I was trying to do that, really.) Those recordings were incorporated into a collaborative electronica album I made in 2009 called Montre Echo: The Near Forever. (Another record I loved was Switched-on Bach by Wendy Carlos. I have those tapes! You can follow my mental musical development: the first was “lasers! and R2-D2!” and by the end, I was doing Bach 3-part inventions. Once a week after school (in kindergarten and first grade) I’d walk across the bridge to the university and go into this room with this Arp synthesizer and he’d teach me how to program it. At the time, the only people who had modular synthesizers were stars like Stevie Wonder, John Lennon, and university laboratories. ![]() There was a student of my father’s at the university that agreed to teach me how to program this instrument. ![]() That final scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, where the mothership comes down and they have that Arp 2500 with two or three manuals, and they play the now-famous theme and all the permutations: I thought that was the coolest thing. I was really fascinated with electronics, not just what Chick Corea and Joe Zawinul were doing, but what I heard on film soundtracks as well. My first instrument was actually an Arp 2600 synthesizer. I played all three of those records over and over until there were no grooves left. As a kindergartener my favorite three records were Weather Report Black Market, Chick Corea The Leprechaun, and Oscar Brown Jr. I was born in 1970, and my dad and mom had a really hip record collection. My dad was actually in the room when Alan Dawson told Tony Williams, “There’s nothing more I can teach you, you need to go on the road (with Jaki Byard).” GK: Yes, he did, because Gary was still studying drums then, too. In UW Eau Claire, my dad was one of two people in the jazz department, although he taught classical percussion as well.ĮI: Your father, Ron, once told me that when he was a student at Berklee, he had the slot with Alan Dawson in between Gary Burton and Tony Williams. My mom is a classical French horn player - she also taught piano and voice - and my dad is a jazz drummer. Geoffrey Keezer: Both of my parents are musicians and music teachers. You must have been attracted to music at a very young age. But, since we are both from nearby small towns in Wisconsin - when I was in high school, people would ask me, “Are you going to be the next Geoffrey Keezer?” - I thought for this next hour we could go back and cover some of your unusual early history. We could talk forever about all sorts of things. (This interview was done during the 2017 Blue Note at Sea jazz cruise.)Įthan Iverson: Geoffrey, of all the people in my peer group, I can’t think of anyone else who has played with a longer list of older masters and younger turks than you.
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