Vance Lowry and the classic banjo?

[RitonMousquetaire]

Hello everybody,

While searching for banjo records on a french radio website I stumbled upon this emission broadcasted in 2013, in which you can listen to two banjo records (which I find really enjoyable), played by Vance Lowry around 1926 : http://www.francemusique.fr/emission/le-fabuleux-monde-des-archives...

While listening to the first one (it starts at 11'53, following a few explanations by the person who curated the program) I thought he was playing a 4-string banjo (wether plectrum or tenor I'm not sure - there are some moments where it also sounds a bit like a 5-string, but I don't know the subject well enough to be sure), but the second (which starts around 12'30) seems to be a 5 string banjo played in the classic way (which would maybe explain that title, "l'harpo-banjo", which can be translated as "the harp-banjo" I think).

I'm quite curious about this player; does anybody knows exactly what kind of banjo he's playing in each of these records? Were his arrangements ever published? Do you have more informations about his life and other pieces or records? There are some informations on his life in France in the programme (where he apparently knew the poet Jean Cocteau), and somebody called Tony Thomas posted some interesting informations on this youtube video in which Lowry's playing can also be heard : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKXzR8a-_DE

Just in case he wouldn't be playing classic banjo and that discussion would be irrelevant to the present website, here is an other broadcast from the same website which features several classic banjo records (and this time I'm sure of it :) ) : http://www.francemusique.fr/emission/le-fabuleux-monde-des-archives...

[Tony Thomas MFA Black Banjoist]

Since then preparing for my presentation I got some clarity on the small banjos being used by Clef clubbers.  They are mostly described in their own reports, lineups of who plays what for Clef supported or engaged concerts or the recordings they made as bandolins for the most part.  The Great John Hoft, except on the 4 stri8ng banjos and the mandolin, historian of the tenor, Grestch vs Bacon clarifier, explains bandolins had a bigger head and a slightly longer scale than melody banjos.  The Melody banjo came along much later than these pictures.  As such it was first marketed by Lange soon to be Paramount, in 1923, and is a slight smaller than previous version of what has previously been marketed and designated as the 4 String Mandolin banjo, as opposed to the 8 string mandolin banjo.  Bandolins tended to have violin like features like the peg head and radiused fingerboards.  The Clef Club  publicly endorsed two brands of bandolins,  the Clef Club models prioduced by McGinnis and Shaw in Harlem,  and the  Stathopoulo Bandolin.    The Weaver Bandolin in the other picture testifies to the fact that such instruments were popular in England during the Great War before Jazz took hold.  In fact, a series of these musicians migrated to England starting in 1912 but particularly from 1914 to 1917 because the kind of late ragtime tending to light jazz and banjo heavy ensembles that were a feature of it on both sides of THE POND remained popular longer in Britain than the US.  The Versatile Quintent,  Versatile  Four,  Versatile 3,  depending on what year between 1911 and 1918 you are talking about included Tony Tuck credited by the Clef Clubbers as designer of their variety of bandolin.  The Versatiles started out in NYC and performed at the major Clef Club concert in Carneige Hall in 1912 went to England where they were the rage and made a number of  records, and attempted to return to the US in 1915 or 16, but they found their music was seen as outmoded in NYC and returned to England to whoop it up where they were a particular favorite of Edward 7, himself a banjoist.   Later when they returned to the US they switched their banjolins for saxophones to try to fit in with jazz 

F. Chris Ware said:

Hi All,

As one who also tries to pledge fealty to How It Really Was, I’m attaching here a photo which perhaps you can make use of in your talk, Tony, of (I think) Louis Mitchell’s Jazz Kings with perhaps Vance Lowry seated holding a banjolin and Dan Kildare at the piano, c. 1915 or so. This was fished from a Manhattan trash can by my friend John Keen a few years ago and sent to me for inclusion in the final volume of my, ahem, still-to-be-completed fourth “Ragtime Ephemeralist,” but you’re welcome to present it with your talk if you don’t already have a copy. I wish I could be there; it sounds like it’s going to be fascinating. I always greatly enjoy your postings and your enthusiastic, engaging and ever-more precise research.

