WAMIs
[ JOAN JOHNSON (Lyle’s sister) ]
Lyle was inducted into the Wisconsin Area Music Industry's hall of fame in 2016. WAMIs are Wisconsin's version of the Grammy awards. I had the honor of delivering his acceptance speech and receiving the award on his behalf.
April 17, 2016 – WAMI (Wisconsin Area Music Industry) Awards Ceremony
Fox Cities Performing Arts Center, Appleton, Wisconsin
I would like to thank WAMI, the WAMI Board of Directors, and the WAMI Advisory Board for this great honor, but more importantly, I would like to thank them for their very existence and for their efforts in bringing attention and recognition to the musical arts, and by extension, art in general. This work is invaluable and greatly appreciated.
As a child, I was the beneficiary of many generous and selfless teachers who also brought the arts to my attention. I learned that beyond Vince Lombardi and Bart Starr, the state had given the world people like Les Paul and Frank Lloyd Wright. This knowledge expanded my world and started me on a path of learning and curiosity which still continues.
My musical journey might have started before I was born. My dad always enjoyed telling me how he played guitar and sang to me while I was still in the womb. I'm not sure if it worked, but I seemed to love music from a very early age. It is a great benefit to have musical parents and a musical household where extended family gatherings always included a jam session. Most significantly, I saw adults making music for the sheer joy of it all. That can have a big influence on a child. I learned to play the piano by ear before I was five. My mother also saw to my general education and taught me to read and write when I was four and often drilled me with math flash cards.
When I started first grade early, at five, I already knew what the other kids were learning, so my teacher, Lula Otto, offered to give me piano lessons – for free. I found out later that Lula offered that to all her students and had been doing it for over thirty years. Lula had taught my mother how to read music back when McAllister (population 40) had only a little one-room school house. Lula's sister, Lily Wickman, also offered free guitar lessons to all her 3rd graders, so I had started learning both my parents' instruments by the time I was seven. These women, through their volunteer efforts, gave me an invaluable head start, and their dedication was profound and moving.
Shortly after that, my parents bought me a theater organ and a set of encyclopedias. I kept playing the piano, and now the organ just for fun. I was improvising long before I knew what the word meant or what jazz even was. In my young Calvin and Hobbes brain, I was engaging in a kind of make believe, just dreaming stuff up. I didn't know at the time that that was supposed to be hard.
My parents let me play, but also searched for music teachers who could engage and challenge me. Eventually my dad took me to see Rose Baron in Wausaukee. He had grown up with her there and just had a hunch. Rose was an angel and a godsend. She was a very astute and caring individual and knew that to reach me, she had to reach both my head and my heart. She taught me formal piano lessons, but would also set aside another hour or two for us to jam afterwards. She would get on the piano. my dad would get out his guitar, and with me on the organ, we would play all the hits from the 1940's She made my weekly piano lessons into a party and a jam session, and I loved her like a second mother.
Not surprisingly, Rose's daughter, Kathleen, was also an expert and accomplished pianist. A few years later she taught me classical piano literature. Kathleen also married well. She had found Dean Wheelock, who became my high band director. The odds of three such accomplished musicians, all living in that tiny town, at the very time I would need them most are astounding to me. Wausaukee's population was only 500 at the time.
Dean lent me his entire jazz collection, which I mistakenly interpreted as a gift, yet he never said anything about it. Dean taught me to play the trumpet, arranged for me to take college correspondence courses in music theory, and told me about Daryl Aderman's Shell Lake Stage Band Camp, arranging early admission for me when I was 12.
I spent exactly one morning sitting at last chair trumpet in the last band at Shell Lake. After lunch, I found a piano in some hallway and started jamming on Dave Brubeck's “Take Five” with my left hand and improvising with my right. I soon drew a crowd. An instructor came by to see what all the fuss was about and literally yanked me from the bench. "Come with me," he instructed. He seemed angry and I thought I was in trouble. In fact, it was the birth of my jazz career. He sat me down at the piano in the top band and instructed the director, "Here is your soloist!!!"
I spent the next five years being the star of the Shell Lake Stage Band camps for two weeks out of the year while suffering through adolescence for the other 50. There were no other serious musicians, let alone jazz musicians in my small high school. It was a difficult trade-off. Pimples and emotional pain for 50 weeks out of the year followed by two weeks of jazz heaven in the summer. I wrote my first big band chart at age 13, met college recruiters and most importantly, met the late, great Rich Matteson, who was the leading jazz educator of the day.
Rich took a personal interest in me, becoming a kind of second father. When I was a high school sophomore, Rich flew me down to Dallas, TX for a week on his own dime to stay with him and study jazz improvisation and harmonic analysis with Jack Peterson, who had just completed a book on those subjects. I inhaled it all and never looked back.
I had also met Dominick Spera at Shell Lake, who was the director of the jazz program at UW-Eau Claire. Dominick arranged a full scholarship for me which kept me in Wisconsin for another two years. When I finally left Wisconsin, at age nineteen, I matriculated to North Texas because Rich Matteson was now teaching there. Two semesters later I made history by becoming the first person (undergrad, grad student or faculty member) to write all the charts for a lab band album; Lab 75 also became the first college ensemble album ever to get a Grammy nomination.
I was fortunate to go on to have a successful and surprisingly lucrative career (as no one goes into jazz for the money). I got to see the world, encounter some amazing people, and of course, continue to compose and improvise, which is all I was really after. But in a way it all started with some selfless sisters in McAllister who taught children music because they wanted to, not because they were paid to do it. I was the beneficiary of volunteer effort at every step in my journey, and I will never forget that.
That is why I teach and mentor today for free. That is why I donated a piano to the Bach Dancing and Dynamite Society in Madison. That is why I challenge you all to help some young musician or artist among you. That help really can pay off. They might surprise you, you will feel fantastic, and they might change the world.
Again, I thank WAMI for this honor, but the real award goes to those selfless, dedicated teachers who help students on in their journeys. I had genius teachers who expressed love as well as knowledge. It can happen in small towns as well as big cities. Art knows no boundaries.
Thank you and good night.
