From the Bench: The Life and Music of Justin Kolb

Transcription by Jerome Kazlauskas

[00:00:00] Justin Kolb: I mean, if you don't leave an audience teary-eyed, laughing... emoting some emotion, you have not done your job.

[00:00:13] Brett Barry: Justin Kolb has been playing piano since he was four years old. He's 82 now and still practices almost every day. This time of year, he offers intimate house concerts called "From the Bench," where he showcases music by living American composers and what he calls music that lives in undeserved obscurity. I visited Justin at his home in Fleischmanns, where he cooked me an omelet and recounted a life behind the piano.

[00:00:43] Campbell Brown: "Kaatscast" is supported by the Mountain Eagle, covering Delaware, Greene, and Schoharie counties, including brands for the local region such as the Windham Weekly, Schoharie News, Cobleskill Herald, and Catskills Chronicle. For more information, call (518) 763-6854 or email mountaineaglenews@gmail.com.

[00:01:04] Brett Barry: In Justin and Barbara Kolb's Fleischmanns home, Justin whipped up a deluxe omelet with toast and coffee, and we began our interview in the kitchen, where he recounted a formative memory in Hammond, Indiana.

[00:01:18] Justin Kolb: I lived in Hammond, Indiana, in the shadow of Chicago. I was four years old, and my parents took me to a band concert of the local high school. This kid gets up in the concert and plays a piece that I now know is called "Bumble Boogie." Everybody goes nuts over this high school kid playing "Bumble Boogie," and it turns out we all learned that his mother was his teacher.

[00:01:55] Brett Barry: And so Justin's parents signed him up for lessons.

[00:01:59] Justin Kolb: Well, I was four, and I didn't mind doing what they made me do, and then somebody suggested that I should get another teacher, and she was very contest conscious, and she was a masterful teacher. I would enter these contests and win, and then she entered me into a higher-level competition for pianists, and the prize was two appearances with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. I was 11. I auditioned for the famous legendary Fritz Reiner. I got on stage and played for him. He's sitting down there in the audience, and nobody was there except his assistant, and I finished playing what I played, and he motioned me over. He said, "You, like, play with orchestra?" And I said, "Yes, sir," and he said, "Okay, talk to him. His assistant, George Schick." Schick was great, and Schick went on to relocate to New York City and became head of the Manhattan School of Music. The prize was twice with them. There's a backstory. I won a contest where I first played with the Gary, IN Symphony Orchestra. When I practiced at my teacher's house, she had two grands, and she brought in a high school girl, and I suppose she was 16, and she would play the orchestra part, and so I would go, "Ba ba da ya ba ba ba ba ba da da dee yum," and then I'd stop, and she would go, "Bum ba da dee yum," and I'd go, "Ba ba da dee yum," and she'd imitate that, and together we'd both go, "Ba ba ba da da dum," and this was a "Haydn D Major Concerto." At that point, I had never heard an orchestra. I had won this contest. I got 25 bucks, which was big money for a 10-year-old, and a medal. I think I still have the medal. We rehearsed in a church basement. It smelled bad. They had a beat-up upright piano. I start, "Bum ba dee yum ba ba ba bum ba dee yum," and the strings go, "Bum ba dee yum," and I go, "Bum bum." They go, "Bum bum," and then together we go, "Ba ba ba dee yum." Well, the sound was like a locomotive was crashing through that church basement. It was awesome. It was powerful, and I'm not making this story up because I remember it vividly. That's when I decided I'm going to do this for the rest of my life. This is great. This is power, and I did, and it was because of that rehearsal that I became a pianist.

[00:05:04] Brett Barry: Two decades later, military service would find Justin Kolb in Germany, where the dream of becoming a concert pianist was still top of mind. Here's Justin juggling breakfast prep and storytelling.

