I’d like to start with an amazing intergenerational story:   I connected with an ex-music student of mine, Tim Stockman, two years ago.  A stroke of luck!  Tim is a renaissance guy in every respect; in music and virtually any category you can think of.  All of that + humor and affability.  He retired from music teaching a year or two ago.

WELL!!  We both have Mac’s, do iChat and  spend hours, gabbing and creating ideas…and having many laughs. 

Get this!  In Tim’s hamlet (250 souls or so) lives one of his own  ex-students:  DeWayne Strickland.  DeWayne is early 30’s and is a genius (computers) in his own right.  (SEARCH DeWayne Strickland and see what happens)  All connected when DeWayne wanted to use my album MY IRISH HEART in a project of his own.  TWITTER is what brought this trio together.

Since I became a NIT-TWIT (…JUST MADE THAT UP!… 6/23/09, 5:07 A.M. so help me! …any challengers?) my life hasn’t been the same.  I’ve always been busy, but this is ridiculous! (I love it!)

Because there are a good number of you, I’m taking the liberty of writing this one informational piece for all.  If some of us connect, the letters will become properly personal.

My thumbnail autobiography:

I was born and raised in Saranac Lake, N.Y.  in 1927.  We natives always add (for the uninformed) “It’s 8 miles from Lake Placid.”   (We used to hitch-hike over to Placid to go to THE NICKEL LUNCH Everything in the joint cost a nickel (except the blue-plate special.) That was 10 cents.  Guess what it was?   A  CHICKEN SANDWICH !

(We’re talking big-time deflation, folks…this was the 30’s

When I was 9, my Mom had me start piano lessons, and my teacher was (Miss) Loretto Leonard, who had been an Eastman grad, and the recipient of many awards.  She was great!  Early on, I started to play “by ear” but she controlled the ratio of that to the legit stuff.  My toughest piece ever with her was Chopin’s Fantaisie-Impromptu.

That was the height of my achievement, because after that I was interested in jazz piano.  Because I was a skinny, un-athletic kid, I made up for it by becoming the boogie-woogie king of Saranac Lake.

I Graduated from Saranac Lake H.S. in 1944 with a final average of 71.2. (I was a baaaad boy.)  This was D-Day time, and I was ruminating a lot about whether I would prefer dying in a foxhole, or on a shot-up, sinking ship.  I elected to go for being a sailor (you know…the old dry bed and food until the the last minutes routine…) and joined the Navy at 17.  While I was at boot camp at Sampson Naval Base in Geneva, NY, Two big things happened: 1) The Germans surrendered 2) FDR died.

I was sent to Bainbridge, MD to go to school to be a quartermaster.

EVERYBODY was terrified at the prospect of our having to invade Japan.  (I had a bunkmate named King and he and I used to talk endlessly and earnestly about our dream that the U.S. might come up with a “super bomb!”   …I’m not kidding!)

When the superbomb actually came, the base went crazy!  I can’t describe the feeling.  But we knew that we would have to hang out in the Navy until the more deserving people got out.  I ended up on APD  USS Burdo, which had been scheduled to be in the Japan invasion in November, ’45.  Its job was to have been to bring in frogmen early to blow up underwater barricades.

ANYWAY…

I got out in August ’46, after spending 6 months anchored in Guantanamo Bay (GITMO.)  How could I ever have imagined what would occur there sixty years hence?

My year-and-a-half Navy stint paid for the first three-and-a-half years of college in Potsdam, N.Y. (in the Crane Dept. of Music.) Meanwhile, I had started doing professional gigs in the summer of ’46 at Saranac.  So when I went to Potsdam, I kept right on going, and still am.  My first teaching job was at Lake George, NY.  From there,  I went  to Ithaca College for an MS.  Dixieland jazz was the party music of that era.  Man, all those Cornell frats… My next teaching assignment was at Skaneateles, NY.  I taught Jr. & Sr. HS music.  (Still leading a double life – teaching days and playing nights.)

Don’t ask me how I did it.  In the meantime, I went back to L.G. for summer gigs.  I did very little drinking on the job (That’s a joke, son…)

(Now I have to mention at this point that in my early life my Ma had had a habit of singing contantly, and she knew a million songs. Thus, I was building an enormous repertoire, because those melodies were becoming lodged in my young noggin.  Later, this was to be very valuable.)  The problem was that as a kid, I had learned them all (by ear) in the key of C.  So when I went to Potsdam, I was a veritable leper.  WHO WANTED TO PLAY WITH A  PIANO PLAYER WHO COULD ONLY PLAY IN C?  (That meant ghastly transpositions!) This was an enormous blow to my ego, and I over-compensated  -thank God- and learned to play in ALL of the keys.   One other thing…I was a MELODY player.  For this, I got put down!  All of the cats in Crane wanted to be jazzers, and playing the MELODY was for squares- especially in this, the Be-Bop era!)  Later on, when I was a “commercial” bandleader, I found the incredible advantages of being able to play the MELODY.  (That’s the part most folks HEAR!!)  Also why so many dudes get away with bum -if not hideous- chord changes.  By the way – many “non-musicians” have great  musical ears and are acutely responsive to chord changes and progressions and love ‘em without understanding why.  (I gave a series of workshops entitled: I LOVE THE MUSIC, BUT I DON’T KNOW WHY)

Back to the music-teaching career:

In ’63, I joined the faculty of the newly-created Onondaga Community College (Syracuse) to form a music department, designed to take good young musicians with low academic averages (hmmm) and show that they could do “college level work.” (They had been rejected elsewhere because of poor grades.)  When I retired from the college in ’85, I had been teaching FUNCTIONAL keyboard harmony  for 18 years.  My advantage was that all the sounds had been in my head from the start, and my education in harmony was identifying those sounds that I had been always naturally hearing!  Coupling that with my huge repertoire meant that I could take any term…say…”Neapolitan 6^th”…and immediately play an example for the class – such as in the theme from THE GODFATHER…

I am the oldest living ex-president of the N.Y.S.S.M.A. (The New York State School Music Association, 1968-69) – but I still can’t get a free cup of coffee.  MacDonald’s is good to seniors, but I can’t stand it.

In January of ’85, I retired from college teaching.  Since then, I’ve:

1)      Learned about digital instruments

2)      Written songs with Maria DeAngelis check (www.philkleinsmusic.com)

3)      Presented “shows” which featured songs, anecdotes and humor

4)    Written original music for a syndicated  kids’ T.V. show *

         * ‘Scusa me; the kiddie show was in 1970…

I have nine CD albums currently available at www.cdbaby.com   That site comprises thousands of musicians, mostly young ones with original music.  (Did you know that people inherently have an aversion to NEW material?)  I know I did!  I recall hating OLD BLACK MAGIC when it first came out!  So as if it weren’t already bad enough, WHERE ARE YOU GOING with NEW tunes?…especially in this era with its massive shift to VISUAL!!  (and complete disappearance of “melody”)

So here I am on TWITTER!  I believe (and TIME MAGAZINE backs me up) that TWITTER represents an epochal event.

Finally – I have to come right out and say it -  I can PLAY, and I consider the highest compliment, which I repeatedly get is that I “play with SOUL.”  There are very few of my genre left in the world.

I don’t consider myself a jazzer, but I do play excellent jazz chords and progressions.  I recommend that you visit www.philkleinsmusic.com   There you will hear longer excerpts from my albums. You can also get free downloads of original songs from my website, learn about Maria, Hear an excerpt from one of my shows & A lot of other great stuff!

So that’s it.  I hope you reached this point.  If you are this far, I hope we have many interesting chats. Talk with you later!

Phil Klein