Wednesday Nights at Burberry's

Every Wednesday night, Burberry's filled with cigarette smoke, jazz standards, regular customers, and whatever happened to be left on the happy-hour buffet.

My mom and grandfather were usually there. A local preacher and his wife rarely missed a week. Musicians drifted in and out carrying horns, drumsticks, and instrument cases. Some came to listen. Some came to sit in. Wednesday night jazz had simply become part of life in Amarillo.

When I first started playing there, I was a student at Amarillo College who knew very little about jazz.

At the time I was mostly listening to punk bands like NOFX, Face to Face, Dead Kennedys, Propagandhi, The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, and Voodoo Glow Skulls. I was already playing punk shows around town and thought of myself primarily as a drummer.

That changed when I joined the Amarillo College Jazz Band and met Dr. Jim Laughlin.

Jim was one of those rare teachers who made complicated things seem simple. Amarillo College's jazz band wasn't just students. Community members played alongside us, and many of the older musicians were incredibly supportive of the younger players. Looking back, I learned as much from those musicians as I did from any classroom.

One day Jim handed me a loose-leaf copy of the Real Book and told me to get it copied and bound.

Looking back, that simple gesture changed the course of my musical life.

Tunes like Autumn Leaves and Blue Bossa became my classroom. The Real Book opened the door to harmony, improvisation, and the language of jazz.

What attracted me to jazz wasn't sophistication.

It was energy.

Coming from punk rock, I connected immediately with the intensity of players like Max Roach, Art Blakey, Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, and Eric Dolphy. The vocabulary was different, but the commitment felt familiar.

I remember standing outside a party listening to Coltrane and Dolphy's Live at the Village Vanguard when an old friend asked, "What is that, smooth jazz?"

Smooth jazz?

To me it sounded like Coltrane and Dolphy shredding the very fabric of space and time.

Around that same period, my drum teacher Randy Markham moved away from Amarillo. Through a fortunate turn of events, I stepped into his spot playing drums with Jimmy James at Burberry's.

The original trio featured Jimmy James, pianist E.P. Simmons, and myself on drums. E.P. would split his keyboard, playing bass lines with his left hand while comping piano with his right. When it came time for a piano solo, Jimmy would switch to an electric bass supported by a cut-off golf club attached to the instrument. It looked strange, but it worked.

The gig paid fifty dollars a week, which for a college student felt like a pretty sweet deal. More importantly, it was the first time anyone had ever paid me to play music. Until then I'd mostly been playing punk shows for the energy, the community, and the experience. Burberry's was the first time I realized that making music could also be a profession.

Over time I became more interested in piano and eventually switched to a Rhodes electric piano.

The Rhodes became my primary gigging instrument for years.

The Rhodes wasn't a refrigerator.

It was more like a coffin containing the body of a previous musical era.

It sounded glorious and weighed every bit as much as you'd expect.

I eventually bought a dolly and learned how to drag it up staircases one step at a time. After enough gigs—and enough suffering—I got smart and started asking other musicians for help.

After several years living in Denton, I returned to Amarillo and stepped back into the Wednesday night gig, this time as the pianist.

Then one summer Jim decided to take some time off.

He told me that if I wanted to keep the gig going, I should just play it as a trio.

That sounded simple enough.

It wasn't.

Up to that point I knew how to play tunes. I wasn't sure I knew how to lead a band.

The first night, Perry Justus was on drums and Mark Cota was on bass. We showed up, called standards we knew, and started playing.

That was the entire plan.

No grand strategy.

No rehearsal.

Just music.

By the end of the night I remember thinking:

"Oh wow. That went pretty good."

That may not sound like much, but it was a turning point.

Those Wednesday nights gave me the confidence to start booking my own gigs, leading my own groups, and eventually forming The Fakebooks. Along the way I started bringing in original tunes as well. One of them, The Square Root of -1, became a regular feature on local gigs. Musicians seemed to enjoy playing it, and audiences always got a kick out of the title.

Looking back, I already understood something about musical community from playing in punk bands. What I found in Amarillo's jazz scene was a different version of the same thing: older musicians helping younger musicians, students playing alongside professionals, and people gathering every week because they loved the music.

I thought I was learning tunes.

What I was really learning was what a life in music could look like.