Lee Cronbach

Smoke on a set break in our club. From left to right: John Kleckley drums, Huey bass guitarist,  Kenny bandleader and saxophone, Lee Cronbach aka 'Groucho' ("Don't get grouchy, Grucho!")      5. JOHN KLECKLEY and SMOKE   -  I ran into my last Boston teacher unexpectedly, when I got invited to join Smoke, an R&B band that was playing in Roxbury - one of the Black neighborhoods of Boston.  The offer came in 1975, when I was already thinking about leaving Boston for either New York City or Los Angeles.          I fell in love with Smoke, as I had with Tribal Rhythms and Boston Elevated Railway, on first playing with them.  What really made them outstanding was an incredibly tight and smoking drum and bass partnership.  John Kleckley, the drummer, had come from Philadelphia where he had played with the Gamble and Huff team, both in their Philadelphia International studio an...

                                                            Prof Norden: photo taken in April 1986 by Rav Avraham at Boston College campus            Now that I had found my jazz teacher, I needed to find a classical theory teacher (harmony, counterpoint, and so on).  I started browsing through books on music theory, and soon felt the same dissatisfaction I had with my music school tutor.  Again the focus was on what you couldn’t, shouldn’t, don’t dream of doing, laid out in the form of proscriptive rules.    One common rule forbade writing more than two consecutive thirds in the same voices in a row.  (For example, it was forbidden to write c/e - b/d - a/c, where the first note of each third was always in the Soprano voice, and the second always in the Alto. ...