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About Music Practitioners:
Music and medicineAt first glance, the one doesn’t seem to go naturally with the other, does it? True, both are art forms, but the musical expressivity of jazz may at first seem far removed from the medical art of a great surgeon, or an exceptional diagnostician, or a gifted clinician.
And yet there is an important connection, found at the root of what makes the art form of jazz so compelling and makes the art form of medicine so thrilling to behold. Both jazz and medicine place one’s improvisational skills on a pedestal, announcing to the world that this innate talent of thinking on one’s feet is a vital element of how one views the art. In jazz, playing the notes on the page, however beautifully, is not the defining feature of the art form—improvisation is. In medicine, the ability to improvise a procedure, work around an instance of abnormal physiology, or recognize an unusual disease presentation—to name just a few examples—all require a willingness to discard any approach resembling cookbook medicine and adopt improvisational thinking.
In truth, music and medicine are more closely allied than one might suppose.
And finally, there is the intellectual aspect. Those involved in the world of medical care are astute thinkers whose tastes are likely left unsatisfied by everyday, popular genres of music. The brilliance of a great musician finds resonance in the mind of a brilliant clinician.
McMahon Jazz Medicine is pleased to present its first compilation from our Music Practitioners, medical professionals who are also professional musicians. As the publisher of 16 clinical publications, now in its fourth decade, McMahon Publishing has created this unique opportunity to purchase original music and art by top artists for our 400,000 monthly readers, as well as the general public.
To see more CDs and DVDs by the artists below, click the link on their respective names or on the accompanying picture below.
About Harry Allen:
Our first artist is the award-winning tenor saxophonist Harry Allen. With about 30 CDs to his credit, Harry, the son of a big band drummer, has been immersed in jazz since he was a child. A graduate of Rutgers with a Bachelor of Arts degree, Harry started recording back in 1989 in a session with Kenny Baron. His CDs have been recognized for their excellence and have won such accolades as the Gold Disc and New Star awards. Harry’s art has taken him to jazz clubs and festivals all over the world, and has placed him alongside such jazz greats as John and Bucky Pizzarelli, Rosemary Clooney, Tony Bennett, and many more. His saxophone style is reminiscent of the melodic, mainstream approach of such tenorists as Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, Lester Young, and Stan Getz.
About Lambert A:
Dr. Lambert Abeyatunge, a general Surgeon of 37 years, offers a selection of his favorite instrumental numbers in his CD Cool Winds for a Hot Summer. Dr. Abeyatunge (aka Lambert A in the music world) is a self-taught musician, playing alto, tenor and soprano sax, as well as the clarinet, flute and harmonica. Like a true general Surgeon, he does it all.
The CD features Lambert A on lead — be it saxophone or clarinet, or both — “playing his favorite instrumental numbers since his medical school days.” Does it get any better than a Surgeon playing Sade’s “Smooth Operator”? With the engineering and sequencing help of Danny Dandan, Lambert A puts together a mix of numbers that will put you in a cool and sultry state of mind. “Music, to me, is a universal language and a great stress reliever,” says Dr. Abeyantunge. So sit back, relax and let Lambert A take you there.
About Bobby Baker, MD:
Dr. Baker learned how to read music before learning how to read words from his older brother Eddie Baker, the pianist/composer/arranger/educator, who worked with many musicians, including Miles Davis and Billie Holiday. Bobby Baker began studying clarinet at age twelve with jazz saxophonists Joe Daley and Sandy Mosse in Chicago.
By his senior year, he was the first-chair clarinetist in the high school orchestra and band. He studied clarinet with Jerome Stowell of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. He also started playing flute in his senior year of high school, and started improvising jazz during college at the University of Wisconsin (Madison). He picked up the alto saxophone during his senior year of college and worked professional gigs with a group called Sebastian Moon.
