Mike Kocour

If you don't know Mike Kocour's piano playing, you have to check it out. A good place to start is at his MySpace page, which is on my sidebar of cool websites.

Within the last couple of days, my ex-roommate from Champaign, Kevin Flanigan (see my original post on "the Scene") mentioned to me in an email that he just thinking about Champaign because he had heard Mike on Marian McPartland’s Piano Jazz last weekend, a wonderful nationally syndicated program. Mike is now Director of Jazz Studies at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona, after a long, successful time as one of the leading giggers in Chicago. Kevin points out that you can hear a rebroadcast of it at http://www.michaelkocour.com/.

A Chicago native, Mike was at Illinois at the same time Kevin and I were. Although he was a math major, he was one of a great stable jazz musicians around school at the time. He played in a quartet with Ray Sasaki, our trumpet professor, and Mike was simply amazing. He has a number of recordings out, including some where he is astounding on the Hammond B3 organ. Another stand-out from that group was drummer Jeff Stitely. I can still remember a drum solo during a Ray Band gig at Nature's Table, right across from the Krannert Center, where Kevin and I were hanging listening to Ray's group late in the night and nursing two huge Guinness drafts, when we turned to each other in the same instant --no words were spoken, but we had the same look on our faces: "Did you hear that?!?" Jeff had in the middle of this amazing solo quoted the melody of the tune on the drums. I'll never forget it.