You Made How much For Doing What?

Music raised its head in my life when I was between two and four years old, when my brother started taking piano lessons. When the teacher arrived (yes, they used to come to the house in those days), my mother would put me down for my nap. Later, when I got up from my nap, I would go out to the piano and play what my brother had played during his lesson. Then I would do my parlor act: I would turn my back to the keyboard and have my brother play a note on the piano. Then I would turn around to the keyboard and play the same note that he had played.

While writing this book, I talked to my brother about this chapter, and he was still pissed off about this (his words, not mine). He had spent several hours over several more days trying to learn to do this, without success. To this day it still bugs him, but perfect pitch is something that you are born with, and it really is a gift.

However, now I see ads in our musicians union paper where people are selling products to help potential students “learn perfect pitch.”

When I was in the second grade, a third grade teacher started an afterschool class to teach third graders how to play the harmonica. Since I was only in the second grade, I didn’t qualify to take the class, but because I had a background in the chromatic harmonica and could read music on the instrument, I was granted an audition for the teacher, who accepted me into the class. Thus began my long climb in the harmonica world.

In the 1930s I was very ill for a time and spent six months in bed. I had to stop all extracurricular activities beyond my schoolwork, which my mother brought home to me for homeschooling so that I might keep up with my class.

When I was twelve and well again, my mother thought it was time for me to start taking music lessons again, so I started taking piano lessons. But after a while I decided that the piano wasn’t it for me. So I started playing the harmonica again and got books and reading exercises for the instrument. When I was fifteen, we all decided that I should take harmonica lessons. My father called around and found a harmonica teacher; his name was Ken Forshee. He played professionally as an entertainer under the name of Johnny Kay.

After about six months I realized that I knew as much about playing the harmonica as my teacher did. So again my father came to the rescue and called around town and found out that Jerry Adler, brother of the harmonica virtuoso Larry Adler, was living in Los Angeles. Suddenly (it seemed sudden to me) I was down at Jerry’s store in the upstairs loft playing an audition for him. He evidently liked what he heard because he offered to take me on as a student for nothing. So I paid nothing for my lessons.

I learned a lot from Jerry, and I still consider him to be one of the best ballad players on the harmonica that I have ever heard. But after about two years I decided it was time that I stopped taking regular lessons from Jerry and tried to develop my own style and sound, because I was starting to sound like Jerry and was really becoming his clone. So I stopped the regular lessons, but I continued to see him from time to time, when I would play for him and have a lesson.