College
After enrolling in Occidental College in 1964, I continued in chorus for a year and then had a terrific time singing barbershop quartet with my fraternity brothers. We often rehearsed in the frat house shower room to achieve clear resonance of the close harmonies that we sang. We always won the inter-fraternity competition. When one of the brothers got pinned to a sorority girl, we sometimes sang Sweet Adeline outside her sorority house, substituting her name for Adeline.
​
My life-long friend and occasional Occidental roommate, Marty Maner, and I formed a group presumptuously named The Occidental Jazz Quartet (or OJQ after the famous moniker MJQ that stood for the distinctively stellar “Modern Jazz Quartet”). We played for college events and Greek-life parties. This party photo shows another life-long friend, Ron Leachman, on bass guitar on my right, Marty Maner on trumpet and flugelhorn on my left and to his left drummer Roland Pang.
We re-convened to play at our 50th college reunion in 2018 and share the friendship and musicianship that lasts to this day.
Following my lessons with Preston, I was lucky enough to study briefly with Clare Fischer, one of the most inventive jazz pianists of the time and a gifted composer and arranger. The connection with him was made via my Oxy classmate and jazz enthusiast, Jonathan Horwich, who collaborated with Oxy biology professor, Willian Hardy, to form Revelation Records. Hardy was a jazz devotee and published journalist. He was well acquainted with Clare and introduced me to him. I was too much of a novice to fully appreciate what Clare could teach me, but have fond memories of having lessons in his Hollywood Hills home.
Being in Los Angeles for college offered me opportunities to take lessons from two highly regarded and completely different musicians. The first was Don Preston, who played keyboards for The Mothers of Invention. We met at Rowena’s Art Gallery in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles, and when the entire group walked in, I was taken aback at their looks. This was 1966 and the Beatles hair was still controversial. The Mothers were a step beyond. Working with Don Preston, shown to the right of Zappa, was a useful but strange experience for a clean-cut college kid.
