A a Berg
Transcript of A a Berg
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V o l u m e s i x n u m b e r T w o , T w o T h o u s a n d T e n | summer
Glacier National Par
100 Years of Inspiratio
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MUSICFIN
DSITSWA
YHOME
After a Grammy nomination and playing music
with some of the worlds most famous vocalists,
Phillip Aabergs inspiration still comes from the place
it started, in the tiny Montana town where he grew up.
ometimes, you can go home again.
You can win a music scholarship to Har vard. You can help make a
bunch of hit records. You can tour with Elvin Bishop and Peter Gabriel,
with all t he fame and the fans and the accolades that go with a great big
road show. You can write your own songs and make your own records and
you can be nominated for a Grammy. You can master classical music, and
rock and blues and jazz, and you can gather it all up i n your head, blend
it, and send it to your fingers, which is how you share the magic.
You can do all this, and you can still go home to Chester, Montana, add your small
family to the 700 or so people who remain in that wind-battered burg on the prairie.
You can move into the house where you were raised, make your music in a grain bin and
when the work is done for the day, when the breeze comes up on a hot afternoon, you
can relax in the shade of your grandfathers favorite tree and wait for your son, wait for
him to come bouncing home from the same school where you studied music and math
and basketball, the school where your mother took her lessons, too.
S
BY SCOTT
M CMILL ION
PHOTOGRAPHY
BY THOMAS LEE
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I felt really lucky growing up the way I did. I got to do all the things the ot her kids did. I played
basketball and baseball. But I had this other thing that the other kids couldnt do. He nodded
at the nearby grand piano in the windowless studio, the grain bin attached to his home.
And you can listen to the wind and the quiet. You can stand and see the
Sweetgrass Hills looming in the north. You can hear the approach of a train
from the east and maybe smell the coming of a storm from the west, and while
you might or might not see antelope on that day, you will know they ar e around
somewhere. And all of this the wind and the weather and the animals, the
sound and the smell and sights combines in your ear, the inner part, where
you make music.
This son of yours, this l aughing boy, is the fourth generation of your family
in this house and you have come home, where he can grow up much as you did,
with sports and music and friends and elders in a place where almost everybody
knows almost everybody. It can be done. You have proven this.
And that, in a nutshell, is the story of Phil Aaberg, a kid from Chester who
became one of the nations most accomplished pianists and composers.High, deep art, is the way George Winston, another Montanan who
wows the world with a piano, described Aabergs music. Hes just the greatest
composer. He captures Montana as well or better than I ve ever heard anybody
capture anything.
Elvin Bishop was more succinct: Hes the best piano player Ive ever
heard, the rocker once wrote.
Aaberg was always something of a prodigy at the keyboard. He first
demanded piano lessons when he was 4 years old, inspired by church music,
and put on his first recital when he was 8.
After the show, people clapped and his piano teachers mother gave him
$10. Something clicked in Aabergs young head. Applause and money? For
doing something fun? Whats not to like?
I felt really lucky growing up the way I did, Aaberg said. I got to do all
the things the other kids did. I played basketball and baseball. But I had this
other thing that the other kids couldnt do. He nodded at the nearby grand piano
in the windowless studio, the grain bin attached to his home.
He credits his small-town upbringing with giving him the confidence tosucceed as a musician. It was easy to be the best i n a tiny place, and nobody ever
told him no, he couldnt aim even higher.
Rather, his mother, whose husband had left her to raise two small boys
alone, had done so in an era when single parents stood out in a crowd, deter-
mined that her sons would be somebody. No questions. Period.
His talent was obvious, and his mother encouraged him, scraping together
money for lessons and driving him to concerts in Havre, Great Falls and Shelby,
which seemed like the bigtime, compared to Chester. There were summer music
camps, contests to win, and f requent trips to an acclaimed teacher in Spokane,
too far to visit weekly but close enough for regular train t rips.
Woven through all of it was practice and more practice, three or four hours
a day at the keyboard, learning Beethoven and Bach and more. And it paid off.
When it came time for college, he aimed high. Dartmouth, Yale, the University
of Chicago and Harvard al l offered scholarships. He chose Harvard, which is a
lot farther from Chester than 2,000 miles of highway can explain.
It was a little like being on the moon, Aaberg said. But he didnt know
enough about the place to be nervous. He just set himself to his music. I was
blessed by naivet.Boston offered concerts of all kinds, as many as three a week, and Aaberg
played in lots of bands, from blues to bluegrass. He played rock. He played funk.
