[Dixielandjazz] bios

[Don Kirkman]

Bob Ringwald earlier wrote:

>These are all very good ideas.  It might be nice for some of us old timers
>on the list to reintroduce ourselves to the List as we have a lot of new
>members.  I'll do that in a separate post.

I'm probably the closest thing to an outsider on this list, being
non-musical and all that.  I had a few months of piano lessons before
the start of WW II changed our family lifestyle, but although the
classically-oriented teacher agreed to let me "study" popular music
style I can't remember any explicit theory or practice on chords or
leading or progressions, just a little Hanon and Czerny (very little, at
least in the way of results).  

A few years later Spike Jones passed through our central California town
on a one-nighter, and my interest was piqued--he was already on the
radio regularly, and "Behind Those Swinging Doors" and "Der Fuehrer's
Face" were indelibly stamped in my memory.  Not too long after, I
arrived at Berkeley where my roommate had picked up some records from a
band he'd heard of somewhere--Lu Watters and the Yerba Buena Jazz Band.
He and I began sharing records, each of us buying what the other one
didn't have, and on one very happy occasion Lu and the band, then
playing at Hambone Kelly's, were featured at a football rally on campus.
I was solidly hooked from then on, both by OKOM and by ragtime as
exemplified by Wally Rose.  I've never been able to get enough of either
ever since, and I've been trying for over fifty years.

After leaving service and bringing a newly acquired wife back to
Berkeley, I had the chance to introduce her to Spike Jones' style at the
State fairgrounds in Sacramento sometime in the 1950s.

On my best days my piano is mediocre, but I still run through folios and
sheet music of maybe close to a couple hundred rags and try to OKOMize
from about a dozen fake books, legitimate and otherwise.

It's been a pleasure to sit back here in DJML and hear tales of how it
was in olden times, to actually see messages written by folks with
familiar names, and just generally to reminisce--thanks for letting me
sit in.
-- 
Don
donkirk at covad.net