Gift Of Inspired Trumpets
When my son was about 21⁄2 years old, a musician friend of mine said, "Get that boy a mouthpiece. He's got chops." He used to walk around the house blowing into any household item he could turn into an instrument. Once he got that trumpet mouthpiece, we couldn't stop him.
When he was 5 and we moved to Rochester, he had trouble falling asleep, so we bribed him. If he slept through the night for five nights in a row, we'd take him out for a treat. Instead of ice cream, he picked going to a performance of Gap Mangione at Woodcliff Hotel & Spa.
He eventually slept through the night uninterrupted. So we brought our 5-year-old to hear Gap. Our son loved it-and Gap, noticing the youngest member of the audience, couldn't have been nicer. He came over and discovered why we were there and suggested our son's first trumpet teacher, Mike Kalpa. Mike was incredibly patient with our little prodigy in private lessons, but finally said that given his attention span, maybe we should wait until he was a little older for those weekly lessons.
We've been so lucky to have the most amazing music teachers help our children to grow both musically and personally. We started both kids on piano lessons at 5. The teacher would come to our house and made the learn- ing fun with color coded books. As the kids got older we were lucky enough to find BJ Comer.
Comer, who had moved to Rochester so his wife could pursue her Ph.D., is an amazing trumpet player but he can also teach flute, clarinet, sax, French horn, trombone, tuba and piano. More important, he shows great interest in developing young musicians coming to their concerts, sharing his stories of playing around town, inviting them to see performances and to learn to love music for music's sake.
When the kids had to choose their instruments for the elementary school music program, my son's choice was obvious-trumpet. When my daughter picked the trumpet, I kept pushing her toward the sax. But apparently we Shermans have big mouths, lots of breath and that natural pucker. She blew me away with her talent.
Our son went on to play in the jazz band in middle school with the incredibly talented, but most patient and zen-like Paul Maguda, who gave him the opportunity to learn the solo on "Children of Sanchez." Given our Mangione love affair, we sat in the audience and cried.
Last weekend, our children provided the best Mother's Day gift ever by surprising me with an amazing rendition of "Route 66" played alongside Comer, his fellow musicians, our cousin Bobby Littman on mandolin and our friends, lawyer and drummer Vinnie Criscuolo and Shauna Hicks, star of Blood Brothers on Broadway.
As I listened to them I felt grateful for the legacy of musicianship in our family and here in Rochester- including the newly inducted members of Rochester's Music Hall of Fame. But I was even more grateful for teachers in school music programs like the new seventh-grade band teacher in Pittsford, Kevin Weber, who coached my daughter every day after school so her mother could cry a little.
You never know where the music will lead you. It could very well one day lead you as siblings back to the Eastman Theatre, just like Gap Mangione and his brother, Chuck.