 What’s the deal with the black & white saddle shoes?  Click here for the story of our farm in Greene County, Iowa. Here's looking at life at Simple Serenity Farm  Carla’s sister & brother-in-law Chris and Tony Woods, of Des Moines, were at the farm on Sunday, August 22, helping Carla do the lawn mowing and other yard work that we’ve struggled to keep up with lately, with all our medical appointments. The Woodses brought along their 18-month-old granddaughter Ari, who was a delight watching all the action from the porch with Chuck, catching up on her reading and then getting a moment on the lawn tractor seat! Click here for larger format Earlier photos in this series Iowa Hall of Pride netINS, Inc. Butler House on Grand B&B Sam's Barber Shop Douglas T. Bates III, Attorney KMA Radio's ''Chuck & Don Show'' Barack Obama story & coloring book The Monks of New Melleray Abbey RELATED LINKS About Offenburger.com Biographies Want to Reprint? Want Updates? ARCHIVES Chuck Offenburger's columns Christie Vilsack's columns Carla Offenburger's columns Carla's book reviews Jared Strong's columns Guest Columns The Simple Serenity Farm columns Farm Photos, 2006 - 2008 Our Iowa News Digest Along Our Way 
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 Tanner Taylor, another sensational jazz player from Jefferson, Iowa, is bringing it home for us By CHUCK OFFENBURGER January 12, 2010 JEFFERSON, IOWA When Tanner Taylor graduated from Jefferson-Scranton High School in 1999, everyone knew that he was one of the best young musicians the community had ever produced – and there have been a bunch.
The 28-year-old Taylor, the son of Jefferson Police Chief Dan Taylor and his wife Vicki, is going to bring his talent and growing reputation back to Jefferson in early February. He and another jazz pro, saxophone player Don Jaques, of Des Moines, will do clinics with the jazz bands at five area high schools, Feb. 9-12. Those schools are Jefferson-Scranton, East Greene, Prairie Valley, Ogden and Dallas Center-Grimes, with J-S band director Becky Greiner coordinating the scheduling. On Friday evening, Feb. 12, Taylor and a couple of his old friends who are also jazz musicians, bass player Dr. David Martin of Carroll and drummer Todd Woodard of Waukee, will lead a jam session at the Jefferson Depot, from 7 to 10 p.m. It will be open to students, adult performers and all who want to listen. And at 7 p.m. on Saturday evening, Feb. 13, Taylor will be the featured performer in a full concert at Jefferson-Scranton High School’s auditorium, backed by three other professional jazz players – drummer Mac Santiago and bass player Graydon Peterson, both from the Twin Cities, and Jaques on saxophone. A dessert reception will follow, prepared and hosted by the Women of the Word group at the Assembly of God Church, which Taylor’s parents attend. THANKS TO FINANCIAL SUPPORT from several sponsors in the Jefferson area, all events in the “Tanner Taylor Jefferson Jazz Project,” as we’re calling it, will be free to the schools, to all participants and to the public, too. Contributors include Tanner’s parents, his grandparents Dee & Karen Taylor, Roger & Lyn Koppen, Dave & Rosemary Hoyt, the Jefferson Telephone Charitable Trust, the Jefferson Bee & Herald newspapers, Bett & Bev’s BBQ, John & Laura Meyer, Renee & Gary Carhill, Jody & Terry Lang, and two couples who asked to remain anonymous. Of the project’s total cost of $4,200, the sponsors have covered $3,875. So a bit more help is needed, and those who wish to join the sponsors can contact me. This idea got started in 2008, when my wife Carla Offenburger and I were two of the co-chairs of the Jefferson RAGBRAI committee planning for the overnight stay of the Des Moines Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa. We worked closely with Chief Taylor, and several times, he and I talked about Tanner’s career. I said we needed to find a way to bring him home and showcase his talent, so that local people can appreciate and celebrate the fantastic start he’s made in his music career. I’ve been a Tanner Taylor fan since I first encountered him during my Des Moines Register years. When I was covering the high school jazz championships and other music events in the mid to late 1990s, I couldn’t help but notice that the very talented Jefferson-Scranton jazz band had a kid on piano – and sometimes he played trombone – who often wore a pair of black & white saddle shoes. That got my attention, of course, and then as I listened closely, I also realized young Taylor had the talent and drive of a true prodigy. I learned he was not only playing