My Kid Brother, TomTed Chapin, older brother of Thomas

I remember that morning at the kitchen table in 1957: Dad came home from the hospital to announce that the new baby was a boy. My older sister Sally groaning because it’s a boy; me, cheering.

I’ve been cheering for the last 51 years. I guess that makes me the original fan. Many of the fans in this audience tonight remember Tom’s performances before large adoring crowds, so let me tell you what it was like when the audiences were really small: what it was like when the audience consisted of only my father, mother, my sister and me.

It was like this: it was as if a meteorite had suddenly, inexplicably show up in an otherwise staid New England WASP family. Tom’s initials were TDC, for Thomas Durfee Chapin. By the time he was three, Dad noted that it also stood for “trouble, destruction and chaos.” Tom giggled with delight every time we called him that, playing to the audience of fans even then.

My Mom, usually a very composed woman, could be driven to tears by Tom’s hyperactivity. For instance, he often would pull out all the pots and pans and start banging on them. She would steer this ball of energy from the kitchen into the basement playroom.

By the time Tom settled into the playroom, I was well into the process of outgrowing it. I bequeathed my pile of children’s toys to him. My use of these toys had been an orderly interplay of various toy groups. (I ended up an architect for 30 years.) Tommy’s use of these very same toys was wildly improvisational: toys all mixed up together in the strangest combinations. It was in the way he played
with those toys that I realized my kid brother had a mind very different from my own.

He was a precoscious little boy. Whereas I was a generalist in my array of interests, Tom experienced sequential passions. He had a hard laser focus on whatever caught his interest: for instance, dinosaurs…then the Civil War….

Thus by age eight most of the essential ingredients of this amazing talent had been revealed: the hyperactivity, mischieviousness, rhythm and wild improvisation in his playing, and the intense focus and brilliance shown by his self-directed studies.

One final ingredient was needed: his forthcoming introduction to music, in general, and then to jazz. As a competitive member of a competitive family: sibling rivalry intially brought him to music. First he took piano lessons because both my sister and I played the piano. Late in grade school he gravitated towards the flute to be part of the grade school music scene and then the Junior High School marching band.

The reason Tom ended up a boarding student at Andover at age 14 was that since both my father and I had good experiences as students there, my Dad suspected that Tom would do well there too, and he did do exceptionally well there, but on his own terms.

Andover was a surprisingly liberal environment by the time Tom arrived. The Dean of Harvard’s School of Education had taken on the headmastership just as there was an upswell of liberal and experimental currents sweeping through academic America.

My Dad was right. It really was the perfect incubator for Tom’s all-consuming embrace of the saxophone and the music he discovered he could play on it. The standard curriculum, a rigorous course preparing kids for good colleges, did not interest Tom. Andover let his genius flower, however, winking him through a few close calls with flunking out.

In these teenage years Tom launched into jazz with the intensity and brilliance that he showed me all those years ago with dinosaurs and the Civil War. Jazz for Tom was the banging on the kitchen pots, the improvisation with the orderly set of toys that I bequeathed him.

I remember being horrified by what he did to my beautiful toys! Well, Tom, I’m finally giggling like you now about all the trouble and all the destruction, and as to the chaos…I realize there was genius woven into that seeming chaos. Starting with that first cheer in 1957, that divine chaos has energized my whole life since.

Family Photo: Ted on left, kid bro Tom, on right. circa 1960s