From pots and pans to a Pulitzer

Michael Colgrass grew up in Brookfield, found his niche and took his talent out into the world.

His name means little to many local people, unless they have lived in Brookfield for a good while, or happen to be well acquainted with the world of instrumental music and musical composition. To classical and experimental musicians, however, his is a famous name known all over the globe.

Colgrass was born in a Chicago hospital on April 22, 1932, to Mr. and Mrs. Michael Colgrass Sr., of Brookfield. His father was the village’s most beloved and respected postmaster, with a term of service lasting from 1934 to 1972. Mrs. Colgrass was both housewife and devoted mother, with all the many duties and abilities that entailed.

Young Michael, or “Buddy,” as was his family nickname, spent his early years roaming and playing on the streets, in the alleys, on the vacant lots, and in the woods of his hometown village. It was not an easy time to be growing up, either, what with the effects of the Depression still very much evident. Sometimes kids had to make do, and find fun wherever they could. As a toddler, young Mike was quite fond of hitting pots and pans with spoons, even then experimenting with a percussion beat.

Colgrass recalled that his childhood involved “climbing the trees and eating too many green apples in the apple orchard that existed between Brookfield and Hollywood, just north of the [railroad] tracks.” He also got “into mischief, playing pranks, like shaking the trolley wires that incapacitated street cars at Lincoln and Madison avenues,” and even had to deal with getting bad report cards. Mrs. Nieman, his fourth-grade teacher at Gross School, wrote on one card that “Michael hasn’t passed a music test yet.”

And so, an early liking for percussion grew in intensity, even as he approached his teenage years. But he did not find the village particularly inspiring.

“Brookfield … was absolutely devoid of music, dance or theater. At age 10, I saw drummer Ray Bauduc in a movie play, ‘Big Noise from Winnetka,’ with bassist Bobby Haggart, and was mesmerized. I hounded my father for a drum, and when I got it, I immediately played the rhythms that I heard Bauduc play in that movie.”

Musically speaking, for him there was no turning back.

The family lived at 3709 Raymond Ave., moving to 9131 Sherman Ave. in his late grade school years. When he started at Riverside-Brookfield High School, they were living at 3648 Madison Ave.

In 1944, Colgrass started his first band, simply known as “Mike’s Band” or “Colgrass’s Band,” that evolved into “The Three Jacks and a Jill.” The name was inspired by a 1942 musical movie, “‘Four Jacks and a Jill,’ about a girl singer who joins a boy’s band, and then climbs over all obstacles to success.”

Colgrass, on drums, was one of the “Jacks,” with the other two being Danny Kral on trumpet, and Warren Jennings on piano. Jarmela Speta was the “Jill” on accordion.

The “swing” band played anywhere, even at basketball games at their own Gross School. Despite their common musical interest, Colgrass still remembers “trying to get Warren Jennings to come in and rehearse after school, instead of playing baseball.”

In his sophomore year at RB, 1947, until graduation in 1949, his band expanded into a quintet, playing bebop music on trumpet, saxophone, piano, bass and drums. But his life wasn’t all bebop and studies. While still a sophomore, he made extra money by working for the Brookfield Enterprise newspaper, physically inserting pages in their proper order. In his junior and senior years, he joined the Masque and Wig drama club and acted in plays.

There were the usual critics of his brand of music. Decades later, in his May 1995 commencement address to the graduates at his alma mater, the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, he recalled that “when I had my own band, at age 15, playing bebop jazz, the remark I often heard was ‘What kind of music is this? If you want to succeed, you have to give the public what it wants.’ But I soon realized that among the best musicians and listeners, the truth was just the opposite: Follow your own creative inspiration, and eventually others will be attracted to it.”

This became his musical creed. At the University of Illinois, Colgrass was playing jazz six nights a week at Katsina’s, “a campus drinking place, that also served light food,” on the corner of Wright and Green streets, at the heart of the campus.

At the college, he studied percussion with his first music teacher Paul Price, who wasn’t very impressed by his student.

“Oh no, he’s back” was the teacher’s comment at seeing Colgrass returning for his second semester. Nevertheless, Price “made a last-ditch effort to turn [his student] around, and urged [him] to come to a percussion ensemble concert … at Smith Hall.”

Price then asked him what he thought about the concert. Colgrass thought the musicians were very skilled, but also said “the music was terrible.” Price responded by asking, “Well, if you don’t like what you heard, why don’t you write what you’d like to hear?”

This proved to be a defining moment in Colgrass’s life. He had never written a musical composition before this. Enthused, he wrote “The Three Brothers,” which Price performed in a concert on May 8, 1950.

“I’m going to be a composer,” Colgrass said, afterwards.

He didn’t know it then, but the die was cast, and his future lay before him. After his unpromising start in musical study, he went on to graduate in 1954 with a degree in music performance and composition.

