So as you know, I’m just about done with my sonic masterpiece (my heavens, you must be so sick of hearing that by now). And it just so happens that my little bruddah Josh, jazz bassist extraordinaire, has just finished a sonic masterpiece of his own. So how, you might ask, did these two giants – nay, titans – of the industry get their start?
With a piano bench, actually. See, we had a piano in the house when I was growing up – we’re Jewish, and it’s the law (stole that one from Robert Klein; don’t tell him) – and my parents had been bugging me for several years to start taking piano lessons, and then “The Sting” came out, and I decided that I wanted to learn to play ragtime, so I signed up for lessons and parked myself on the piano bench – or tried to, because my bruddah, bless his pointed little head, decided that he, too, wanted to learn the piano, mostly, as far as I could tell, to keep me from practicing, because every time my butt approached that bench, my bruddah slid in underneath me and claimed it was his turn.
And yet, he lived to see his bar mitzvah.
Of course, by the time he reached his bar mitzvah he’d already quit the piano. And halfway through high school, he’d already quit the violin. And the clarinet. My bruddah was well on his way to being a wasted talent at the age of 16. I, on the other hand, had dutifully marched my way into pianistic competence, and acquired a guitar, and begun to pen the same whining, soulful crap that every other teenager writes as he pines for, well, whatever it is that we teenagers pine for.
And then I came home from college and discovered that my bruddah had bloodied his fingers learning the bass guitar over the previous three months, and he was actually competent, and I sat my parents down and warned them that he was going to be a professional musician, and they laughed at me, and now he’s got a doctorate in modern classical composition, and he’s the artist in residence in charge of the jazz program at American University in Washington, DC, and he plays the piano better than I do. So in your face, parents. I, on the other hand, decided I wanted to be a rock star, moved to Boston, joined and subsequently helped disassemble a ska band, and pivoted shortly afterward to the musical career that is quickly becoming a legend, at least in my own mind.
None of this, however, explains how my bruddah became a jazz musician. He and I used to be in love with the Electric Light Orchestra, and Jeff Lynne’s band before that, the Move, they of the original throw-the-television-out-the-hotel-window bad boy school. Josh was in a thrash band in college. He had an inverse mohawk. Nobody saw the jazz thing coming It’s like he suddenly decided to be Swedish or something. I have asked him, and he’s told me, but I’m old, and I forget these things.
And so here we are. We’re both professionals, and neither of us really makes a living at it, although Josh could probably keep a roof over his head, as long as it was a very small roof. His new album, “Six by Five”, is available on CDBaby, and mine will be too, eventually. And then we’ll take over the world.