Today is Steve’s 47th birthday. We lost Steve to this world but there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think of him. Happy Birthday Steve. I miss you – this song is for you: He gave to me his tenderness His friendship and his love I see [...]
It was so right, it was so wrong Almost at the same time The pain and ache a heart can take No one really knows When the memories cling and keep you there Till you no longer care And you can let go now It’s wrong for me to cling to you Somehow I [...]
In my voice, in my smile In the eyes of my eldest child You appear everywhere in my life In a dream, I have now Standing still in my father's house And I try another time to run away I learned the music and laughter From the child that you hid in your eyes [...]
I’m not sure why I’m so drawn to water. Perhaps it is from swimming so much as a child or maybe there really is some sort of cosmic connection to a past life; I don’t know. I was walking around today just to clear my head and get some fresh air. I strolled down [...]
Bayside Middle School made a big deal out of Eighth Grade Graduation. I remember my dad had just gotten a new car; a very light yellow four-door sedan with tan leather interior. Although he had owned it just a few short weeks it already held his scent, a unique alchemy of leather, freshly hewn [...]
I have few clear recollections of my early years. But one day I recently remembered with remarkable clarity is the day I learned to swing by myself. I must have been around four years old. One thing that was wonderful about my childhood was the physical location of where it took place. We had [...]
One of my musician friends has perfect pitch. I met him on the American Idol tour two years ago and talked to him about it. Perfect pitch is the ability to identify a pitch simply by hearing it. It’s a great party trick; while someone is moaning about a particular roll in backgammon, for [...]
Remember show and tell? One thing I loved to bring to show and tell year after year was one of the small pieces of the Kitty Hawk fabric that had been divvied up to the members of the Orville Wright’s estate. We had two small pieces that were mounted on certificates of authenticity and [...]
I have this vague geometric model in my head that represents in an abstract way the return home from any destination. I see the trip back as passing through a funnel that gets increasingly narrower as I approach Milwaukee. The actual plane that lands in Milwaukee is the neck of that funnel and contains [...]
It was a sound I had to have. I remember hearing it for the first time in songs like Spyro Gyra’s Morning Dance and Catching the Sun. By this time, I was already a fairly accomplished trumpet player and enjoying the instantaneous popularity only afforded to those kids who carted over-sized instrument cases on [...]
