Let's get personal for a moment. Well, actually, I'll get personal and all you have to do is read along.

While there are a few new CDs I'm enjoying right now, I figured I'd devote this month's column to my own musical background. That way, when I make CD recommendations down the road, you'll have an idea of "where I'm coming from," as the kids say-wait, they don't say that anymore? Yikes.

Some of you have seen me playing around town with Mo' Ritmo, my funk/jazz group. One of the things that made our move to San Miguel possible was the number of genuinely talented musicians here. I've also sat in with Gil and Cartas and the guys at Tío Lucas, and there are several other players I'm looking forward to working with here in town. 

But every story has a beginning, and mine was in San Diego on a street appropriately called Art Street. My dad was a terrific painter and an amateur musician. My older brother, Andy, was coerced into taking violin lessons at the age of 10. When he practiced, he looked as if he was being forced to walk on hot coals. 

Dad owned a couple of bars, and his enormous collection of recordings (45s, mostly) was like a lending library for jukeboxes. I remember him auditioning all the newest music on the Motorola console stereo in our living room. Thanks to his eclectic tastes, my brother and I were exposed to Marty Robbins, Ray Charles, Chuck Berry, Floyd Kramer and Elvis. We liked it all, but nothing prepared us for the first time we heard The Beatles.

It was 1963 when my dad called Andy and me into the room and said, "Tell me what you think of these guys." The song was "I Saw Her Standing There." That joyous beat had us bouncing around the room as we listened over and over. Later that week, The Beatles debuted on Ed Sullivan and both Andy and I were hooked: we wanted to be musicians.

A week later, Andy got his first drumset-a blue sparkle Ludwig four-piece. We never saw his violin again. He was a natural drummer, and within no time at all he had formed a neighborhood band that held its weekly practices in our garage. This is a time-honored tradition that lives on today. If you've got a garage band in your neighborhood, do your best to overlook the off-key vocals and pulsating rhythm sections, and try to appreciate the hormone-driven creativity exploding through the walls.

Right around the same time, I was selected for an experimental electronics class at the age of nine. On my first day, I set a wall on fire while attempting to create a circuit by plugging two ends of a wire into a wall socket. The teacher didn't appreciate my innovative experiment, so I was ejected from the class and deposited in a beginning piano class. That afternoon, the piano teacher called my folks and urged them to buy or rent a piano for me. Turned out that I was a natural, too.

I will always be grateful to my folks for what followed: a day later, a piano was sitting in our living room. I sat down and immediately played a song from the radio by ear. I also had a private teacher. Her name was Mrs. Foote, and she was approximately 140 years old. She'd sit with a snoring Pekinese tucked under her arm and sob loudly whenever I played her favorite song. After a few months of that, I went on strike and the lessons ended.

I still played every day, though. And not just the piano-by the time I was in junior high school, I'd discovered that Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder could also play drums, bass and guitar. I picked up these instruments easily, learning tricks from anyone with an hour's more experience than I had. The thought never occured to me that most other musicians spent their lives playing a single instrument-I wanted to play everyting I saw.

Every day was filled with making music: playing drums in my own garage band, guitar at the beach for my hippie friends or piano in the school auditorium on my lunch break. I had lots of talented friends, even back then. I played in many bands with bassist Nathan East, who today plays with Eric Clapton, as well as pianist Carl Evans, Jr. (Fattburger) and saxophonist Hollis Gentry III (Larry Carlton).



At first, I was focused solely on rock and roll, the louder the better. But one day I got an offer I couldn't refuse-15 dollars to sit in with a jazz band.

I didn't know a thing about jazz, but the money was too much for a kid to turn down. The rehearsal for that gig was remarkable for a few reasons. Number one, it was the first time I'd ever been the only white kid in the room. Number two, Hollis-a lanky 14-year-old who smoked and had a voice as deep as Barry White's-immediately counted off a song I'd never heard before! I stopped the band and said "Hey, guys-I don't exactly know what to play here." Hollis smiled knowingly and said, "Hey, this is jazz. All you need to do is play what you feel," as he pointed to his heart.

I think that one inspirational comment jump-started puberty. Until then, I was always worried about coming up with the right notes, but that afternoon I realized that they might have been inside me all along. Thus began my lifelong love affair with the intimate and expressive art form known as jazz. 

