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V o l u m e s i x n u m b e r T w o , T w o T h o u s a n d T e n | summer

Glacier National Par

100 Years of Inspiratio

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MUSICFIN

DSITSWA

YHOME

After a Grammy nomination and playing music

with some of the worlds most famous vocalists,

Phillip Aabergs inspiration still comes from the place

it started, in the tiny Montana town where he grew up.

ometimes, you can go home again.

You can win a music scholarship to Har vard. You can help make a

bunch of hit records. You can tour with Elvin Bishop and Peter Gabriel,

with all t he fame and the fans and the accolades that go with a great big

road show. You can write your own songs and make your own records and

you can be nominated for a Grammy. You can master classical music, and

rock and blues and jazz, and you can gather it all up i n your head, blend

it, and send it to your fingers, which is how you share the magic.

You can do all this, and you can still go home to Chester, Montana, add your small

family to the 700 or so people who remain in that wind-battered burg on the prairie.

You can move into the house where you were raised, make your music in a grain bin and

when the work is done for the day, when the breeze comes up on a hot afternoon, you

can relax in the shade of your grandfathers favorite tree and wait for your son, wait for

him to come bouncing home from the same school where you studied music and math

and basketball, the school where your mother took her lessons, too.

S

BY SCOTT

M CMILL ION

PHOTOGRAPHY

BY THOMAS LEE

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I felt really lucky growing up the way I did. I got to do all the things the ot her kids did. I played

basketball and baseball. But I had this other thing that the other kids couldnt do. He nodded

at the nearby grand piano in the windowless studio, the grain bin attached to his home.

And you can listen to the wind and the quiet. You can stand and see the

Sweetgrass Hills looming in the north. You can hear the approach of a train

from the east and maybe smell the coming of a storm from the west, and while

you might or might not see antelope on that day, you will know they ar e around

somewhere. And all of this the wind and the weather and the animals, the

sound and the smell and sights combines in your ear, the inner part, where

you make music.

This son of yours, this l aughing boy, is the fourth generation of your family

in this house and you have come home, where he can grow up much as you did,

with sports and music and friends and elders in a place where almost everybody

knows almost everybody. It can be done. You have proven this.

And that, in a nutshell, is the story of Phil Aaberg, a kid from Chester who

became one of the nations most accomplished pianists and composers.High, deep art, is the way George Winston, another Montanan who

wows the world with a piano, described Aabergs music. Hes just the greatest

composer. He captures Montana as well or better than I ve ever heard anybody

capture anything.

Elvin Bishop was more succinct: Hes the best piano player Ive ever

heard, the rocker once wrote.

Aaberg was always something of a prodigy at the keyboard. He first

demanded piano lessons when he was 4 years old, inspired by church music,

and put on his first recital when he was 8.

After the show, people clapped and his piano teachers mother gave him

$10. Something clicked in Aabergs young head. Applause and money? For

doing something fun? Whats not to like?

I felt really lucky growing up the way I did, Aaberg said. I got to do all

the things the other kids did. I played basketball and baseball. But I had this

other thing that the other kids couldnt do. He nodded at the nearby grand piano

in the windowless studio, the grain bin attached to his home.

He credits his small-town upbringing with giving him the confidence tosucceed as a musician. It was easy to be the best i n a tiny place, and nobody ever

told him no, he couldnt aim even higher.

Rather, his mother, whose husband had left her to raise two small boys

alone, had done so in an era when single parents stood out in a crowd, deter-

mined that her sons would be somebody. No questions. Period.

His talent was obvious, and his mother encouraged him, scraping together

money for lessons and driving him to concerts in Havre, Great Falls and Shelby,

which seemed like the bigtime, compared to Chester. There were summer music

camps, contests to win, and f requent trips to an acclaimed teacher in Spokane,

too far to visit weekly but close enough for regular train t rips.

Woven through all of it was practice and more practice, three or four hours

a day at the keyboard, learning Beethoven and Bach and more. And it paid off.

When it came time for college, he aimed high. Dartmouth, Yale, the University

of Chicago and Harvard al l offered scholarships. He chose Harvard, which is a

lot farther from Chester than 2,000 miles of highway can explain.

It was a little like being on the moon, Aaberg said. But he didnt know

enough about the place to be nervous. He just set himself to his music. I was

blessed by naivet.Boston offered concerts of all kinds, as many as three a week, and Aaberg

played in lots of bands, from blues to bluegrass. He played rock. He played funk.