Not that it matters, but I believe the bandolins pictured here (not the Ecuadorian or Trinidadian instruments) are perhaps ones of American make, which I’ve read were by McGinnis and Shaw and stamped “Clef Club” to capitalize on the popularity, one imagines, of the name. After looking for years I finally found one last year and fixed it up (pictured, post-fixing up; dowel pre-fixing up) and it’s sort of fun to (try to) play, tuned of course like a violin/mandolin with a slightly radiused fingerboard. John Avery Turner has had an Essex version for sale on their site under "mandolins" for quite a while now.

Just to confuse things, I think they were also sometimes called “banjolins” or a “tango banjo” or “melody banjo” and the slightly later (?) banjo-mandolins were offered in both four- and eight-stringed versions. It’s seemed to me that the tenor banjo perhaps evolved out of all of this, tuned, as it is, in fifths like a violin or a mandolin (or really, a viola/mandola) but I dunno. Maybe the scroll-topped version was considered a sort of banjo-violin and the “paddle headed” version was a banjo-mandolin, even though each had four strings.

Also (not from my collection) a photo of “Europe’s String Octett” with, second from right, Noble Sissle (!) also holding a four-string banjo-mandolin-type thing.

A lot of these Kildare/Ciro’s Club recordings are available on YouTube, too:

St. Louis Blues — Dan Kildare Groups

All warmest of wishes, as always,

C.

P.S. Jody, as for strings, who knows, but if one believes the violin/mandolin principle, it might follow they were gut/metal, but life is complex and rule-less so the reality was probably much more interesting.

[Tony Thomas MFA Black Banjoist]

Tjhe picture you have is most certainly NOT  Louis Mitchells Jazz Kings.   For one thing Dan Kildare is at the piano.  Kildare never went to France but stayed in London where he ran a pub with his wife, but ended up shooting his wife and sister in law in the pub and shooting himself..  Mitchells jazz kings only existed in Paris and then briefly as Mitchell himself ended up getting out of the musician business and tried to run a restaurant/bar/dive as his life became more and more consumed with his gambling addiction,.  

I think this is the initial version of the Ciro Night Club band which would put it at some time before April 1916.  The banjoists, or bandolinists  if you like, in this picture are George Watters and Seth Jones.  On May 3 1916  Seth Jones returned to NYC.   Vance Lowry arrived in London  on May 7 to take Jones' place as on April 2,  Kildare had gone to NYC to fetch musicians to replace Jones and two other musicians who had lreturned to NYC with Jones.   What strikes me is that in the height of the U Boat campaign,  band leaders were going back and forth from Britain to the US to fetch musicians.   Kildare  Made at least 3 trips across the Atlantic during the Great War,  and Louis Mitchell apparently made at least 6 crossings or or back and forth trips in 1914, 1915/16 and perhaps 1917.  Lowry himself crossed in 1914 returned in september, funded the US government evacuation of  refugees from the war and did not return to England until 1916.  He stayed in Europe until 1941/42, in France from 1917 at least to 1939, although he may have lived or stayed in Sweden for a time in the late 30s, returning to England when WWII started.  He returned to the US via Vichy France thence to Portugal in 1941, and claimed he was roughly treated by German soliders in France until he showed them his perfect command of German   

[Tony Thomas MFA Black Banjoist]

What is amazing is the amount of intimate detail about all this I can learn sitting at my desk in my home here in West Palm Beach.  The British Jazz Archive's online copies of the Storyville Jazz magazine have rather intensive articles about  Kildare and Mitchell,  although they have errors and confusions.  When Louis Mitchell returned to the United States in 1940,  he set out to talk to all kinds of writers, jazz buffs and reporters, exaggerating his own role in ex-patriot music in the inter-war years and disrembbering things as a person would be naturally expected to do without the online archive and jazz history we can rely upon.  My biggest resource checking and correcting some of Storyville and French jazz buff records of this have been access to newspaper archives from New York and London across the period.  The New York Age, until the 50s NYC's premier African American newspaper had a particular affiliation with the Clef Club and Tempo club in the years befetween 1910 and 1925.  Afterwards,  Nobble Sissle who had been one of the prominent later members of Europe's circle in NYC and France was a columnist for the Age  in the 1940s through 60s when Sissle seem to pass from being a band leader, singer and entertainer to a political figure in Harlem.  Sissle wrote several column reminiscing on  the Clef Club days as well as a couple of obituaries of Clef Cklubbers as well as an unpublished memoir.  His musical partner Eubie Blake also has some generally good reflections on these days in several "as told to" or interview books.