He played at the Whiskey A Go Go in L.A. for three weeks when he was a member of the rock group Baby Huey and the Babysitters. At one point he moved to Paris to follow the avant-garde jazz scene, where he practiced and performed with Steve Lacy.
His love of music continued while in medical school at the University of Illinois, Chicago, during which time he had a group called Myoho featuring the late great bassist Fred Hopkins. He also played a gig with his brother Eddie Baker, Sonny Stitt and Steve McCall, and had some mentoring with George Coleman, Freddie Hubbard and James Spaulding. To this day he juggles his professional medical practice with his musical interests, sitting in with musicians in the Chicago area.
About Dr. Sam:
Dr. Sam (a/k/a Samuel Bierstock, MD), chief conspirator behind both the Managed Care Blues Band and the Frivolous Action Blues Band, is blessed with an unquiet mind. In addition to being a physician, he also describes himself as a professional musician (harmonicologist) and entertainer, and is also a recognized medical informacist. His penchant for creating satirical lyrics that skewer the managed care healthcare system (example: “You Picked a Fine Time to Leave Me Blue Shield”) and the medical-malpractice industry (example: “They’ve Got Deep Pockets — Letıs Sue”) has resulted in his unique means of delivering important messages. Musically, however, Dr. Sam and his life-long professional musician bandmates are not fooling around, and their professionalism has brought them wide acclaim and a steady gig schedule.
About Betsy Braud:
Betsy’s jazz combo, The Jazz Nurse Prescription, serves up a gumbo of sounds she calls latin-flavored bayou jazz. Born in Thibodaux, La, on the banks of Bayou Lafourche, this multi-instrumentalist sings and plays flute, soprano sax, and piano when she is not busy as an RN. Her unique take on jazz standards as well as her own original music all demonstrate a flavorful tonal approach that somehow highlights its origins in the Louisiana delta.
About Adam Dachman:
Adam has been called a healer. His music considered to be from a realm of peace and possibility. Interestingly, he happens to be a well trained general Surgeon. And while medicine has received much of his focus over the years, music has been on his mind since childhood. Trained classically, Adam quickly became his teacher’s prodigy and competed nationally.
As the years passed, he became interested in composing his own music. Formal training in theory, jazz, improvisation, orchestration and production led to a seasoned young composer who still had to mature. So what better place to do it than in medical school. A graduate of the class of 1990 Adam went on to complete a surgical residency and set up a practice near Madison, WI. He released “Echoes In The Canyon” in 1998—his first solo CD. In 2002 he released “Center of My Heart.” In 2005 he released “Keys of Hope.”
About Wolfgang Ellenberger:
For Wolfgang Ellenberger, MD, music is not only a hobby done in his spare time. After his parallel studies of a piano diploma and the medical training with extra studies for music therapy, Dr. Ellenberger spent 18 years as a professional concert pianist before returning to practice medicine and then crossing over into the medical software business. A man of many, many talents, a complete list of all his skills and professions is too long to list here!
Dr. Ellenberger, who resides in Buchen, Germany, is also the president of www.DoctorsHobbies.com, an association that promotes the music of healthcare professionals, including physicians, nurses, pharmacists, veterinarians and many other professions and hobbies, listed in the “100-hobbies-table” on the website.
In November 2005, DoctorsHobbies collaborated with the NMMG-Doctors Orchestra to put on a German-American Friendship Concert at the magnificent Berlin Philharmonie. The event was captured live and is available on an exquisite CD, which features Dr. Ellenberger as well as healthcare professionals from both sides of the Atlantic performing pieces from Beethoven to Mozart to Schubert.
Dr. Ellenberger’s solo-CD “Inclination” presents him on the magnificent Bosendorfer Imperial grand piano (290 cm/630 kg) with the Sibiria State Symphony Orchestra, and includes the Haydn piano concerto in D major.
