Here are the stats for the project as of December 29, 2011:

154 Potential Interview Subjects Identified
60 Different Individuals Captured On Camera
30 Full On-camera Interviews
26 Cities Visited
13 States Visited
9 Countries Heard From

~6 Terabytes Of Video Shot

And, again, like any proud new parent, I'd like to share with you some pictures of the baby in the form of a slideshow (really...this will be enjoyable and not painful at all):

I hope that you've been enjoying what I've been posting and talking about here on the project site and that you're as excited about the potential for this subject as I am.  If you are, I hope that you would consider any level of financial support that you or your organization could muster.  Frankly, all travel and expenses that I have put into this project so far have stopped.  There's zero possiblity for me to add any further money to the project, so I'm seeking other funding sources.

If you'd like to help, it would be greatly appreciated.  You can click right here to check out our supporters and support page.

Thanks in advance and I wish everyone (and this documentary baby) a great 2012!!

Rod Milam - Director/Executive Producer of The University City Musician Documentary Project

Hello from Rod Milam again,

I was back in the St. Louis area for the last 5 days.  I made a great deal of contact with many (22) different U. City Musicians and got most of them either on video or still camera.  I'll make another post about that with links to some great stories and pictures later.

Also while I was in St. Louis I was interviewed on the city's biggest NPR affilate, 90.7 KWMU, St. Louis Public Radio on the Citiscape program.  Click here and you should be able to hear the segement from the program where host Steve Potter and I discussed the project:

 http://www.milamnyc.com/storage/audio-recordings/Sounding%20The%20Chord%20Radio%20Interview%20-%20Cityscape%20on%2090.7%20KWMU%209-23-2011%20Edited.mp3

Also joining me in the segement were U. City musicians and brothers Rob and Mike Sliverman (UCHS c/o 1985 and 1989 respectively).  They founded and pulled of a VERY successful first iteration of the U. City Jazz Festival in the city's Heman Park.  More than 2,000 people showed up throughout the day of music and food.  You can listen to all of us talk about the projects in the segment of Cityscape linked above or just below this paragraph.

Most people up this way not from the feels-like-the-middle-of-a-non-concrete-jungle sections of the country complain a lot when the temperature gets above 90F (32C).  They'll whine and moan even though there's really not much humidity and there's actually a breeze blowing, a feature sorely missing from the steambath that is St. Louis in June, July, and August.  But, again, there are usually one or two days that I walk out of my door in Astoria, Queens, get hit in the face with what feels like one of the warm towels that you get before a meal at a Japanese restaurant, and I'll think to myself, "Ahhhh....feels like home."

During the research and recording of interviews for this documentary, I've come to find out that there are about 20 people in the Big Apple that are, or have been professional musicians, that would be very likely to have that same thought running through their heads on those same sweaty days.  Before February, I knew of about 20 people in general that were from U. City that were in New York, but no where near that many were musicians.  Now with this outreach, more and more people that know that "North & South" is a street as well as points on a compass.  It's been a good thing.

One of the people that we've recorded doing his thing is U. Citian and pianist Harry Miller (UCHS c/o 1980).  He's been in New York for many years and is a jazz musician and was a student teacher at the LaGuardia School of Music and Arts.  One morning a couple of weeks ago, Harry asked a couple of other current teachers at the school to come by when no students were around so that I could record them doing a bit of a jam session.  They all would like to play more than they do and the'd gotten together before just to work out some standards.  This particular morning Harry pulled out a very lovely, untitled ballad that he'd written some years ago but had never played with others.  These musicians being great professionals just took about 10 seconds to look over Harry's chart and then proceeded to play this lovely, chilled out piece that made everyone in the recording studio forget just how hot and uncomfortable it was on the other side of the outside walls.

Just click play on this, sit back, and enjoy some sitting-on-the-porch-with-some-lemonade music:

We haven't fully interviewed Harry yet, but that's coming.  Another U. Citian that we have interviewed fully and seen perform some great music in town is Kaoru Watanabe.  (Just click that link to see him playing the Japanese Fue (wooden flute) in Prospect Park, Brooklyn as a part of an experimental "Creative Walk" where he serenaded blindfolded attendees with the fue and a large taiko drum.)  Kaoru's musical story is interesting and we'll be bringing you more on that as the project continues.

We also had a great gathering of a lot of U. City people a couple of weeks ago at a special "listening party" for a soon to be released album by Jeremy Schonfeld.  To find out a bit more about that shoot, just click here.  I've actually done some work surrounding this album, Iron & Coal.  If you'd like to find out more about it, please just click here.

