Lee Cronbach

    Curtis Jones and Charley  Holley MY FIRST FREE DRUM CIRCLE  – In my last years at Berkeley I had a lot of musical firsts, as has been shown in Part one, Interlude     My first realization of tone deafness and first attempt to cure it; my first Latin jazz lessons; my first lessons in blues theory and blues scales; my first lesson in how to listen; and my first lesson in bop melody.             To complete the history of my firsts, I have to add my first experience in a free drum circle, which was to have the biggest impact on my music education and career.  (In the interest of completing this blog, I am saving most of the drum circle info I have for the Appendix.   This info is just to give the background to me and the Cooperative Artists Institute).             Telegraph Avenue is one of Berkeley’s major arteries.  It runs straight into the University of California at Berkeley and where the Avenue meets the college there is a little mini-square called Sather Gate.   Telegraph Avenu

                                          CHARLES BANACOS               I didn’t want to waste any more time on teachers who thought you couldn’t make an interesting re-harmonization of a Motown tune .   So, for two months I asked a lot of music students and musicians,” who is the best jazz piano teacher in Boston?”  And I soon found out that the almost universal favorite was Charley Banacos.  He was teaching now at a famous music school, but was soon going to leave to teach in his own independent studio.  People said Charley knew he was the attraction, and that he didn’t need to share his fees with anyone else.   (Later he told me, “They need me a lot more than I need them.’)                 I didn’t have a phone number for Charley.  All I knew was his teaching schedule at the school.  So, I decided to just ‘cold-call’ Mr. Banacos, just go up to the door of his studio and knock.   (I was so eager that I didn’t even think about how a teacher could get really annoyed at someone interrup

  (This is the pianist, Rahn Burton, who by soloing for 10 minutes on a pop Motown song in many different classical and jazz styles convinced me to forget about music schools and look for the best private teachers ) RAHN BURTON (VIA RAHSAAN ROLAND KIRK) SENDS A MESSAGE               After Frosty's band broke up I continued studying music, returning to the music school (from which I had dropped out to travel with Frosty's band) to study music theory.             I was given a grad student there to tutor me.  On the second week he gave me an assignment, to re-harmonize a popular song.  I was into Motown at the time (thanks to Marvin Gaye's opus) and chose 'My Girl' as the song to be the source of the harmonic variations.             When I told my tutor the name of the song I had worked on, he shook his head in a vigorous negative.  "No, Lee.  I meant a standard or Broadway song, something with 32 bars and a lot of harmonic movement already in it. You cannot poss

                                               BEN PETRUCCI                  1. Meeting Ben  -  In 1973 I was coming out of my economic and spiritual depression.   I had found my teachers, the ones I had come to Boston hoping to find. My back had healed enough that I was mobile again, so I started asking  Frosty's   friends in Cambridge if they knew of any bands that wanted a keyboardist.             Most rock musicians loved Frosty.  He had the best and most modern musical equipment, he had a really clean sound and was a solid soloist; he was also a part-time athlete, and his music taste was similar to theirs.  So Frosty got lots of work - within a year of the breakup of Sweet Blindness, Frosty was working the East Coast circuit playing rhythm guitar with some major names.                But I was too strange for the regular rock musicians.    It was still very unusual for a musician to be openly gay - I saw several well-known rock musicians in gay lounges, and it was always "