Miami Story

Originally in life, I was going to be a jazz musician.

My sister started piano lessons when I was in 3rd grade. At the same time, my mother bought an encyclopedia from the grocery store, one volume at a time. When I got to the article on music, it laid out the basics of how to read music. That, combined with my sister's piano books, taught me the basics.

Around that time, the Lubbock S&H Green Stamps store shut down. My parents had been collecting them for years, so my dad went to the closing. He came back with a guitar.

All four of us tried it out. My sister's hands were too small, and she was much more interested in singing, anyway. My mother hated having callouses on her fingertips. My dad and I started figuring it out, however.

Dad was a natural. He picked it up, and within weeks, he was playing 50s and 60s rock and roll songs. For years, he and my mother would jam after dinner, having a cigarette, almost every night.

I was still young, so I was slower. I like guitar, but it was pretty hard.

Around that time, my uncle, who was an Eastman degree holder, ex-band director, and a computer programmer, gave me a book on music harmony for Christmas. I kind of looked at it; after all, I was 10.

I started playing saxophone at 12 in 6th grade. In 7th grade, at Lanier Jr. High in Houston, I was put into a jazz band, knowing nothing about jazz. The director taught us well; I got hooked on jazz. One day, he taught us the blues scale. I took home my horn and noodled around, and this great lick came out of my horn. (To this day, I wish I remembered it!). Right then, I decided I wanted to be a jazz musician when I grew up. Discovered bari sax in 8th grade, and have been playing it ever since.

I also got much more serious about that harmony book; I worked all of the way through it. Once I realized that you did not have to hear what you were writing, the exercises were easy. Hearing the music would have to come later.

I attended the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in Houston for 10th grade. The first day of classes, I went to a class called "Music Theory". That day, they explained what treble and bass clef were, and where all of the notes on the staff were ("Every Good Boy Does Fine"). I was incredulous.

Afterwards, I went to the instructor and asked what was being taught in that course. He explained that we would learn intervals, triads, voice leading, major and minor chords, and dominant sevenths.

This was harmony, except that the modern term apparently was "theory". I told him I already knew this stuff. He then told me to hang on, and we went back to his office. He wrote out an 8-bar figured bass exercise, and told me to go voice lead the exercise, and bring it back a couple of days later.

Which is how I ended up as a sophomore in a class full of juniors for Theory II. My senior year at HSPVA they did not offer Theory III. I really wish that they had.

I got an academic scholarship, and a music scholarship to the University of Miami in Florida. Not quite all of the tuition was covered, but about 2/3's was. The first week, they gave me a music theory placement test. They put me in Theory II, where the first day, we went over voice leading dominant sevenths.

This was a big step backwards for me, so I asked the instructor why I was in that course. He said that I did not do well on the placement test. I asked him to show me, as I found that hard to believe.

He, and the head of the department, looked at my exam. And I saw the problem immediately. In music theory, you label chords with numbers, depending on where in the scale the root is. But you use Roman numerals. And you use CAPITAL letters for major, and small letters for minor. So far so good. So, V is a major chord starting on the 5th scale degree, and v is a minor chord starting on the 5th scale degree.

These people put bars across the top and bottom of their capital Roman numerals. I just used capital letters. They graded my test assuming I did not know the difference between major and minor.

The head of the department, Dr. Kam, told me to wait a few minutes. He came back out and said,

"We are putting you in Theory III".

I said, "Really? What did I not know?"

He said, "You missed Neopolitan Seconds, and Augmented Sixth Chords."

I said, "If you give me 24 hours, could I take the test again? I am sure I could learn them tonight."

He laughed, and said, "No. I want you to really learn them, not just memorize them for a placement test."

He didn't know me very well.

He taught my Theory III class. At least he was interesting; I slept through most of the class, doing the homework in the class room while everybody was gathering before the class started.

I then took his Theory IV class, 20th Century Music. And here is where the fun began. I loved it. I also got to know him pretty well. The class was a blast.

Midway through the semester, he asked the class for help. The Miami Theory Department was putting on a Contemporary Music Festival for an entire weekend. All kinds of strange stuff was being performed.

I only performed on saxophone twice at Miami because I did not make a jazz band. I practiced a bunch! I played bass and contrabass clarinet in Wind Ensemble, and played piccolo and alto flute on several recording sessions, and a couple of master's recitals. The first time I played sax, I read in the pit for Ain't Misbehaving. It was fun; the entire cast was black, of course, but the entire band was white and in the shadows.

The second time was in the Contemporary Music Festival. We had one performance piece in the music quad that consisted of four of us wearing Walkmans and headphones, improvising to chord changes that only we could hear.

The festival opened with atonal trumpet fanfares from the rooftops of the 360 dorm towers (somewhere around 12 stories tall), and went from there.

In the leadup to this festival, Dr. Kam surprised our theory class with a guest, the avant-guard composer John Cage. He was in town as a featured clinician for the festival. He came to the back of the class and sat down with us jazzers.

He was 69 years old. Near the end of the class, he turned around to the four of us hanging out in the back, and said, "You guys play jazz, right? I can tell."

We all nodded. He continued,

"You guys want to go out to the Everglades and get some mushrooms? I know a place that has really good ones. But I need a car."

I was as straight-laced about these things then as I am now, and bowed out, but the other three enthusiastically said yes.

I went through all of this to say that at least two of the guys who took John Cage out and got stoned ended up in the Miami Sound Machine a couple of years later, and at least one of them is in this video: