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John Bowman, Jan Stevens, Oliver Eikenberry, Austin Clark, Dan Ackerman, Laura Kaufman and Narda Wishka of the Dexter Community Band.
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John Bowman learned a few years ago that you don't pick your teachers, your mentors or your inspirations; those are chosen for each of us by forces beyond our control.
Bowman is currently the Dexter Community Band's baritone or "bari" saxophone player.
Typically a regular in the clarinet section, he was called to his current position in the band when one of its fixtures suffered a stroke. Longtime baritone saxophone player and founding member of the Dexter Community Band, Duane Debutts, has still not returned to the band.
"As far as I'm concerned I'm still keeping his chair warm for him," Bowman said. "He's not well and it's really frustrating for him."
Debutts says he's doing better and is even working on playing his alto sax.
Bowman recalls just showing up for a DCB gathering four years ago. He had literally put his passion in the closet to enter the real world of 9-to-5 work that displaces so many dreams.
"When I moved to Dexter I busted my old clarinet out of the closet," he recalled. "I hadn't played it in 12 years. So I started playing again and went to check out Dexter's band."
He had played in the marching band on various instruments at Michigan State University while pursuing a degree in biology.
Bowman had been working as a warehouse manager for a Plymouth-based company, until his occasional absences for training sessions forced him to quit the band - a temporary predicament.
"Six months later I quit the company and went back to playing for the band," he said with a pleased tone.
He wasn't in the clarinet section long before he met Debutts or "D" as most people call him.
"I started talking to this baritone player with a piece from the 1920s," Bowman said. The sax was heavy for an older guy with poor health to carry, he recalled. So the two men just chatted for 10 minutes about baritone saxophones, since Bowman had played one in high school.
At next week's rehearsal, Bowman received a shock.
"Some of the other guys from the sax section came up to me and said that D was in the hospital, and that he wanted me to call him," Bowman recalled.
So halfway to the hospital, D told Bowman he would have to take his position in the band, since he had suffered a stroke.
"I'm in the car thinking 'What is going on?'" said Bowman, who knew he would have to do it or the band would be in trouble.
"We were playing 'Rhapsody in Blue,' which has major bari sax parts and solos,'" he said.
Not wanting to let the band or composer George Gershwin's ghost down, the choice was clear.
"The next day I met D's wife in the hospital parking lot and she had his horn in her van," Bowman said.
"Rhapsody in Blue" was played, and well.
"We played it with Professor (Louis) Nagel from the University of Michigan, and by all accounts we did fine," Bowman said.
Two weeks of practice in his basement with a cat for company certainly helped him cope with what he referred as a "pressure cooker," - the situation, the piece of music, the presence of a renowned U of M musician, the sheer pedigree of it all
"I think I practiced so much that my cat could play it now," he said, laughing.
Growing in music
For Bowman, the greatest thing he has taken from his experience in D's seat, aside from memories and a new friendship, are the lessons that he has learned by being thrown into such a situation and through his involvement with D that might not have happened to the extent that it did had they not both been in such circumstances.
Bowman recalls feelings of anxiety, incredulity and shock, and says he has since learned that these were byproducts of a false perspective.
"I've since learned that it's not about me," he said in discussing where he was at mentally four months out from taking D's place on the bari sax.
Bowman also learned to not just survive in the position, but how to thrive. He even got his own bari saxophone off e-Bay.
Just as D was leaving hospice, Bowman was emerging from music a new man.
"After I gave D his horn back, I realized that I never played music for myself before," Bowman said. "I played it because it was expected of me at school. Some people were playing football or swimming.
"Me ... I go to the band room, and now I don't feel that pressure to play."
And Bowman says that change in attitude and worldview has made him a better musician.
Coming up
D got his first sax when he was just 10 years old, in 1951. He was trained on a song flute, "basically a plastic whistle that plays exactly like a saxophone," D explained.
He had no idea he was learning skills that would transfer to an instrument like the saxophone.
"I was so good my parents got me a saxophone for $50 and for that princely sum I got a semi-worthless saxophone and two lessons," he said. "Those were the only lessons I ever had."