Tony Thomas MFA Black Banjoist said:

Tjhe picture you have is most certainly NOT  Louis Mitchells Jazz Kings.   For one thing Dan Kildare is at the piano.  Kildare never went to France but stayed in London where he ran a pub with his wife, but ended up shooting his wife and sister in law in the pub and shooting himself..  Mitchells jazz kings only existed in Paris and then briefly as Mitchell himself ended up getting out of the musician business and tried to run a restaurant/bar/dive as his life became more and more consumed with his gambling addiction,.  

I think this is the initial version of the Ciro Night Club band which would put it at some time before April 1916.  The banjoists, or bandolinists  if you like, in this picture are George Watters and Seth Jones.  On May 3 1916  Seth Jones returned to NYC.   Vance Lowry arrived in London  on May 7 to take Jones' place as on April 2,  Kildare had gone to NYC to fetch musicians to replace Jones and two other musicians who had lreturned to NYC with Jones.   What strikes me is that in the height of the U Boat campaign,  band leaders were going back and forth from Britain to the US to fetch musicians.   Kildare  Made at least 3 trips across the Atlantic during the Great War,  and Louis Mitchell apparently made at least 6 crossings or or back and forth trips in 1914, 1915/16 and perhaps 1917.  Lowry himself crossed in 1914 returned in september, funded the US government evacuation of  refugees from the war and did not return to England until 1916.  He stayed in Europe until 1941/42, in France from 1917 at least to 1939, although he may have lived or stayed in Sweden for a time in the late 30s, returning to England when WWII started.  He returned to the US via Vichy France thence to Portugal in 1941, and claimed he was roughly treated by German soliders in France until he showed them his perfect command of German   

[Tony Thomas MFA Black Banjoist]

One reason so many NYC clef Club musicians of this type were going to England and france in this period is that up to around 1914/15  the AFM musicians union in NYC refused to enroll any Black members, but more or less  did not boycott venues where Black bands (there were no mixed bands bore the 30s) or musicians performed.  Around 1914 the AFM changed its policy.  They began enrolling Black members on a very Jim Crow basis that most Clef Club musicians rejected. However, in venues where other AFM musicians or union acting and stage crews etc were on the job,  the AFM tried to get non-AFM black musicians fired and replaced by members of the Jim-Crow AFM operation.  This seemmed to happen to Vance Lowry who was playing with Joan Sawyer's Persian Room Orchestra at the Persian Room in NYC and when that cklosed down, in Sawyer's tour of Vaudeville I think working Keith Time.   Anyway at the same point this happened Sawyer's entertainment career came to a crashing halt as she was involved in a sexual infidelity and murder scandal involving a Chicago millionaire, his wife, and her some time dancing partner one Rudolf Valentino.   LOL 20 years ago when i first purchased a goodtime banjo, did I think it would lead me to know such things????

[Tony Thomas MFA Black Banjoist]

"but he was in show business from an early age,"  The earliest notice I can find for Lowry  who spelt his name Lowery or at least newspapers described him a s"lowery" until around 1911, is in 1906 when he was 15,  he has a nice little write-up in a Kansas newspaper describing him busking in the streets of Topeka  Kansas where he lived at the time with his father playing guitar to accompany him.  The article describes him as a musical "prodigy."

Tony Thomas MFA Black Banjoist said:

Thanks  Joek:

I trust your judgment.  With a much greater picture of his life--I have a timeline for Lowry that is quite think from around 1914 to 1917 and am incrementally working forward,  if I can refind the provenance of the picture--that might be linked to the particularl group he was playing and the variety of engagements he had.  He was surely playing tenor banjo with a pick all the recordings  I have heard so far of him with the Ciro Club band and most pictures I have of him from France show him with a tenor.

I think that is quite possible.  Lowry became known as a tenor banjoist,  and as a saxophonist and juggler!!!--in the 1920s and 1930s,  but he was in show business from an early age, before the tenor banjo became standardized as an instrument. 

He is mentioned in 1911 as about to work up a joint act with Stinson by two of the top Black entertainment writers of the time in the New York Age and the Indianapolis Freeman (which functioned as a national newspaper for Black entertainers) with the idea that the readers particularly folks in show business knew who both were. 

While Stinson may have played stroke style,  he seems to have predominantly played guitar banjo and touted his musical education,  Stinson is often referred to as Prof. Stinson, even though he had quite humble origins, including several stretches in prison and was musical director of a variety of  African American touring companies in the US and beyond and over Black religious and cultural celebrations in Ohio and Pennsylvania where he operated.

It is also quite possible that the Weaver Style banjolin may have circulated back and forth so that makers of similar instruments NYC may be copying British models.  The circulated across the Atlantic of just the few black banjoists I have followed who collaborated with Lowry is pretty amazing for the times.  Lowry came and went to the UK in 1914 and then returned in 1916 not to return until 1941.  Whenever venues would close or bands he participated in would break up in either London or Paris, there were always other former associated of Europe's Clef Club more lately come across the pond to complete a new band.

.

I started on following him on and off, as his name came up being linked to Stinson as part of a possible link between tenor banjoists and five string banjoists. 

[Tony Thomas MFA Black Banjoist]

I think the teaming up with Stinson was at the most one engagement at the Family Theater in Allegheny Pa, then an independent town, but within months to be incorporated into Pittsburgh.  It was where Stinson lived and entertained on the banjo, and was  local political ward healer and barber.   Stinson seemed to have regular appearances at this theater when he was not touring, and it seemed to be more oepn to African American performers than other theaters in the Pittsburgh area.  After Stinson died Lowry moves to NYC if he was not already living there and joins a set of Clef Club associated ensembles led by Louis Mitchell and then Dan Kildare before leaving the US for England in 1916 thence to France in November 1917 where he remained resident until 1939 

Tony Thomas MFA Black Banjoist said:

A bit busy being drawn back into the minstrel period and into efforts to characterize the whole place of minstrelsy in 19th century society,  LOL,  distracted me.  But  I have an interest in Lowry which brought me here though I am always wanting to help HIS NICENESS.

It certainly looks like a five string banjo, but I see no sign of a fifth string being on the banjo.  In that era plectrum and tenor players often used a five-string without the fifth string

Before I was pulled into the antebellum period by OUP I was developing an interest in Lowry and some of his Ciro club peers precisely as a link between the age of five-string guitar banjo playing and the tenor banjoists of the jazz age which he may be.  Unfortunately,  I am still immersed in trying to figure out where T.D, Rice was between August 1830 and May 1831, LOL.

In the Black newspapers of the first decade of the 20th century,  Lowry is frequently described as a comedian and banjoist, something that seemed to be standard as this is the way earlier newspapers also described James Bland before he too went to the soggy island.  Lowry's notices as a banjoist come from a period BEFORE tenor banjoists existed or at least before tenors were formally marketed in 1910.

Very interestingly enough in late 1910 and 1911 notices appeared that he was working up an act with C.P.  Stinson.  Stinson appears in Converse's memoirs as the first Black player allowed to participate in a banjo contest in the 1880s, and who famously won such a contest in Kansas City.  Stinson performed in the US and Europe in minstrel troops and as a banjo soloist.  He returned to Pittsburgh where it was headline news in the national Black press that the major white music store in Pittsburgh hired him as a banjo instructor.  For a time, at least one report says, Stinson was making banjos in Pittsburgh, but he eventually became more of an actor, and then a theater manager.  However, more pertinent to this research is that he definitely was a guitar banjo player.

Teaming up with Lowry probably would have been a duo but probably with jokes, and maybe singing.

Unfortunately,  Stinson died before the new show business season could start and never toured with Lowry,

Lowry was among the New York musicians associated with the Clef Club led initially by James Reese Europe.  The Clef Club had annual concerts to raise funds for formal music education for African American youth in New York.  At several of these concerts Lowry is listed as a banjo soloist.  Europe considered all stringed instruments to be African American particularly the banjo, and for these concerts he assembled orchestras that scores of banjos (and often as many as ten pianos as he considered that a stringed instrument too!).

However, Europe was one of the pioneers of the pick played banjos, the four string mandolin/violin played banjos.  Europe  was foremost an arranger who would often be pulled in to black Broadway or touring shows to rearrange the band and the singing, and had formal compositional skills.  He said he liked the various mandolin-descended banjos because he could score them like the violin or the viola or the cello.  His own dfance band the Europe Society Orchestra with about 10 pieces had 5 banjos, but only two pianos.

