Postby Jazzooo » June 26th, 2014, 6:17 pm
I appreciate the invite! Congrats and thanks to Scott for taking the initiative and to Ron and Justin for keeping it rolling.
My life has been a bit of a rollercoaster since I split up with Glenda almost 3 years ago. Not my best decision, but I've heard that life goes on and what do you know--it often does. I started a passionate relationship with the wrong woman, which has been ending since last november. It took me to places in my home country of almost 9 years, Mexico, that I might never have discovered and there were lots of positives but peace wasn't among them.
I am now wrapping up almost 2 years of life on the Pacific Coast, north of the puerto Vallarta region, which has been a mixed experience--started the best trio of my life and met my new love, but also have witnessed the horrifying effects of tropical humidity on my beloved piano and other instruments. As a result, Denise--a lovely Hungarian Jewish Mexicana--and I are moving back to San miguel de Allende this weekend!
Beyond playing live, I've been working on a great project I'm calling The Ultimate Frank Rehak Website. Frank was a terrific bebop trombonist, a contemporary of Urbie Green, Frank Rosolino, Billy Byers back in the '50s and '60s, but his career was hampered greatly by heroin addiction. I met him when he came to Synanon to clean up for the last time, and we became good friends. IN fact, he was my mentor for a solid 15 years before his death in '87.
A couple of years ago, my friend and his widow Sandy sent me a box of literally hundreds of cassettes, albums and odds and ends with Frank soloing next to Cannonball, Miles, Trane, Basie, Evans (Gil and Bill), and it just goes on and on. Through some detective work, I also discovered more obscure groupings where Frank was heavily featured, such as an Ernestine Anderson project from 1963, some Charlie Barnett recordings and a piece that john Cage wrote specifically for Frank.
I decided to digitize it all and as of now I've got over 200 tracks and excerpts of Frank at his best from every era...including over a dozen of recordings that no one outside of the Synanon community has ever heard until now. You think he was attention-worthy when he was a junkie? Wait till you hear him straight and strong. i've also got amazing interviews with Frank where he talks about his career and misadventures, as well as planning his own celebration of life only weeks before he slipped into his final coma.
I hope to have the site go live, with links to the best recorded solos of his life and his stories, photos and so on, by the end of the year. It's taken a massive amount of time so far, but I might be getting near the end!
