The Story of my dad’s last time in the studio.
When I was 16, my dad gave me a list of 30 standards and told me to memorize the sheet music and be able to arpeggiate the chords. He made me cassette copies from sides deep within his prodigious record collection, especially versions by Stan Getz, Bird, Ben Webster, Art Tatum and Duke Ellington. Even though I was struggling to make the changes then, by internalizing the list, I had unwittingly set myself up for a career as a jazz musician.
Naturally, the duo of tenor and piano served as my first professional vehicle for going all the way to my very first at a folksy country club overlooking Canyon Lake. As the years went by, we were “holding down the fort” with our weekly duo gigs at The Faust Hotel, The St. Anthony Hotel and Los Barrios Restaurant. We must have easily chalked up a hundred gigs together by the time we recorded The Last Session. A few months before I moved from my beloved home state of Texas, friend and fellow musician Steven Heffelfinger suggested I record some tracks with my father at his home studio in New Braunfels.
It was 2006, four years into my father’s battle with Alzheimer’s disease.
I’m glad Steven was persistent and am ultimately happy with the outcome. Deep down, I knew this would most likely be my dad’s last session. The rapid mental decline associated with Alzheimer’s rendered my dad helpless. He knew neither which day nor month it was, who was the President of the United States nor his physical location, but he could still play.
On these recordings, there are moments when you can clearly hear my father struggling to maintain his mental grip. We recorded about 15 tunes that day and we did it raw, no editing with just a cursory mixing job. I thought I’d never release these recordings because my dad was such a strong player and I thought these sides showed too much vulnerability. But looking on these recordings now, they represent something far greater. They are nothing shy of his heart and soul. You can hear him trying, you can hear him remembering and you can always hear him swinging.
Now I have compiled these recordings into an EP for us all to enjoy. It’s actually a pretty good listen. Just click the photo below:
Yours in music,
Stan Killian