[00:05:20] Justin Kolb: '64 to '69: I was in [five years]. Yeah, I was hot, not with desire. I was just ripe to get assigned to ‘nam. I spent two years in the States and three years in Europe, and then at the end of the European tour, my CO, he called me in and said, "What do you intend to do when you get out... get out of here?" And I said, "I'm going to be a concert pianist," and I was studying with a coach in Heidelberg, and he said, "Yeah, I heard... I heard that." I said, "How come I don't know this, and why aren't you in the 7th Army Soldiers Corps as an accompanist?" And I said, "Because I didn't want to tell my kids when they say, 'What did you do in the Army?'" I didn't want to say, "I was in the band," so instead, I had chickened out. I got in personnel administration, and it was a great job. It taught me how the world really works as far as organizational behavior and organizational structure, so then the colonel, who was bucking for general and ended up retiring with two stars... he said, "Well, I'm going to have you presented by myself or the State Department in your European debut. What do you think of that?" And I said, "Well, I think that sounds too delicious to be true. I said, "I better check with my wife." He said, "Well, that's smart." He said, "What are your hours?" And I had guys working under me. I was... I had a big job as far as personnel goes for a 7,000-man unit that was spread across Western Europe. I said, "Well, I normally work 8 to 5 unless we're out in the field on an exercise." I said, "I'll come to work at 7 and leave at 3." He said, "Can you handle that?" And I said, "I got good guys working for me, yes," and if there's something important, I'm not stupid. I'll go army first and piano second, so I was excited about this debut. It was great, and he cut a deal for me with the State Department, so that at the end of my tour, I just started playing concerts. I had USIS and State Department limos. I mean, I had a private plane in Iran where I played ten recitals, so I was on tour for a year in which I played more than once a week. My very first formal concert tour, I did 21 cities within 22 nights in Italy. My deal with the State Department is they had to guarantee it. I said, "I don't know how you guys are going to do it, but I'm not doing it unless there are critics in the audience." At the end of a year, Barbara wrote all the concert agents—well, 10 agents in New York City, and all the agents wrote back. Most of their letters were boilerplate. Sorry, we have too many pianists on board. We will not even audition you. Stay in Europe. You've got it made. Well, we had these two kids. The grandparents had never seen one of them. He was the Heidelberger, and Barbara was pregnant, so I was released from the Army, and I had no choice really other than to go to graduate school, so I went to Northwestern, outside of Chicago and Evanston. I ended up in the world of business for 20 years. During the 20 years, I found myself in sales roles more than anything, and success to me at the time was a two-week vacation and maybe a couple of grand at the end of the year for a bonus.

[00:09:21] Brett Barry: And then came an opportunity to own and operate a cellular telephone company.

[00:09:26] Justin Kolb: We looked at a number of businesses, and we made a decision, and our goal was to be able to retire to do what our passion was in 10 years, so we had some unique ideas, and I flipped the company six and a half years later to a large, smaller telephone operation that was getting into cellular, and I even had a Mercedes at the time. That was fun. It's fun to have money. The money's gone. I look forward to Social Security. I hope I'm able to keep getting Social Security checks, but I have no regrets. It was fun, and I'm the luckiest guy I know. I beat stage 4 throat cancer. I'm nursing low-level leukemia right now, but it's not life-threatening, and I have no aches or pains, and Barbara's healthy as a horse. Our three kids all have great marriages and solid jobs, so life, I'm just very lucky.

[00:10:34] Brett Barry: Okay, so back to the Catskills chapter of this story. After Justin retired from that stint in cellular and the kids were grown, Justin and Barbara headed up to Fleischmanns, New York, for a house of their own.

[00:10:48] Justin Kolb: We decided it was time that we should own something and not live in rental houses. We came up here, and after a year of building some stone walls and reinforcing others and clearing an orchard, and of course we were financially secure, but it wasn't that as much as it was the kids were gone. They were out of college on their own, and we just had a blast. After about a year of goofing off, at which everybody should be given this opportunity, Barbara said, "When are you going to start practicing again?" And I wisely said, "I don't know if I was serious." I said, "I'll start practicing when you learn how to book concerts," so she found two women in the city who were concert agents. The sisterhood was active. They took her to showcases and showed her how to book concerts. We broke it down. Okay, let's do a concert, one a month, and we'll do them for free. Well, Barbara booked 12, and then the next year we charged expenses, and then someone said, "You guys are totally ignorant of what you could be doing," so we started with reasonable fees, and it was great. We went all over the country. I ended up playing as far away as Budapest and Novi Sad, Serbia, to as far west as Santa Barbara.

[00:12:14] Brett Barry: Justin's post-retirement piano career would take him to New York's most prestigious concert halls, and he'd garner glowing reviews from the likes of the New York Times and the Washington Post.

[00:12:25] Justin Kolb: I've got three CDs, and I'm very pleased with them, but my colleagues have 30.

[00:12:34] Brett Barry: Well, you can't look too closely at what other people are doing. You'll never be satisfied.

[00:12:38] Justin Kolb: You know, you're right, and so I'm booking less concerts. It's much harder since COVID. I have a friend who's a composer. He got 88 million hits on one track of electronic music. Spotify gave him 300 bucks, and so the business is all mixed up, so Barbara said, "Let's do concerts here." Because I have done, I think, 34 fundraiser concerts here and attracted an audience, but it was because of the cause, and I was scared to death, so we put together a mailing list, and I invited him, and that was eight years ago, and every single concert has sold out. It just blows my mind.

[00:13:31] Brett Barry: Here at your house.

[00:13:32] Justin Kolb: In my house, and I call it, "From the Bench: Concerts with Commentary." I tell war stories from being on tour, you know, stories like the time I had drinks with Aaron Copland.

[00:13:50] Brett Barry: My wife Rebecca and I got to hear that story at a recent "From the Bench" performance at Justin's house, where Copland was one of five composers on the program. To Justin's left, turning pages of the score, as she's been doing for some six decades, was Justin's wife Barbara. Here's how he introduced her that afternoon.

[00:14:12] Justin Kolb: The person behind me is my first wife. Her name is Barbara, and it's curious because in our 1960 high school yearbook, the year we graduated, there's a photo of Barbara and me dancing, and it says, "J.C. Kolb and his favorite page-turner." Barbara has turned pages at Lincoln Center, at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie, and the From the Bench Concert Series in the Catskills.