Lowry also played the Clarinet, and stayed in Europe until the Second World War.  He recorded with both tenor and clarinet.  He appeared in one avante-guard movive in the 1920s in France, playing, not the banjo but the clarinet.  He apparently lived in France during the interwar years (we show our age when to us the War was still WWII and not the ones that seemed to be permanently starting and stopping over the past 20 years).

I wish  I could do more but right now  I am kneed deep in other work, but keep in touch as I eventually aim to write about Lowry.

He seems to have died in the late 1940s, although continued to perform as a solo act after his return to the US and I found some notices for War bond and similar benefits from the WWII years.  A couple years ago I was briefly in contact with a relative of Lowry's through Ancestry.com,.

Probably if this had come up in 2012, I would have richer memories  about Lowry.  But he certainly is a candidate for someone who started as a five-string classic player who graduated to being a tenor player.Some day I will return to him.  LOL

I
 
thereallyniceman said:

Thank you RitonM ,

That is very interesting and Mr. Lowry certainly is/was a great player. It sure sounds like Classic Style to me, but I agree that many of his arpeggioed chords sound like he is using a plectrum.  The triplets, finger tremolo and Bass notes clinch it for me though... Classic Style !!

Here is a music player so that you we don't have to hunt for the track:

VANCE LOWRY on www.francemusique.fr Classic Banjo

By the way Tony Thomas is a site member on here, but we have not seen him for a while. Tony helped edit the site page  "WHAT IS CLASSIC BANJO?"

[Tony Thomas MFA Black Banjoist]

Minor Correction,  there is no evidence Lowry played the clarinet.  There is evidence he also played the bass saxophone as well as banjo and bandolin in the Joan Sawyer Persian Room Orchestra,  and is recorded as playing the alto sax as much as banjo in France, though he seems to have shifted chiefly to the tenor banjo by the late 1920s.  However,  especially at this time, most musicians who could play several saxes could also play clarinet.  In one of his reminiscence interviews about the Clef Club days published in the NY Age in the late 1940s or early 1950s,  Noble Sissle explains that in the "society" gigs Clef club bands were sent to, especially in playing in the private palaces of NYC,  Philiadelphia, and Palm Beach's super rich and the post clubs the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers and Wanamakers frequented,  it was considered inappropriate for Black musicians to play horns  of any kind.  String instruments were acceptable and the piano in Reese Europe's eyes was a stringed instrument, given that his sister was a performing classical pianist who accompanied.Samuel Coleridge-Taylor  during his visits to the US.    However, Eubie Blake who was a Pianist with them at the tinme explains the Clef Clubbers were never allowed to use the fine Steinways and Becksteins in these mansions.  The wealthy would rent a lesser piano for black hands to play.

[Tony Thomas MFA Black Banjoist]

Speaking of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor,  I also discovered about 10 years ago that when Samuel Coleridge-Taylor visited the Washington,  an African American BMG club, the Aeolians,  were part of the official program greeting him along with the Marine Band.  The Aeolian BMG club was apparently composed of  what was then considered "high society" African Americans  as a layer of African Americans with important government jobs remained in the Republican years of Roosevelt I and Taft, before the segregationist Wilson resegregated the US govt.  I have found notices for their participation in cultural events or concerts in DC and other east coast cities attended by hundreds and in one case thousands.  Black newspapers around the US covered their activities as " society" news.  This is all recorded in my article on Gus Cannon in Banjo Roots and Branches.

Tony Thomas MFA Black Banjoist said:

Minor Correction,  there is no evidence Lowry played the clarinet.  There is evidence he also played the bass saxophone as well as banjo and bandolin in the Joan Sawyer Persian Room Orchestra,  and is recorded as playing the alto sax as much as banjo in France, though he seems to have shifted chiefly to the tenor banjo by the late 1920s.  However,  especially at this time, most musicians who could play several saxes could also play clarinet.  In one of his reminiscence interviews about the Clef Club days published in the NY Age in the late 1940s or early 1950s,  Noble Sissle explains that in the "society" gigs Clef club bands were sent to, especially in playing in the private palaces of NYC,  Philiadelphia, and Palm Beach's super rich and the post clubs the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers and Wanamakers frequented,  it was considered inappropriate for Black musicians to play horns  of any kind.  String instruments were acceptable and the piano in Reese Europe's eyes was a stringed instrument, given that his sister was a performing classical pianist who accompanied.Samuel Coleridge-Taylor  during his visits to the US.    However, Eubie Blake who was a Pianist with them at the tinme explains the Clef Clubbers were never allowed to use the fine Steinways and Becksteins in these mansions.  The wealthy would rent a lesser piano for black hands to play.

