Like every jazz musician, I started at the age of five learning piano scales and Fur Elise. Every day, for two hours, up and down that damn keyboard till I thought it was gonna drive me nuts. I almost cried with joy when I got my first Schirmer's Book for Little Piano Players -- I can still see that bright yellow cover, and the tunes inside -- classics made easy -- made the wait worthwhile. I gravitated to jazz when I was maybe 20. I'd gone to a club with some friends, prepared to hate it, and discovered that when you cut through it, there's not much difference between a theme and variations by Haydn and an oboe player doing a riff on "Someone to Watch Over Me". So I started playing a bit here, a bit there. I found that, without too much work, you could take a little Mozart melody and make it work in service of something worthy of Benny Goodman. A few people noticed: I can still remember being at a pickup session and seeing a few knowing smiles when I used 32 bars from Beethoven's Second Violin Concerto as interpolation in "Funny Face". Felt kinda good, y'know? Now, as a soloist I was never really that good. Good enough for some of the lower clubs, but I'd never be a major player -- and I accepted that. So before long, I was mainly working this little place in the neigbourhood, down by the beach, little club that figured half a dozen customers was a hot night. Harry played piano better than me, so I started experimenting with horns -- bugle, trombone, trumpet. Gino played the string bass. All three of us were mediocre, but put us together, and man, what a sound. We just tuned into each other, trading lines and riffs, swinging the melody back and forth. Word got out a bit, and the club started picking up a little more on weekend nights when we were playing. It wasn't ever gonna be the Stork Club, but that was cool. We enjoyed what we did, and that was enough. Hell, we even got invited to perform at Louise Franklin's wedding: forty people applauded us -- most we ever got in a single room. What a rush. But it was always about the music, y'know? When me and Harry and Gino played together, it was like we were in another world or something. And I guess I thought we'd always be like that, playing together in this little club out on the beach. Then the war came. Gino and Harry enlisted. I couldn’t go: my knees. But we stayed in touch and made great plans about going to New York when everyone got back. Thing was, neither of them did. Harry went to Afghanistan and never came back. Gino went off to the Iraq and got blown up during the attack on Baghdad. So I stayed playing at the club. I was back on the piano, but my heart just wasn't in it anymore. The music just wasn't there. The manager noticed and quietly asked me to take a vacation -- his delicate way of telling me it was over. So one night I packed my stuff, headed home, and spent the rest of the night doing my laundry, paying my bills, cleaning the apartment. At sun up I walked out into the freezing Atlantic till I couldn't walk no more. Once the music was gone, there just wasn't any point, y'know? But hey, sometimes, out of bad stuff comes good. Gino and Harry and me play together now, and it's like nothing ever changed. We have a few public gigs every now and then, but mostly it's just the three of us, taking a little Goodman and a little Vivaldi and mixing 'em up to see what happens. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it don't. The right mix is there, somewhere. And we've got all eternity to find it.