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He played New Orleans jazz.

A lot of stuff was out of school, and my grades reflected

that, he said.

After college, he joined a band and they all lived in the

same house in New England and played in the same venues

with people like Bonnie Raitt and the J. Giles Band. It was

fun, but it didnt scratch the itch inside him.

I wanted to play in a blues band and I wanted to study

Beethoven, he said. So he moved to Iowa, and focused on

sonatas in the daytime, the blues at night.

Then his first wife decided she wanted to try California.

And I thought, oh, thats where they make records, he

said.

Once in Oakland, word spread of his skills, and he lined

up lots of work, mostly as a session player in recording studios,

playing with Elvin Bishop, Henry Gross, the Pointer Sisters,

Peter Gabriel and more.

I played on a lot of top-10 records, he said, but being a

sideman is a tough job. I didnt want to go in there and have

to sound like somebody else.

He went on a couple tours, but the road didnt appeal

much. He wanted to stay home with his three young sons.

Living in Oakland, he picked up work closer to home.

He composed jingles for Saturday morni ng cartoons, Peanuts

specials, small movies, even the California Milk Board.

Id get $20,000 for a half hours work, he said. It was

the kind of work musicians would kill for, but it was killing

me. My stomach hurt. My shoulders hurt.

So, at the age of 32, he quit. And he came up with a plan,

writing his goals on a couple sheets of paper.

He wanted to play chamber music and he wanted to

compose and play his own music. And he wanted to support

his family doing it.

Nobody does that, he said.

But he knew he had to try. He gave himself a year.

If it didnt work, I was going to take the civil service

exam and be a mail man. And as soon as I made that decision,

it was like a miracle cure.

The pain lifted from his shoulders and his guts and in

short order he had a record contract with Wyndham Hill, a

popular independent label.

I toured the world, playing my own music, which I never

thought was something I could do, he said.

And it lasted for years, until the company was purchased

by a corporate giant that favored formulaic music and frowned

on his politics, which favored letting nature be nature. So

Aaberg found a way out of his contract and formed his own

label, Sweetgrass Music, named for the hills north of his

hometown.

His second album, Live from Montana, earned him the

Grammy nomination in 2002. It was recorded in the Chester

High School gymnasium, the place where Aaberg played

basketball.

The Grammy nomination arose from the same place

Aaberg did: Chester. Home.

Shortly afterward, he moved back to Chester for good. He

cleaned out his grandparents house, added the studio, and

brought his new wife Patty and their son, Jake. Now 60, he

wonders sometimes what took him so long. Throughout his

career, hed written songs with rural Montana in mind: the

stretch of the prairies, the cleansing winds, the blessed abun-

dance of quiet.

I think I was always trying to get back here, he said.

Every time I crossed the pass and saw the prairie, my mind

opened up and my lungs opened up. And I thought, Why am

I not doing this?

Work followed him: composi-

tions, movie scores, albums, commis-

sions and concerts. He stays as busy as

ever, producing albums for friends in

his grain bin and writing more music

all the time, jotting it on napkins or

the back of his hand, recording it on

his cell phone or his computer, refin-ing it later, putting Montana in your

ears.

I know I get a lot more done here

than I ever could before.

But hes brought more than

himself back to Chester. Hes brought

a message for kids a lot like himself.

Through a nonprofit foundation

he calls Arts Without Boundaries,

he stages seminars and free concerts

in small venues around the state.

Sometimes he performs, sometimes he

brings in other top talent.

The message is a simple one.

Heres what I do, he tells the

kids. This music comes from where

you came from.

If you doubt that, pop one of his

CDs in the stereo and drive the Hi-

Line. Or Highway 191. Even Interstate

90, in the quieter stretches. Then p

watch the horizon, and listen to Mo

Youll get the point.

Aaberg knows that few studen

Doing so takes luck, talent and

perseverance.

But success in the arts is possib

wanting it to stick.

I go into a place and I say, a

to be a part of it.

He wants to see the evolution o

tion, something based not on the ta

York or Nashville. And its starting

Montana is increasingly sta

and style, said Erik Funk, a longt

composes classical music for music

his home in Bozeman. Its not ju

western American sound. Its a M

subtle and varied as the topograph

What Aaberg wants is a music

lucky ones among us al ready unde

A place called home.

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