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He played New Orleans jazz.
A lot of stuff was out of school, and my grades reflected
that, he said.
After college, he joined a band and they all lived in the
same house in New England and played in the same venues
with people like Bonnie Raitt and the J. Giles Band. It was
fun, but it didnt scratch the itch inside him.
I wanted to play in a blues band and I wanted to study
Beethoven, he said. So he moved to Iowa, and focused on
sonatas in the daytime, the blues at night.
Then his first wife decided she wanted to try California.
And I thought, oh, thats where they make records, he
said.
Once in Oakland, word spread of his skills, and he lined
up lots of work, mostly as a session player in recording studios,
playing with Elvin Bishop, Henry Gross, the Pointer Sisters,
Peter Gabriel and more.
I played on a lot of top-10 records, he said, but being a
sideman is a tough job. I didnt want to go in there and have
to sound like somebody else.
He went on a couple tours, but the road didnt appeal
much. He wanted to stay home with his three young sons.
Living in Oakland, he picked up work closer to home.
He composed jingles for Saturday morni ng cartoons, Peanuts
specials, small movies, even the California Milk Board.
Id get $20,000 for a half hours work, he said. It was
the kind of work musicians would kill for, but it was killing
me. My stomach hurt. My shoulders hurt.
So, at the age of 32, he quit. And he came up with a plan,
writing his goals on a couple sheets of paper.
He wanted to play chamber music and he wanted to
compose and play his own music. And he wanted to support
his family doing it.
Nobody does that, he said.
But he knew he had to try. He gave himself a year.
If it didnt work, I was going to take the civil service
exam and be a mail man. And as soon as I made that decision,
it was like a miracle cure.
The pain lifted from his shoulders and his guts and in
short order he had a record contract with Wyndham Hill, a
popular independent label.
I toured the world, playing my own music, which I never
thought was something I could do, he said.
And it lasted for years, until the company was purchased
by a corporate giant that favored formulaic music and frowned
on his politics, which favored letting nature be nature. So
Aaberg found a way out of his contract and formed his own
label, Sweetgrass Music, named for the hills north of his
hometown.
His second album, Live from Montana, earned him the
Grammy nomination in 2002. It was recorded in the Chester
High School gymnasium, the place where Aaberg played
basketball.
The Grammy nomination arose from the same place
Aaberg did: Chester. Home.
Shortly afterward, he moved back to Chester for good. He
cleaned out his grandparents house, added the studio, and
brought his new wife Patty and their son, Jake. Now 60, he
wonders sometimes what took him so long. Throughout his
career, hed written songs with rural Montana in mind: the
stretch of the prairies, the cleansing winds, the blessed abun-
dance of quiet.
I think I was always trying to get back here, he said.
Every time I crossed the pass and saw the prairie, my mind
opened up and my lungs opened up. And I thought, Why am
I not doing this?
Work followed him: composi-
tions, movie scores, albums, commis-
sions and concerts. He stays as busy as
ever, producing albums for friends in
his grain bin and writing more music
all the time, jotting it on napkins or
the back of his hand, recording it on
his cell phone or his computer, refin-ing it later, putting Montana in your
ears.
I know I get a lot more done here
than I ever could before.
But hes brought more than
himself back to Chester. Hes brought
a message for kids a lot like himself.
Through a nonprofit foundation
he calls Arts Without Boundaries,
he stages seminars and free concerts
in small venues around the state.
Sometimes he performs, sometimes he
brings in other top talent.
The message is a simple one.
Heres what I do, he tells the
kids. This music comes from where
you came from.
If you doubt that, pop one of his
CDs in the stereo and drive the Hi-
Line. Or Highway 191. Even Interstate
90, in the quieter stretches. Then p
watch the horizon, and listen to Mo
Youll get the point.
Aaberg knows that few studen
Doing so takes luck, talent and
perseverance.
But success in the arts is possib
wanting it to stick.
I go into a place and I say, a
to be a part of it.
He wants to see the evolution o
tion, something based not on the ta
York or Nashville. And its starting
Montana is increasingly sta
and style, said Erik Funk, a longt
composes classical music for music
his home in Bozeman. Its not ju
western American sound. Its a M
subtle and varied as the topograph
What Aaberg wants is a music
lucky ones among us al ready unde
A place called home.
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