So since there are so many musicians from U. City in the New York area, we're going to concentrate on interviewing them for the next couple of months.  At the same time, we plan on raising a lot of funds and awareness so that we can go back out into the rest of the world to capture more of this great talent that has come through the black and gold city.

Going to the public schools in University City in the mid 1970s & 1980s meant that there was a great chance that I'd wind up playing an instrument even though neither one of my parents ever played.  Music was everywhere...even on the streets and McDonalds.  I decided to follow my cousin's footsteps and take up drums in 5th grade in 1980 (surely to my parents' ears' delight).  I loved playing and loved being part of the band.

One of the biggest thrills was going on to junior high and not only playing in a bigger band, but was being around to see and hear the great bands that were playing in the high school.  At least once a year, the high school Wind Ensemble or Jazz Band would play a concert that we'd get to see in the big auditorium.  Hearing them was an inspiration for all of us in the band.  We wanted to try to be that good and be in that band when we made it to UCHS.

The Jazz Band 1 in 1983 was directed by John Brophy, a very talented drummer in his own right.  He'd not only put the talent of U. City musicians on the map in St. Louis, but they were eventually known around the US and the whole world.  The group of high schoolers was so good that they were invited to play at the famed Montreaux Jazz Festival in Switzerland and they played several gigs around Paris on the way to the big show.  Below is a clip of a documentary that was made by the St. Louis PBS station KETC Channel 9 about the band's trip to Europe called "Brophy And The Band".

The band cut an album and sold it around all of St. Louis so that they could raise enough funds to make that trip.  Everyone I knew wanted a copy of that album.

After I started working on the radio in the 1990s, I pulled out the "On The Threshold" album that I liked so much from the Jazz Band and I played songs from it on my non-news program "The Show with Rod Milam" on 88.1 KDHX.  I had a lot of pride in my fellow alumni that were able to pull of some great music at such a young age.  I never went on to be a musician, but I was glad that I could do my part to show my love and appreciation for that form of art by presenting it to all of the people in the St. Louis area.

Flash-forward to 2010 and New York City.  I'd lived in multiple countries and spoken multiple languages.  But the one thing that I knew was a constant around the world was the appreciation of music.  I'd widened my already broad palate of musical tastes over the years.  But recently, I'd been running into many people around town from my hometown of U. City and I was really happy to find out that many of them were professional musicians.  I decided that I wanted to use my old broadcasting bug and see if I could mix some of the old and new music of the players from University City into one piece and then use it on my project website The Global Loop.

I figured that I'd play some of this music on the network before and after any live events that I had scheduled to run on UStream so that people would know the programming was up and running.  I combined the music with some sped up sunrise videos that I'd since shot from many different locations so that people could see and hear that something was going on over the feed.  The result was this almost 2 hours worth of music by 15 different U. City musicians below.

Taking time to find and put together this music really was the last step for me to actually deciding to take on finding all of the professional musicians that had passed through U. City.  It was the final piece of the puzzle that let me know that the deep music tradition of U. City needed to be explored further and that I need to see where it all came from and how it lasted so long.

If you have some time to hear some great music, just click and enjoy.  There's a song listing below the player window:

One of the reasons that this whole project got started was because of the impact of the high levels of musical talent that I was surrounded by during my era at University City High.  Now I played in multiple bands...the Wind Ensemble, Jazz Band II, the marching band...but that doesn't really mean much.  So did other people.  Even though I was really in to playing music and loved it, I never thought that I was going to go on in live to be a musician.  But it was always clear that there were other people that I was playing with on a daily basis that not only had the desire to go on a play professionally, but the ability to go really far with it.

In my class of 1988, there were many talented artists and musicians; however, there was little doubt about 3 people in the bands that would go on if they so chose: Peter Martin, Jeremy Davenport, and Chris Thomas.  These three close friends didn't just play in the bands together during school functions, but they performed at other times and had professional (low paying) gigs to boot.

As you will find out throughout the course of this search phase of the documentary project, there are many U. Citians that have taken many different paths throughout their careers.  Some stayed in the St. Louis area.  Some left music for a while and then went back to it after school.  Others changed their interests to areas other than music.  But for many U. Citians, their path in life took them down to the end of the Louisiana Purchase to New Orleans for at least a short stint.