[Tony Thomas MFA Black Banjoist]

Jody Stecher said:

I sent the Hosea Easton photo to Paul Hostetter who reciprocated with another I've never seen before.  Check out her banjo!  A zither-banjo type pot and a fretless neck without a channeled fifth string.

Lydia and William Williams with their banjos, Carlyle Street, Napier, NZ, ca. 1890.

yeah this appears on the same web site that I found the Easton picture.  Both Australia and New Zealand maintain a very high level of newspaper and other archives on their national library sites freely accessible to all, so much that I am really just giving a brief summary of Easton's work, because I have so much data on him from Australia and New Zealand as well as banjo methods and other materials created by his collaborators there.  someone seeking to study banjo in Australia has some good assets despite the impediment that when you google Banjo this or that, you end up with the writer "Banjo Patterson," would that he were Christened more correctly

[Tony Thomas MFA Black Banjoist]

Unfortunately I was wrong.  Laurant had been scheduled to have a chapter that would appear in Banjo Roots and Branches on Banjo and the Caribbean.   Unfortunately,  Illinois UP felt his great book,  "The Banjo: America's African instrument"  http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674047846  was deemed to have too much material that was in that chapter.  Actually this book which belongs in every home, has much better material than Laurent's original chapter, but any way IUP  rejected several contributions that had been published in scholarly journals and elsewhere and would allow only stuff never published before into Banjo Roots and Branches.  Both books belong in every home, and  a wise person would own at least two copies in case a thief brakes into your home and steals one copy

Jody Stecher said:

Tony, you and Joel each seem relentlessly (in the best way) interested in discovering How It Really Was and then letting the rest of us know.   This is a welcome development and such a change from the other sort of banjo "scholarship" which is based on notions, ideology, and communal partisanship rather than on empirical evidence.  I say this as someone who has loved and played American Old time music and bluegrass my entire life.  The real story of the banjo and the music it has played is so rich and varied. I hope someone researches and illuminates the story of the banjo  in the Caribbean. Just the other day I was listening to Roaring Lion's 1940s kaiso/calypso recording of Mary Ann whose chorus goes 

All Day All Night Miss Mary Ann

Down by the seaside she sifting sand 

Strings on a banjo can tie a goat

Water from the ocean can sail a boat.

How's that again?  Tying a goat with banjo strings?  What were the strings made of? Not metal surely.  I'm thinking of the rhythmic chordal accompaniment that Lord Invader played on the cuatro  (the soft-strung kind from Trinidad and Venezuela ).  Was Caribbean banjo playing something like this? I have no idea!

I am also contemplating a number of possible explanations for an anomaly. 

120 and maybe even 100 years before the time a black musician in white America  is expected to not be a violinist, the ability to ably play violin was a major selling point for a house slave.  I have seen facsimiles of the adverts.  What an odd change.  People sure get peculiar ideas.

By the way over the years  I have played about half a dozen single course short-necked banjos tuned as a mandolin and built before the time of the tenor banjo. Each sounded really good.

[Tony Thomas MFA Black Banjoist]

I think I would have gone mad preparing my presentation without my typings here which will serve as a good basis for the journal or magazine article I will write on these topics.

Thank you 

[Tony Thomas MFA Black Banjoist]

You will  be happy to know that the entire assemblage of he banjo collectors gathering in Bristol Virginia  this weekend will here pieces of both these selections you discovered.  I cannot say how much your launching this thread off years ago has helped me and some of my colleagues even those of us who focus on other banjo playing methods.  I am in pertpetual shame as I have never learned this style properly,  Nit without opportunity!  I grew up in Hartford CT.  The next town is Wethersfield CT,  the home of the great Bradbury,  As a senior in high school and in my college years I actually played music regularly with two friends who were taking lessons with Bradburry.  Hiow dumb can we be when we are young