His career in high school playing the sax was "successful" and a band that D was party too even won talent contests and other accolades, including $1,000 in bonds.
"Everybody was encouraged by that and gradually I got more and more into Jazz," D said.
Shifting more from classical music into the heady world of jazz, D continued his music career at Michigan State playing in their marching band, recalling it "was the hardest work (he had) ever done."
But it was fun, he added.
D quickly learned the same lesson his friend and Dexter Community Band successor would learn decades later.
"I was a big deal in Cadillac, but at Michigan State I played last chair," he said. "It was a nice wake-up call."
D has also attended Interlochen Center for the Arts on a Kiwanis sponsored scholarship. It was a similarly humbling experience.
"I learned humility."
After many "clumsy" attempts at jazz, D packed up the bari sax, just as Bowman would so far into the future and did other things with himself and his time for 15 music-less years spent earning a living for himself and his family.
"When you get into things like professional bands and earning a living, it's very, very seldom that you can do that and raise a family and everything," D said. "Out of thousands I only know, only half-a-dozen have managed to earn a living as a musician, and that's very typical."
Reemergence
The crowds at his 20th class reunion remembered the old D that was packaged up with his old bari sax and stuffed in a closet, and noticed not the moth balls.
"Everyone asked me where I was playing now, which really surprised my wife ... because I hadn't played for so long she didn't know it was such a big deal for me at one time," D said. "She told me to get back into it."
So he joined the Ypsilanti Community Band, followed by the Plymouth, Dexter and Belleville equivalents.
Dexter was the clear winner in D's mind, and that's where he stuck. "I quit all my other community bands, because Dexter to me is what a community band should be."
The enthusiasm, sense of community and hard work ethic were a few of the qualities that convinced an Ypsi-man to travel more than halfway across Washtenaw County to play his music.
D was there with founding Dexter Community Band Director Dave Angus, who manned that post for 15 years.
"He elected me to the band board," D recalled, adding that all sorts of ideas came out of the band leadership at that time, such as ensembles.
"We had our first world tour, from Chelsea to Stockbridge and Pinckney ... we played three concerts on a Saturday and that was our 'world tour,' - we didn't have a very big world then."
The spectacle of the group setting up, playing an hour concert, taking it all down, driving a few miles, wash, rinse and repeat is still highly amusing to D, but also highly reflective of what drew him to Dexter in the first place.
Crescendo
If D has anything to teach anybody through both word and deed, it's that practice trumps talent any day of the week.
"I've got two daughters, one of which got a scholarship to Eastern Michigan University who is a very fine sax player and my other daughter plays alto sax," D said. "It takes a lot of hard work and passion, but not very much talent. My daughters caught the passion from me and one daughter had a little bit of talent, but she's not the one that achieved great things. The younger one had talent, the older one had hard work. The older one got a scholarship and the younger one doesn't play anymore."
D recalls Bowman visiting him at the hospital and talking to him over the phone, asking if there was really a chance of filling the space left vacant when D had the stroke on Oct. 1, 2005.
"He asked me if I think he would play and I said sure ... it's easy to play, just hard to master," D said. "Because of his better technique, he had no problem, aside from some problems with jazz. He couldn't quite express himself."
Sitting in on some jazz performances at Washtenaw Community College, through practice and by discovering his passion, Bowman had lived up to the greatest lesson of D's lifetime.
"It took me 50 years to get pretty good," D said. He was impressed with how well Bowman stepped up to the plate.
"I don't think I ever would have gotten to know him if not for the Dexter band," Bowman said of D. "I like to think if he hadn't had the stroke I would have come to talk to him, but probably not so much. Through that incident and musical connection, I got to know a guy who otherwise I wouldn't have and I found that I rather like the guy."
D and Bowman have found that they share a lot in common, from a weather-worn old saxophone at Michigan State University that both men played 40 years apart to the lessons that music and hard work have taught them.
The common trajectory has reinforced a strong bond and steeled the bari sax successor of the Dexter Community Band, so much so that his three and five year old children are probably going to play a bari sax at one point or another if he has any say in the matter.
"I want them growing up experiencing music the way that I experience it now," Bowman said.
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