Chris, Peter, and Jeremy have all spent at least some time in bayou country and have added their own flavor to the musical gumbo that is one of the signatures of the Crescent City.  The three of them no longer live in NOLA at the same time, but during one of the early concerts that Peter held in his concert series Peter Martin Music: LIVE! in 2010, Peter invited his old buddies plus another musician (Ulysses Owens Jr., originally from Harlem) also steeped in the New Orleans tradition to "The Reunion" show in April 2nd at the Sheldon Concert Hall in Midtown St. Louis.

One of the many great songs that these musicians performed was a standard written by Hoagy Carmichael, "New Orleans", that paid homage to the city that they'd all called home at some point.  Below is this great rendition of this classic, and it features great solos by all 3 U. Citians. (Jeremy Davenport: Vocals/Trumpet, Peter Martin: Piano, Chris Thomas: Bass, Ulysses Owens Jr.: Drums)

I'm sure that we will be featuring some other songs from this concert throughout the course of Sounding The Chord, but this will have to tide you over for now.  Don't worry though, there is so much more music out there by U. Citians that we've captured and, surely, some that we haven't even gotten to yet. It is my firm hope, and almost need, to be able to find as many people that have called U. City home in their formative years and have taken up music as a profession at some point in their lives.  This pursuit of the arts and music seems to be part of the culture of my hometown.  And hearing, recording, and broadcasting music and performances like this does nothing to dissuade me from that belief.

Stay tuned to the site.  Spread the word.  Join the mailing list.  And let's get ready to begin this trip, OK?

Thanks,

Rod Milam

TriBeCa Drive-In f. "Fame"

We knew that Tanya was an enthusiast about the festival, but we didn't know that Tanya had a particular reason to be enthusiastic about seeing "Fame" at the festival.  It turns out that Tanya attended the LaGuardia School for Music and Arts High School, the very school that "Fame" was based on and where a great deal of the movie was filmed.  Who knew...?  It also turned out that Tanya arranged to have some other alumni members come down (many of whom were in the movie), get VIP seating, and get on stage to be acknowledged.  Very fun.

We got to sit with the group in the freezing, windy weather in New York harbor in the front row to screen the film.  Before things got started, we got to talk to the nice bunch a little bit about their school.  They all had very fond memories of the place and were extremely proud to have gone there.

They asked where we went to school, and we told them a bit about U. City.  We let them know that our public school (not designated as a "music and arts" school) reminded us a lot of the movie "Fame".  And as a matter of fact, we put on a musical "Fame" back in 1986.  They were shocked to hear that.  "How do you put on a musical version of Fame?  That hasn't been done."

Well...we did that...

That was just one of the songs from the first staging of a musical version of Fame.  The LaGuardia bunch thought that was cool.  We asked if we could interview some of them some time as a nice parallel to the U. City arts experience, and some said they'd be happy to do it.  We'll set that up later and let you know about the results.

In that clip above were Randy Carter, George Wright, Amy (Fisher) Abeyta and Emily Bruder singing (among others...any help with other names will be GREATLY appreciated).  The only person that wasn't singing was the piano player, the role of Bruno Martelli, Chris Edmonds.  We'd forgotten that Chris was in that musical and so we didn't put together that Chris was going to be the next subject of an interview for the project the next day in New York since he happened to be in town from his place of residence for many years, Kingston, Jamaica.Chris Edmonds & Greg Echols

We met up with Chris the next afternoon at the bar/restaurant of another U. Citian in NYC, Stephanie Schneider.  She's owned Huckleberry Bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn for a bit over 3 years now and her brother, Aaron Schneider, did most of the construction.  Steph had let us shoot 2 other interviews in off hours at her place and Chris would be the third.  During the course of the interview about Chris and his current work as a DJ and music producer, he let us know that the only musical that he was in was "Fame". He said that he was cool with taking the role of Bruno since he wouldn't have to sing.  The singing talent on stage with him would have been too much...especially Randy Carter.

With that, the string of coincidences continued because just before we took off to head to the shoot with Chris, a long anticipated delivery of a VHS tape had shown up at the studio.  That tape was of the high school's 1985 verision of "The Wiz" where Randy Carter (the Tin Man) and the other dancers brought down the house each night with the performance of "Slide Some Oil To Me"...

Well that was too much for us, but it's the way that the project has been going so far.  One person will mention something about another one that we just finished talking about and so on, and so on, and so on... We really look forward to where this string of coincidences is going to end up.  Our whole hypothesis is that the string of artistic connections can be traced back to the beginning of the city in 1906 and beyond.  And so far, nothing has happened to knock us off that track.

