publish. It whetted my appetite for the 60 plus countries I later would visit in my love for travel and my insatiable curiosity about other cultures. That trip alone would have marked the year as an extraordinary turning point, but there was yet more.

Returning from Europe, I moved to San Francisco in the Fall, got my first job teaching jazz piano at The Community Music Center (amazing considering what a beginner I was!) and with my sister and brother-in-law who let me live with them those first three months, went to my first Zen meditation retreat (sesshin) at Mt. Baldy Zen Center, a practice that would sustain me without pause all the way to this morning’s zazen sit (and hopefully beyond!). 

And so. In one astonishing year, I took my first steps onto the paths of Jazz, Orff, Zen, as well as writing, traveling, living in San Francisco. 50 years of being kneaded by these beautiful practices, massaged by their strong fingers that evoke chords of deep music in this body/heart/ mind. Happy Anniversary to them all!