[00:14:52] Brett Barry: That piano Justin plays is a nine-foot concert grand.

[00:14:59] Justin Kolb: I lucked out with this piano. It is a Steinway knock-off, and this company, Steinert, was actually on the board of Steinway and friends of the family, and the guy took advantage of them. He was a piano manufacturer, Mr. Steinert. He ripped off some of their technologies. They took him to court, and he was prohibited from making nine-footers and seven-footers in perpetuity.

[00:15:28] Brett Barry: That legal ruling must have come down after Justin's nine-footer was built.

[00:15:33] Justin Kolb: I got a good deal on a seven-footer prior to moving up here. We went back, and I gave him his check, and he said, "Oh, by the way, I want to show you, and I had seen it, and it was this piano, and I said, "I'm happy with a seven-footer. I'm not gonna give you any more money."

[00:15:54] Brett Barry: But then he heard the piano.

[00:15:56] Justin Kolb: I mean, it's great, you know. You can't beat that, and yet it has the ability to project even though I play quietly. You cannot play that softly, consistently, or quietly unless you have a great technician, and it's got to be the same technician, and I use Serge Ivanov, local to Kingston. He's a fabulous piano technician, and it's got to have a quick reaction also. Touch and feel is very important to me, and should be to all pianists. I don't like the trite expression. It's gotta be an extension of myself, but it does, and I just love this piano. I'm very blessed to have it, and I have a backup. If Serge decides he's going off to Bermuda for a vacation and I need somebody, I use Ray Jackson, who is also in Kingston. Ray is a wonderful technician, and there's a big difference between tuners and technicians.

[00:17:43] Brett Barry: Whittling an interview down to a 20- or 25-minute podcast is a perpetual challenge, but Justin had so many interesting stories about his life with the piano that this episode was a particularly difficult exercise in distillation. This next story, however, tracing his education in piano, all the way back to a teacher named Beethoven. Yes, that Beethoven, just had to make the cut.

[00:18:14] Justin Kolb: I have studied with a lot of teachers, really fabulous pedagogues. I studied for about ten years with Hernán Díaz, and he was from Havana, and he studied with a great pianist by the name of Claudio Arrau. Arrau studied with Martin Krause. Krause studied with Franz Liszt. Liszt studied with Carl Czerny, and Czerny was the most famous student of Beethoven, so I tell kids if I'm doing a little music appreciation class for anybody, adults love this. I've done it during my concert. I do a flip chart, and I say, "Okay, does everybody agree that I'm your teacher during this hour?" Yes, we all agree, so I draw a little smiling face. This is me. I'm your teacher. I have a teacher, Mr. Díaz. He had a teacher, so you all can go home and tell your parents that for one hour of your life, you are 8th-generation students of Beethoven—accurate or inaccurate, malarkey or not, we believe that this is important.

[00:19:35] Brett Barry: You've been playing piano for 78 years?

[00:19:42] Justin Kolb: Yes, you'd think I would be better.

[00:19:46] Brett Barry: How important is practice now?

[00:19:48] Justin Kolb: Four hours a day, five days a week.

[00:19:51] Brett Barry: Now.

[00:19:51] Justin Kolb: It's critical. It's critical if I want to make real music. I mean, learning the notes is nothing. Certainly, with my experience, you can sight-read almost everything slowly, but to make real music to talk to the audience, you know, all these curved lines on a music score, you get used to seeing them so much you forget what they mean, but when a composer writes a curved line over a group of notes, those are called phrases. They're systems, and you must put these systems together. You know, it starts with a sentence, and then there are two sentences. I do a lot of visualization, so my visualization is, "Here's what happened to me, and in this case, it's really sort of mournful, and then someone answers." Oh no! Well, not only that, but this happened to me also. Oh, this is terrible, so it's question and answer. Now this is both a generalization and oversimplification, but this is how I do it, and people respond. I mean, if you don't leave an audience teary-eyed, laughing... emoting some emotion, you have not done your job. Your job is to listen to this one, you know, and sometimes during concerts in the middle of a piece, I'll go, "Isn't this delicious?" And people laugh, and they always agree, you know, and what I'm doing isn't sacred, but the intent of music might be sacred. I'm not sure about that, but that's how I look at it.

[00:22:05] Brett Barry: If you'd like a spot at one of Justin's "From the Bench" home concerts, which I'd characterize as semi-private, the best place to start is at justinkolb.com. No guarantees, of course, but maybe mention "Kaatscast" on the contact form, and if you got this far into the episode, he'll know you're genuinely interested. "Kaatscast: The Catskills Podcast" is a biweekly production of Silver Hollow Audio. Please consider joining our monthly member listeners like Cyndi, DGB, Allan, and Donna. Click the "Support" tab at kaatscast.com to learn more, and if you'd like to join us as a business sponsor, get in touch. You can reach me directly through our contact form. That's at kaatscast.com/contact. If you like the show, please rate and review [so more people can find us]. I'm Brett Barry. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.