The Story of My Life So Far, Written by Me but Told Mostly in the Third Person
By Chris Kelsey
Chris Kelsey was born in Bangor, Maine on June 5, 1961. Maine proved far too ecologically-varied and close to natural bodies of water, so his family soon relocated to Oklahoma, a flat and dry (in more ways than one—the beer was 3.2 and the state didn’t allow the legal sale of liquor in bars until the ‘80s) place, where they’d live for most of the next 25 years (except for four years in Texas, an even flatter and dryer place).
Chris showed exceptional musical aptitude as a child and began playing flute at the age of ten. Flute was soon supplanted by the more-socially-acceptable-for-a-heterosexual-male alto saxophone, which became his primary horn for the next 18 years. Chris won lots of awards as a schoolboy saxophonist, earning scholarship offers from colleges far and wide. The thought of leaving Oklahoma to attend a top music school never seemed to occur to the timid, jazz-loving adolescent, however, and he ended up making the worst possible choice—the University of Oklahoma in Norman, a mere 10 miles or so from his home.
The best thing about the OU School of Music was its kickass marching band, which played in support of the school’s even more kickass football team. Unfortunately, the rest of the music department was mediocre, made worse by its virtually non-existent jazz component.
Chris attended OU for three painful, largely friendless and mostly wasted years, before finally getting off his ass and transferring to Central State University (now the University of Central Oklahoma) in Edmond, which—while not exactly the hub of nonconformist creativity that Chris craved—at least had a thriving stage band program. After two relatively happy years at Central, Chris earned his Bachelors Degree in Music Education, which he's never used, thanks mostly to a profoundly traumatic student-teaching experience (much screaming and throwing of drum sticks, mostly at, but not by, Chris).
Chris took his diploma and—rather than teach, or play what he considered demeaning commercial music gigs—got a job as a convenience store clerk working the graveyard shift (nothing demeaning about that). Chris’ store was known throughout the land as the pornography capitol of central Oklahoma. His shift—11 pm to 7 am—comprised the prime porno-viewing hours.
In those pre-internet days, the only way for a cheapskate perv to get his free porno fix was to stand in front of the magazine rack at his friendly neighborhood convenience store, head down and shoulders hunched for hours and hours, studying intently the content of such publications as Big Boobs (not to be confused with Big Boobs Double D-Plus! ), Leg Show, Lipps, Club, and the notorious BUF (the title an acronym for “big ugly females”). For the more literary-minded, the store also sold such erotic paperback masterpieces as Dogged Out Nun and Lesbian Sorority Gang Bang (don’t ask me, I was scared to even look at the covers, much less read them). Working alone during those wee hours, Chris never lacked for company, albeit silent, sullen, and exclusively male.
After two years at the convenience store, Chris helped his parents move to Florida, where he worked for a couple of months at another convenience store in order to save enough money to move to New York City, which he did on October 21, 1986 … by coincidence, the night of Game Three of that year’s World Series between the New York Mets and Boston Red Sox. The Mets won that night, which Chris saw as a good omen, being a rabid life-long Mets fan. They went on to win the Series in memorable fashion, after which they were celebrated with a ticker tape parade. Chris attended, losing a shoe in the incredible shoulder-to-shoulder mob that lined Broadway (he rode home on the subway half-shod).
Chris didn’t play much music during his first couple of years in NYC. A former college classmate had enrolled in the New School’s fledgling jazz program, so Chris hung-out there for the better part of a year (under the auspices of the department’s preternaturally generous founder, Arnie Lawrence), until he got kicked out for good by the school’s preternaturally pain-in-the-ass administrator (“You’re taking practice room time from people who pay good money!”). That was about it, as far as playing music went.
Chris spent most of his time working his day gig at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and courting his future wife in a romance for the ages that he will someday document for posterity. Nights and weekends he spent going to see old movies and digging the incredible jazz the city had to offer. For a time he considered becoming a visual artist and actually produced a small number of works that to this day he doesn’t hate but probably wouldn’t show to any of his real artist friends.
After a few years living in Queens and the outermost reaches of Brooklyn (in Canarsie, no one can hear you scream), Chris moved to the Lower East Side in late 1989. Living in a neighborhood synonymous with experimental music prompted Chris to begin playing again. He hooked-up with a crowd of non-idiomatic improvisers almost immediately—musicians who played extemporaneously, but for whom jazz was something best left to guys in straw boaters. Their home base was a floating (from venue to venue in the East Village) Sunday night concert series called the A Mica Bunker Series for Free Improvisation.
There Chris made his earliest NYC performances, playing with musicians of variable skills but invariably generous spirits. They played castanets and decrepit old analog synths and rubbed on balloons and plucked heavily-processed guitars. Some of the sounds they made were on the far side of being even remotely musical. One alto saxophonist did nothing but bite his reed and blow as hard as he could for an hour or more at a time, emitting a deafening high-pitched squeal that probably did as much as Rudy Giuliani’s war on street crime to rid the neighborhood of crack dealers. Overall, it was a great lesson in openness, and helped to alleviate Chris’ jazz-snobbism.
Try as he might, however, Chris never fit in with the free improvisers. His natural inclination was to play Free, but with jazz chops. He was moved to connect with others of a like mind, and was soon playing in countless ad hoc groups of Downtown NYC free jazzers.
In 1992, Chris recorded his first album—Stomp Own It—on his own dime. Unfortunately, a scarcity of funds led Chris to make it a cassette-only release at a time when cassettes were going the way of Allen’s Thirteen-lined Ground Squirrel (that is, extinct or nearly so). His next release didn’t come until 1996, when he parlayed a demo he’d made of an improvised duo with trombonist Steve Swell into a date with the fledgling CIMP label.
The resultant CD, Observations, was followed by a series of recordings for the label, including, among others, The Ingenious Gentleman of the Lower East Side, Renewal, Wishing You Were Here, and The Crookedest Straight Line Vols. 1 & 2. The latter several were made with Chris’ current rhythm section: drummer Jay Rosen and bassist Francois Grillot—top-notch NYC free jazzers who he had somehow managed not to alienate over the years.
In late 1994, Chris began writing about jazz, augmenting his meager earnings as a musician with meager earnings as a critic … making his earnings either half- or twice-as meager, he couldn't be sure because he sucked at math. His first writing gig was as a monthly columnist covering the New York scene for the late Jazz Now magazine. In the years since, he's written for Jazziz, JazzTimes, Signal to Noise, Cadence, Ms. , All Music Guide, and many other publications and Web sites of which he now has little or no memory.
Chris and his wife Lisa left NYC after the birth of their first child, son Jasper, in 1998. They lived in Mount Vernon until the birth of their second child, daughter Meret, in 2001, after which the happy family moved further upstate, to Pawling in Dutchess County. There they still live, Lisa commuting to the city to work her glamorous job as art director for Family Circle magazine; Chris staying home with the kids, writing for his blog and many jazz publications and Web sites (most recently Jazz.com). He also engages in various musical activities, the most recent of which is this latest album, Not Cool (as in,"The Opposite of Paul Desmond") on his own Tzazz Krytyk label.
Chris is happy to report that the family lives in a very hilly area in extremely close proximity to many natural bodies of water. Furthermore, Chris and Lisa are able to purchase the occasional alcoholic beverage at a wide range of area restaurants and taverns. Life is good.
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