A few months following his graduation, from September 1954 to June 1956, he was in the service, playing over 200 concerts with the Seventh Army Symphony Orchestra. Once this phase of his musical life was at an end, he went to New York City, where he continued to both write and play.

He then free-lanced as a percussion player, which led him to him playing with Dizzy Gillespie’s band, the New York Philharmonic, and subbed for the original jazz drum player for the Broadway musical “West Side Story.” The drummer was unable to continue working, so Colgrass was chosen to take his place, and subsequently played on the original cast recording.

At the same time, he was still also a student of the Manhattan School of Music. He studied composition with Eugene Weigel, Darius Milhaud, Lukas Foss, Wallingford Riegger and Ben Weber.

In 1966, he arrived in Denmark, intending to study by way of a grant, but it was during this time he met a journalist named Ulla, who absolutely entranced him, and soon they were married.

Up until 1967, Colgrass continued to play percussion, but also found time to occasionally conduct music classes of a few days’ length and, as always, compose. But now he decided to cease playing, and to concentrate on composition. He was now working solely by commission.

The previous summer at the Tanglewood Music Festival, his new work, “As Quiet As” had premiered. On Feb. 17, 1967, the piece was played by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The basic theme for the work came from schoolchildren’s answers when the teacher asked them to end this sentence: “Let’s be quiet as…”

Seven answers came forth: “as a leaf turning colors; an uninhabited creek; an ant walking; children sleeping; time passing; a soft rainfall; and the first star coming out.” Experimental, yet entertaining, it became a hit, not only with music critics, but with the listening public.

Now he was getting more and more into the performing end of his works, and realized he needed to better understand the theatrical world. A Rockefeller Foundation grant and his second Guggenheim Award allowed him to pursue his studies in the areas of acting, singing, fencing, directing, improvisation, and commedia dell’ arte. Two years later, he felt greatly improved by his experiences.

In 1969 he premiered his first piece for the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, titled “New People.” It was a new type of piece for him, set to seven of his own poems. Very well received, Colgrass was said by Harold C. Schonberg of the New York Times to have “lyric flair” and to be “extremely personal and poetic.”

Colgrass moved in 1974 from New York to live in Toronto, Canada, and continued to compose. Three years later, he wrote “Deja Vu,” for percussion quartet and orchestra, being four separate concertos for four soloists. It was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, and was premiered on Oct. 20, 1977.

It turned out to be so special a piece that the next year it won the Pulitzer Prize for Music. The April 18, 1978 the Chicago Sun-Times announced the news. Three days later the Sun-Times followed that up with the news that “Mike’s mom heard the Pulitzer news while making an apple pie. She was so ‘greatly elated,’ she couldn’t finish the pie.”

Colgrass first received the news from an Associated Press reporter while speaking at a Toronto elementary school. Though obviously flattered and pleased, he took it all in stride, declaring that his greatest “pleasure about winning … was receiving a lot of nice letters from old friends, and excited people coming by with a bottle of wine.” He later received his prize in the mail, with no formal ceremony.

But he was becoming so well known that, in 1982, he was the subject of the PBS documentary “Soundings: The Music of Michael Colgrass.” For this he received an Emmy award.

Now that he was more well known than ever before, the commissions poured in. Over the next several years, he was to win several other honors, such as the 1985 Louis Sudler award for his composition “The Winds of Nagual,” that netted him $10,000. But even then, Colgrass was expanding his horizons, and finding additional interests.

That same year, he began to investigate the possibilities of a connection between ESP and creativity. This occurred as a result of having a clairvoyant experience while his composing process was being studied at a Neuro-Linguistic Programming workshop in California. Soon he became a trainer in NLP, with an aim to enhance personal creativity in others, as well. More years passed, and more prizes and honors followed.

In 2000 Colgrass published his first book, “My Lessons with Kumi”-How I Learned to Perform With Confidence in Life and Work.” It’s a valuable self-help guide to performing on stage, or in front of any size of an audience, and even coping with life in the outside world, as well.

Then, in October of that year, his old high school, RB, honored him with one of the first Alumni Achievement awards, for “having enjoyed a distinguished career in the fine arts, as a performer, a teacher, and composer.” Locally at least, it was his finest hour.

Colgrass was last in Brookfield in December 2004, speaking before Kevin McOlgan’s band class at RB. They played for him, and then talked with and listened to him, long after the seventh-hour class had been dismissed. The students were fascinated by this man who had gone so far in his chosen career, yet had once been just a student here, like any of them.

His many musical works have been performed by the greatest orchestras around the world, and yet few in Brookfield know his name, other than perhaps by recognizing him as the son of Brookfield’s former postmaster and brother of Village Trustee Catherine Colgrass Edwards. But Michael Colgrass Jr. has long, long since stepped out of his father’s shadow, and has blazed a trail of triumph throughout and beyond the world of music.

For more information on this remarkable man, you can visit his web site at www.michaelcolgrass.com.