For the past couple of months, we've been hard at work interviewing U. Citians from Portland, Oregon to Portland, Maine and many points in between.  With that and some preliminary organizational setup, we've gotten things off the ground in a good way.  Things are ready to go to the next level.

We've asked U. City native Tom Seltzer (UCHS c/o 1988 and owner/principal designer at Seltzer Studio Graphics) to use his skills as a graphic designer and artist to capture the spirit of this project in the form of a logo and look-and-feel. As usual, Tom has knocked it out of the park.  He's just now finishing up some of the last details of the enhancements, but we figured we'd give all of you early followers a sneak peek into what's coming up from the drawing table of Tom Seltzer:

As soon as everything is done, we'll be rebranding this site, the Facebook page, Twitter, and all communications materials from here until we release a movie or have gallery shows.  We're very excited to moving on to this next phase, and we're glad so many people on Facebook (almost 220) have started to follow us in such a short period of time.

Please let us know what you think below and also visit Tom Seltzer's website for Seltzer Studio Graphics to see more of his work and to see what he can do for your business: http://www.seltzerstudio.com

I've come up with the idea of this project slowly over the past 5-6 years while I've lived here in New York City.  I've met and continue to meet many people from my home town here in the Big Apple and felt a huge sense of commonality with them all (no matter what it is we do now and how we ended up in NYC).  And one of the many ways that we all seemed to be able to bond was over our inherent need to be involved in the arts and music in some way.  Some of us are still active participants in that scene and some of us support it as a matter of course in our daily lives.  We all seem to attribute that trait to growing up in U. City.

About two and a half years ago, I organized an event called "UC in NYC before DC" set to take place in Brooklyn, New York, one day before the inauguration of Barack Obama down in Washington, DC in 2009 since I'd heard that there would be a good number of U. City people heading for the nation's capital.  Here is a promo video that I produced to promote the event: 

About 25-30 people from U. City that lived anywhere from Vermont to Washington DC showed up on a snowy night to hang out and have a great time...as well as to listen to some great music by some U. City folks.  A great time was had.

That whole event inspired me to do a follow up on some more of the musicians from U. City that I knew about and to expand the group of people that I did know.  So in the middle of 2010, I finally gathered a bunch of the recorded music from various artists that I knew and decided to use only U. City folks as background music to some of the sunrise/sunset video that I'd shot around the world so that I could run it as network filler on my project website The Global Loop.  After a lot of work gathering the files and recording end editing, I came up with a two hour video that I currently use ahead of and after any live events that I may be running on any live webcasts on the site.  You can check out the music (and pretty video) by going to this link:

http://www.thegloballoop.com/home/2010/11/19/from-the-u-city-loop-to-the-global-loop.html

15 different U. City related musicians were involved in getting that video made and I made sure to send DVD copies of the finished video to all of them.  They seemed to really enjoy it.  At the same time that I handed out the DVDs, I asked them all if they'd like to be involved in a documentary about the people from approximately 1965 to 2008 that passed through U. City at some point and decided to make music a profession at some point in their lives.  Not one person said "no".  I also asked if they'd be willing to help in getting me in touch with even more people than the 15 I'd already gotten in touch with so that I could try to get as complete a record as possible.  Again, not one person said "no".

The result of that is that MilamNYC Productions is now in pre-production on a documentary about musicians with a tie to University City.  These musicians don't have to be currently playing, the biggest stars on the planet, or part of a specific genre of music.  They only need to fit these criteria: 1) Must have spent 1 year of life in University City, 2) Must have attended at least 1 year of school in the University City school district, 3) Must have worked as a paid and recorded musician (or producer/conductor) for 1 year at some point in their lives.  That's it.

I already have many people on board, but I'm certainly looking for many more to get involved.  I won't just want to hear from musicians either.  My goal with this project is to make it a 100% U. City production.  I am sure that there is enough talent in the area of the arts, photography, technology, finance, grant writing, production, and logistics that an important document such as what I hope to produce can be done totally "in-house" so that we can create and preserve our own unique culture and history. (U. City isn't ONLY about the arts.) Again, I'm in the fairly early stages of this project, but some things have been done.  I would certainly appreciate any leads that any of you might have.

So now that I've put this out in the Internet ether, I hope that anyone reading this will help in getting people that fit the following criteria in touch with me here at MilamNYC Productions.  If you or others can and want to find out more and help, you can send an e-mail to ucdoc@milamnyc.com . You should also feel free to forward this link on to others that you know so that they can get in touch with me if they'd like to.

Thanks for reading this and I hope that you stay tuned to this space so that you'll know what's going on as this project progresses.