in the school’s bands, he was also performing weekly with the well-known Jack Oatts Quartet, led by the Iowa jazz legend who had been the band director at Jefferson High from 1966 until his retirement in 1985. They played every Thursday night at the Court Street Pub in Carroll, as well as at private parties and dances all over western Iowa and the Des Moines area. And Taylor also frequently was invited to play with the Des Moines Big Band, led then and still now by Jack Oatts’ son, Jim Oatts. MAYBE IT COULD ONLY HAVE HAPPENED HERE. As you can imagine, that kind of early start – with instruction and mentoring from such outstanding musicians – is the reason Tanner Taylor is where he is today. “You know, as I think about it, it’s almost a fluke that any of it happened at all,” Taylor said in an interview last weekend. “If I’d been growing up in any other town but Jefferson in the Midwest, it probably wouldn’t have happened.” Jefferson is where Jack and Marcella Oatts and their four children – all four of whom are or have been professional musicians – were rooted. Nearby were Chuck and Virginia Radke, Taylor’s piano teaches from his boyhood through high school. And his high school band director Becky Greiner recognized his unusual talent and helped channel it to the benefit of other students and the band as a whole.  The support and push Tanner got from his parents was very important, too. Dan Taylor was a saxophone player in Jack Oatts’ high school band, and Vicki Hastings played clarinet. They wanted to share their love of music with their kids, including Tanner and both his sisters, Amanda Allen and Jessica Chapman, who still live in Jefferson. Tanner recalled how a few times in his boyhood, when he was “wanting to stay out and play with the guys who were my friends,” the Jefferson Chief of Police would pick him up for piano practices and lessons. “Dad saw the talent before I thought I had it,” Tanner said. He recalls starting on the piano when he “was about 6 or 7 years old,” taking early lessons from several different teachers in the Jefferson area. Greiner first became aware of him when he was in sixth grade. “Tanner came to me then, asking if I’d teach him music theory,” said Greiner. “We started to work sitting at my dining room table. However, he only lasted a few sessions. He didn’t want to sit down and learn music theory. He wanted to play the piano and learn theory as he played.” That’s when the Radkes, in nearby Grand Junction, got involved. “They taught him piano, and Chuck was able to interject theory as Tanner played,” Greiner said. Taylor said that really helped him begin to understand how to compose. “Radkes would form my lessons around what I was interested in,” he said. “I can remember they’d send me home with a couple of musical scales to work on, and my assignment would be to compose a song around those scales.” He eventually won “best solo” in a state piano festival in which the Radkes entered him, playing one of his own compositions. He continued taking lessons from the couple all the way through high school. NOT YOUR TYPICAL MIDDLE SCHOOL PIANO STUDENT. Todd Woodard, who was band instructor at East Greene High School in Grand Junction, remembered meeting Tanner Taylor for the first time when Taylor was in middle school. “I was doing some experimenting back then with some new computer software,” said Woodard, who now is middle school band instructor in the Waukee schools just west of Des Moines. “This program would let you play an instrument into it, and then it would print out the notes you’d played. Chuck Radke heard about it, and said he had a middle school student he’d like to try it with. I said that’d be fine, and he brought Tanner in one afternoon to have him play. I was expecting to hear the typical thing you’d get from a middle school piano student. We set up the equipment, and then when Tanner started playing, he went right into these intricate runs with a whole lot of ornamentation. Basically, he froze-up the software. It couldn’t begin to stay with him. It was a shock to me then just how good Tanner was.” About the same time, “when I was 13 or 14 years old,” Taylor said he lucked into a key connection. “I went to a jazz camp down at Southwestern Community College in Creston, which had a good jazz program, and Jim Oatts was there as one of the instructors. He heard me play that day, and I think he may have talked to his dad Jack, back home in Jefferson, about me.” At a subsequent community event in Jefferson, Jack Oatts, who was in his early 70s, saw young Taylor and “he came over and introduced himself to me.”
