There are teachers and then there are teachers. Dan is one of those guys who's playing with me on every gig. We get decent instruction and learn licks and stuff from all over but once in a while we encounter that one person who arranges all those musical pieces in an order to us that makes sense. for me, that guy was Dan Pliskow.
My wife encouraged me to get reading lessons. It was the "only way" I'd ever get in a traditional wedding band and make better gig money.
Going out to get the mail one day, there's the phone book on my porch. That pulpy monstrosity we get annually that's been replaced by handhelds & Google & Bing. Concluding a discussion with my wife, I didn't quite get the whole thing on the counter and it fell to the floor...falling open to a page that read; Musical Instruction for Bass, Dan Pliskow and his number.
Taking this as a sign, I called right away & began reading lessons. The SIMADL book was where I started with Dan but we got into all sorts of lessons about Jazz, and Popular Music including Sinatra, Herb Alpert, Burt Bacharach and the kinds of music that would be requested for auditions of traditional acts. Dan walked me through charts of all sorts of standards. I got ok at it but occasionally he had to play to correct or show me some phrasing.
That's when "whoa!" became as common a word I would use as 'the', 'it' or 'huh'. He had such a touch, an easy way of making it ALL make sense. The bass danced when he would play it and the notes fell into place. Music suddenly made sense. I saw and learned what was possible.
When I got cancer, he came to the hospital and visited. We talked on the phone as I convalesced and I came back to study again and this time, I actually started to "get it". Minus experience mind you, but coming from being so ill as to not even been able to stand or even hold an instrument on my lap on a couch, I dug into his instructions with a 'time is of the essence' nature. Eventually, I had to break off lessons and get some real time experience which involved hard lessons where you have only yourself to reflect on what went good at an audition and what went wrong.
We still talked a lot on the phone. I stopped in a few times to visit but you get busy, time passes and then you get that call. This time it was from his wife Phyllis, who informed me of cancer ravaging Dan's internals and that chemo or treatment was out of the question. Hospice was already called.
Dan and I talked on the phone. I wanted to visit but, he was not up for much. He passed with his family at his bedside. He was 79.
Dan was that guy who would get the call to play in the orchestra pit, on TV, on radio. Dan worked the Jazz circuit around metro Detroit for decades and recorded and backed some well known local and national names. A professional to the end, he could show up and sight read the gig or just have the bandleader call 'em out and he'd be as solid as ever.
My wife encouraged me to get reading lessons. It was the "only way" I'd ever get in a traditional wedding band and make better gig money.
Going out to get the mail one day, there's the phone book on my porch. That pulpy monstrosity we get annually that's been replaced by handhelds & Google & Bing. Concluding a discussion with my wife, I didn't quite get the whole thing on the counter and it fell to the floor...falling open to a page that read; Musical Instruction for Bass, Dan Pliskow and his number.
Taking this as a sign, I called right away & began reading lessons. The SIMADL book was where I started with Dan but we got into all sorts of lessons about Jazz, and Popular Music including Sinatra, Herb Alpert, Burt Bacharach and the kinds of music that would be requested for auditions of traditional acts. Dan walked me through charts of all sorts of standards. I got ok at it but occasionally he had to play to correct or show me some phrasing.
That's when "whoa!" became as common a word I would use as 'the', 'it' or 'huh'. He had such a touch, an easy way of making it ALL make sense. The bass danced when he would play it and the notes fell into place. Music suddenly made sense. I saw and learned what was possible.
When I got cancer, he came to the hospital and visited. We talked on the phone as I convalesced and I came back to study again and this time, I actually started to "get it". Minus experience mind you, but coming from being so ill as to not even been able to stand or even hold an instrument on my lap on a couch, I dug into his instructions with a 'time is of the essence' nature. Eventually, I had to break off lessons and get some real time experience which involved hard lessons where you have only yourself to reflect on what went good at an audition and what went wrong.
We still talked a lot on the phone. I stopped in a few times to visit but you get busy, time passes and then you get that call. This time it was from his wife Phyllis, who informed me of cancer ravaging Dan's internals and that chemo or treatment was out of the question. Hospice was already called.
Dan and I talked on the phone. I wanted to visit but, he was not up for much. He passed with his family at his bedside. He was 79.
Dan was that guy who would get the call to play in the orchestra pit, on TV, on radio. Dan worked the Jazz circuit around metro Detroit for decades and recorded and backed some well known local and national names. A professional to the end, he could show up and sight read the gig or just have the bandleader call 'em out and he'd be as solid as ever.