About Admir Hadzic, MD:
Admir (aka Dr. Blues) has been an electronic engineer, amplifier builder and vintage instrument amplifier collector for almost 3 decades. Admir has studied recording engineering since his medical school days and has recently established his own hi-end analog/digital recording studio, StoneTone Studios, along with an independent record label StoneTone Records Inc. Admir’s performance and recording credits include Rich Cohen, Rod Gross (Bo Diddley), Barry Harrison (Shemikia Copeland, Michael Powers), Engineering credits include Hazmat Modine, Joe Daly (Taj Mahal), Christian Howes (Les Paul) and many others. He is currently producing his next CD and an Advanced Blues Harmonica instructional video with harmonica virtuoso, Jason Ricci.
About Reuben Hoch:
Growing up an Orthodox Jew in Brooklyn, NY, Reuben Hoch learned traditional Chassidic melodies, which he has now used to create fascinating contemporary jazz arrangements. A drummer, Reuben was playing professionally in his teens, and managed to continue his interest even during his years in medical school, from which he emerged an anesthesiologist. His new trio "Time" also features jazz veterans Don Friedman and Ed Schuller.
About Henry Lee:
Henry Lee, MD, lives and practices neurology on the central coast of California. His interests are in neuro-critical care and neuroengineering. When not on call, he is a jazz musician, composing and performing on soprano and tenor saxophones. His CDs range from mainstream to the avant garde. He recently released a CD “In Your Dreams,” which features Henry on soprano saxophone, Jeff Norwood on bass and Darrell Voss on percussion. The tunes were all collectively improvised with a great deal of interplay and eclectic twists, a bit on the avant garde.
About Ron Odrich:
A periodontist and senior partner of Park Avenue Periodontal Associates in New York City, Dr. Odrich leads a quartet that plays regular gigs in the metropolitan area. He has played with many jazz greats, including Phil Woods, Buddy De Franco, Clark Terry and Zoot Sims, and was the featured soloist for a memorial concert at Carnegie Hall for composer Morton Gould.
About Mario Olivares, PharmD:
A pharmacist by training, Mario Olivares has a passion for Latin-flavored guitar. He and his band, “Latin Spice,” play music that has been described as “Latin world guitar.” Mario’s clean sound mixes Latin jazz with romantic boleros, adding a touch of flamenco with a dash of Spanish classical guitar. Music critics have described Mario’s music as both timeless and romantic, and “Latin Spice” has been a top musical draw in Southern California for years. His recordings are currently being marketed to a world-wide audience, and his fame is spreading. Mario is the musical director for a new show called “The Booming Show with Brian Christie,” which will be televised this summer on Wealth-TV in his hometown of San Diego and will air nationally on the FOX TV network. This pharmacist practitioner doesn’t need a physician to write a prescription, he’s written his own script for passion and romance. His drug: the guitar.
About Patrick Plunkett:
Patrick Plunkett never let his desire to be a jazz saxophonist be consumed by his day job, despite the demands of his orthopedic training and full practice. Father and son team, Patrick and Aaron Plunkett, are recording artists in their own right as Plunkett recordings climb to 16th on Billboard’s Radio & Records National Airplay Charts (see below). Patrick’s Plunkett Project recordings combine popular jazz tunes with ancient percussive rhythms provided by his son, Aaron, whose multi-ethnic percussion tracks can be heard with music icons Lionel Hampton and John Fogerty, as well as in the blockbuster epic film Titanic.
Also, check out Aaron’s World Beats website at www.world-beats.com. Learn to play the oldest instrument in the world, the 2.5 million-year-old bones — as well as other rare world music percussion instruments. Drums, CDs, DVDs, videos, instruments and instructional material are available for purchase. Hear sample sounds as heard with music icons Lionel Hampton and John Fogerty, as well as in the epic film Titanic.
About Paul Todd:
Todd is a singer and piano player from the Deep South, where he plays at sold-out venues, particularly in Florida. Todd sings gospel, show tunes, and also jazz.
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