Influential High-School Music Teacher at Andover's Phillips Academy, MA
"I was the music teacher at Phillips Andover. He came to me playing flute, and I started him playing saxophone and clarinet. He never played much clarinet, though. His interest was music generally. He was a serious classical flute player, but when he started playing sax and I got him into the jazz ensemble, he just exploded with music. He loved the challenge of playing anything, and nothing held him back. He lived, ate, slept and breathed music, and he had friends like Arthur Kell whom he worked to surpassed.
His parents wanted him to be an academic, and had no interest in him becoming a musician. But he had ways of insulating himself. He dressed like nobody else, wearing loose-fitting white clothing. He also started wearing his hair long. And he'd practice all day. Nothing else made him happy.
I was his private teacher, and challenged him to go as far as he could go. There were a lot of talented people at that school like the director Peter Sellers, who had all kinds of interests. Tommy's interest was only in music. His parents would call, very concerned, but that's what he wanted to do.
He started advancing really fast, getting into all-state competitions and such. By the end of high school, his interest in classical music was gone. He learned a lot from playing classical music, to the point where he could eat the method books for breakfast. Fun for him was transposing Charlie Parker's solos into every key. And he was always trying to find out how to make new sounds. I started him on multiphonics and circular breathing he just soaked it up.
Tommy always lived on the edge, because his soul was searching for something he could never find. Staying up all night to practice, or to listen to a bunch of Charlie Parker recordings, were just things he would do, without considering that there might be other consequences. People from other academic departments--Tommy wasn't interested, but for music rehearsals he was always involved. When someone is that devoted, you just have to let them go their way. If you sat someone like Tommy down today and tell them they HAD to study American history, they wouldn't be able to do it, and would be labeled ADD.
I went off to another life, and managed artists around the world. Tommy was one of my most talented students. He went off to the Hartt School, and his parents were still worried that he would just become an eccentric musician. Well, he did; but they started seeing that his search was to be an artist, and they let it go. I didn't get along with his parents well, because I was his music teacher. They did come to most of his performances, though.
He and I had some conversations when he was 14 or 15, because he saw that he should pay more attention to his other classes; but you could see that it wasn't going to happen.
He had an entrepreneurial spirit about him, too. He wanted to make art work.
He was obsessed with sound. He would look for anything that would make a new sound, from a piece of pipe to a new multiphonic on his horn. And, like many great artists, he loved to mix the old and the new. He'd take familiar sounds and make them unique, or play two sounds at once. And he never wanted to sound academic. He wanted to create an organic sound. Classical purity wasn't his bag. If the composers were alive, they probably would have prefereed Tommy's way, anyway.
I would play duets with him, and because I was better technically, I would play them faster. He'd come back the next week and nail it. He loved the challenge of being better. There was no ego involved; all he wanted to do was make great music.
He was so good, he was a freak of nature; but he was such a great guy that he never burned the other musicians who couldn t keep up. Tommy never did that."