My main instruments were drums and piano, and I was playing both professionally by the time I was 13. Though I played in an award-winning high-school jazz ensemble, I also dabbled in classical music, country, folk/rock and blues. 

I had one other interest in my life: an experimental community called Synanon, which had its origins as a drug rehab program in the late '50s. By the early '70s, the population of Synanon was split evenly between ex-addicts and non-addicts like me who were affectionately referred to as "squares." I was drawn to helping others get their lives back on track, but I was also blown away by some of the talented screwups who came though Synanon's doors. Drug abuse was pretty common in the entertainment community, so we never had a shortage of musicians, actors or writers. As a result, there was nonstop fun for a guy like me who loved the challenge of playing in an off-off-off-Broadway show one day, a gospel choir the next and a Bach recital on the weekend. 

And then came a turning point. I had three scholarships to study music at Cal State Northridge, a fine school for jazz musicians in Los Angeles. I knew a lot of full-time music students, and while they were excellent players, I actually found their lives to be pretty one-dimensional. In Synanon, I sensed the chance to become more than just another good musician in the end. I had been informally apprenticing with Frank Rehak, a legendary bebop trombonist who had played with Miles Davis and John Coltrane before his heroin addiction had made it impossible to keep up. But Frank had cleaned up in Synanon and decided to stick around and give back to the community that had saved his life. He got married and began teaching music to the kids in the kibbutz-style school. 

I presented my options to Frank one day and asked for his counsel. It was a great moment when he told me that I was good enough to do well at Cal State. Then he made me an offer I'd been hoping for: If I chose a career at Synanon instead, he'd personally take over my music education. I believe Frank's exact words were: "I promise you you'll never regret it." And so it happened that in October of 1973, at the age of 18, I moved into Synanon as a resident. Frank immediately started me on a boot camp-like regimen of theory, harmony and trombone classes, as well as tape editing and bandstand etiquette (which included everything from making sure the musicians got fed at gigs to polishing all of the equipment that had been donated to the organization over the past 20 years). He also enlisted a wicked Zen master piano coach who showed me new ways to approach my main instrument. He was a scary but brilliant teacher who had me reharmonizing Bach chorales within 10 minutes of instruction.

I came of age playing with these men. For the last 15 years of his life, Frank Rehak was my mentor and friend. Before he died of throat cancer, we fielded loving calls (and some job offers) from Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis and Frank Sinatra. Today, his trombone sits on top of an urn with his ashes in our San Diego home. (If you'd like to hear an amazing track Frank and I recorded, go to www.dougrobinson.com/rare1.shtml and download the mp3 of "It's Alright with Me.")

In the late '80s, the technology to make decent home recordings became affordable, and I jumped in head first. My first album was a cassette-only affair called Fine Tunes. I discovered that I was one of the rare musicians actually born with a business gene when I sold 2,500 copies to a pharmaceutical company looking for a tradeshow giveaway. This started my wife and me on the path of selling the music from subsequent albums to corporations who used our custom CDs in place of more traditional gifts like ballcaps, pens and keychains emblazoned with their logos. I had been overdubbing most of the tracks myself, but since I was actually making part of my living from my music-a dream come true-I decided to splurge and start recording with big-name artists. In the mid-'90s, I flew to New York City and enlisted guitarist Mike Stern and bassist John Patitucci, two of my role models, for a CD called Plays Well With Others. It was an exhilarating and addictive experience that I've since been able to replicate on both coasts with other amazing musicians.

Today, I spend a good amount of time producing excellent artists who would otherwise get lost in the shuffle of a dysfunctional music industry with nothing but short-term gains on its mind. I've scored some commercial videos and a feature film. My San Miguel band, Mo' Ritmo, is not only in the middle of recording our first album, we're also producing a great concert at the Teatro Ángela Peralta on July 7-a jazz tribute to Ray Charles. By the time you read this column, Glenda and I will be settled back into our Los Frailes home after a couple of months' indulgence in the empty pleasures of San Diego: fast freeways, multiplexes and music stores with hot and cold running inventory. Back to the richer life of San Miguel, where the simple act of buying a screwdriver and some bread can take you halfway across the city, make you some new friends and teach you a few new words in a beautiful language.

So that's my story. Next column, we'll talk about some new music!


Doug Robinson is a composer and multi-instrumentalist who performs with the jazz/funk group Mo' Ritmo here in San Miguel.