Indeed, Jack Oatts was a big time musician who, when he became a family man, also became a small-town band teacher – one of the best ever. When he took an interest in Tanner Taylor, that led to all kinds of opportunities for the youngster. For example, Oatts arranged for Taylor to take lessons from one of the nation’s best piano players and instructors, Garry Dial of the Manhattan School of Music in New York City. “This was way before all the communications technology we have now,” Taylor said. “I studied with Garry Dial by correspondence. He’d mail me lessons he’d written out by hand on staff paper. Then I’d set up a recorder, play the lessons and make a cassette tape. I’d mail that back to him in New York.” Soon, he would receive a letter with Dial’s critique and the next lesson. Jack Oatts also helped connect Taylor to many other musicians around the area. Dr. David Martin, a podiatrist in Carroll who has played bass for decades, remembers the first time he met Taylor. THE REAL DEAL. “We had the Carroll Jazz Combo in Carroll, and somehow we were asked to play in Jefferson out in front of an ice cream shop there, as I remember it,” Martin said. “Fred Burrack, the band director at Carroll High School, was leading us, and he brought along two of his students – Ben Nuckels on drums and Andy Trachsel on sax. I was playing bass. We needed a keyboard player and that’s when we met Tanner Taylor. He was probably in his junior high years then. I looked at him and thought, ‘Oh, he’s so young!’ But as soon as I heard him play, I knew – ‘he’s the real deal!’ ” Taylor thinks it was Jack Oatts who gave his name to the Carroll combo for that performance outside the Twiins Shoppe. By the way, there were some other high achievers in that group besides Taylor. Burrack went on to earn master’s and doctorate degrees and is now a music education specialist on the faculty at Kansas State University. Trachsel, with music degrees from Drake and the University of North Texas, is now director of bands at Ohio University. Nuckels, who lives in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, is chief of staff for the lieutenant governor of Wisconsin. Before long, Taylor became the piano player in the Jack Oatts Quartet, which featured Oatts on sax, Martin on bass and Todd Woodard, whom you met earlier here as the band director at East Greene High School, on drums. Taylor recalled they played “at least four times a month – every Thursday night at the Court Street Pub in Carroll – and sometimes twice that with all the gigs Jack would book at parties and dances around the area.” What was on their play list? “Jack loved playing the old standards of jazz,” Taylor said, “so we played a lot out of the Duke Ellington book. One ballad Jack loved to play – in fact they played it at his funeral in 2008 – was ‘I’ve Got It Bad and That Ain’t Good.’ ” Woodard recalls that in those years in the quartet, “Tanner was way above what you’d expect a kid his age to be. He was mature. You didn’t think of him as a school kid. He was playing at a level where I sure couldn’t tell him anything about what he should or shouldn’t be doing on the piano. Jack would occasionally work with him a little bit on style, teaching him some jazz techniques. But we really didn’t think of Tanner as a student. We thought of him as another fellow musician. And we were all Jack’s students. Jack might stop us abruptly in the middle of a tune and be just as likely to to give suggestions to me or any of the others in the group as he would Tanner. Actually it was a little un-nerving to wonder which one of us was about to get a talkin’ to.” Meanwhile, Taylor was fully involved in Greiner’s bands at Jefferson-Scranton High School, too. He played trombone in the marching and concert bands. He was on piano in his freshman year when the jazz band made it to the Iowa Jazz Championships in Des Moines. “FROSTY THE SNOWMAN”? Greiner said her “first memory” of Taylor in a jazz contest was that same year in the South Central Iowa Jazz Festival at Hoover High School in Des Moines. “During his very first jazz solo, somehow he threw in ‘Frosty the Snowman’ during his solo,” Greiner said. “I didn’t know if I should giggle or drop my jaw. The band just looked at me with wide eyes. But the jazz band adjudicator loved it!” She also recalled the jazz combo Taylor and his pals put together in their high school years. “Marty McGinn played clarinet and tenor saxophone, Josh Hoyle was on the drum set, Matt Thompson was on bass, and Tanner was on piano,” Greiner said. “They performed at many events in the community, and they would spend hours in the band room playing jazz. One of their last nights together, they stayed up all night and put all their selections on tape. This group, or parts of the group, competed at thee Morningside College Jazz Combo competition, and they won it.” Greiner said it was clear that Taylor’s future was on piano, but “Tanner was also a very fine trombone player. He and I had most of our disagreements over trombone. I always wanted him to refine his trombone skills. My favorite moment came in his senior year, when I asked him to please pick out a trombone solo. He replied, ‘Mrs. Greiner, you and I both know that I’m not going to practice that solo, so why don’t we just agree right now for me not to take a solo and save ourselves a lot of time arguing over it?’ ” Of course, he could have learned and played it easily. “Tanner could pick up anything by ear and just play it,” Greiner said. “He absorbed everything that teachers and other musicians told him, and he could apply it to his piano skills. He had an amazing ear and had such a love for jazz music. Even from my first meeting with him in sixth grade, he was interested in jazz. He was gifted in all areas of music, but his true love was playing jazz piano.” During those high school years, he would also frequently play piano with dance bands that Jim Oatts would book him with, at the Val-Air Ballroom in West Des Moines, Lake Robbins Ballroom south of Woodward, and other ballrooms. And he entered the Bill Riley State Fair Talent Search two or three times, once reaching the finals. MOVIN’ ON UP. After high school, Taylor spent a year at the University of Northern Iowa, studying composition in the strong jazz studies program directed by Bob Washut, but he wanted to start playing more. “I moved back to Jefferson for a few weeks, and then on to Des Moines in the summer of 2000,” he said. “Jim Oatts was booking me with bands again, and I went to work at Rieman Music, repairing and tuning pianos.” That led him to a new job opportunity as a piano technician with Yamaha Corporation of America, working from their Twin Cities offices. He moved there in 2001. He said he was thrilled to get into the music scene in the Cities. “Minneapolis and St. Paul are known for supporting all kinds of arts,” Taylor said. “It’s a very lively cultural scene. Besides New York City and Los Angeles, the Twin Cities probably have the best jazz community in the country.” His first performance there was accompanying professional singer Sue Oatts-Tucker, a daughter of Jack and Marcella Oatts, who now bases in the Cities. One gig led to another as Taylor introduced himself around town. “I’d work on pianos all day, then play piano at night,” he said. His day job went well for five years, until the Yamaha operation was clobbered by the soft economy in 2006, and terminated all their Twin Cities employees. He was able to pick up a part-time teaching job at the Institute of Production & Recording, while he adjusted his schedule and finances for becoming a full-time performer. NOW HE’S GOT HIS OWN TRIO.There were even bigger changes ahead in his personal life. He fell in love with Becky Ellman, originally from Hugo, Minnesota, they married in 2008, and in late January last year became parents of a daughter, Evelyn. They live in Eagan, a suburb just south of Minneapolis. He plays a couple times monthly in such jazz clubs as the Dakota in Minneapolis and the Artists’ Quarter in St. Paul. He sometimes plays in a trio, sometimes with a Latin band “Tickle Fight.” He’s played with such jazz notables as David “Fathead” Newman, Wycliffe Gordon, Delfeayo Marsalis, and saxophone player Dick Oatts, the latter another of the Jefferson Oattses who is now based in New York and has played for years with the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra. Taylor has also traveled as far as New York and Los Angeles accompanying touring vocalists, including spending two to three months at a time with a group “Five By Design.” They are two women and three men who do tight harmonies on the hits of the 1940s and ’50s. He’s also played for legendary singer Marilyn Maye when she was in Minneapolis-St. Paul. “I’m known as a jazz pianist, but also as a vocalist’s pianist,” Taylor said. “I’ve found how to support them and cushion them, and I don’t try to take over the show.” Lately he’s been performing with jazz vocalist Connie Evingson, a Twin Cities-based singer who tours nationally and has appeared several times on “A Prairie Home Companion.” He’ll be playing for her during the “Prairie Home” cruise in the Caribbean in March, launching from Tampa with stops in Belize; Costa Maya, Mexico, and on Cozumel Island, Mexico. “I’ve known and worked with Tanner since right after he moved to the Cities,” Evingson said in an interview from New York. “I was immediately struck by his maturity. I knew right away that he is special. Tanner has technique and sensitivity way beyond his years. “He always raises the level for everybody he’s performing with, and the other musicians on gigs talk about that, too. They’re inspired by him, and so am I. I just hope and pray he stays with us in the Cities.”  Of course, you understand after all this, that Tanner Taylor can play anything – classical, symphonic, spiritual, pop, rock, blues, Latin and more. So why is it that he puts his heart and soul in jazz? “Oh, I don’t know if I’ve got an answer other than I’ve always loved it,” Taylor said. “I can remember when I was like 13 years old, I realized how much I liked big band music then, and I wondered if there was something wrong with me. Most of my friends then were into rock, and there’s always been some rock stuff I like. “But jazz has been my favorite since way early. It’s seemed to me to be the best way for someone to express themselves artistically.” IN TRIBUTE TO A COUPLE OF HIS INSPIRATIONS. He said that among those who inspired him in that direction was Oscar Peterson, a Canadian jazz pianist who toured the world from the 1940s into this century, before his death in 2007. “I never got to meet him, but I saw him play at Orchestra Hall up here in the Cities about five years ago,” Taylor said. “He was what we call ‘a 10-fingered pianist’ – lots of notes, lightning-fast speed, but very technical and disciplined. He was a great inspiration for me.” Last year, Taylor put together a whole show in the Cities called “A Tribute to Oscar Peterson,” and he’s going to play a few selections from it during his concert here. And “since we’re playing in Jefferson, I think we’ll bring out a couple of Jack Oatts’ standards, too.” So, is the young guy impressed by how far he’s gone and how well he’s developed in a decade? Everybody else is, I told him, and I suggested there must be times when, after some big show, he shakes his head and thinks, “Wow, I’m a big-time jazz musician!” He scoffed. “I’m so critical of myself, I’d have a hard time doing that,” he said. “I’m a real perfectionist, always thinking I could’ve done something better. Sometimes, when I listen back to something I’ve recorded earlier, I’ll hear something and think, ‘That’s pretty good,’ but then I’ll hear something else and know I can do it better. “What I do feel sometimes, when I’m on the road playing with some national act, and when the show has gone really well, it makes me happy that I can do this for a living. After doing this, I just couldn’t go sit in a cubicle and do a normal job. I’m thankful for the opportunities.” You can write the columnist at chuck@Offenburger.com.
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