Jazz Musette ~ Mark Runions

Mark was born and raised in the Northwest, and despite a few extended sorties to far-off lands (Italy, Brazil, New York City, and would you believe, California!), he remains a confirmed Mossback. Something about the salt water, the evergreen trees, the shitty weather...exerts a pull on him that he can't resist. He has always lingered at the water's edge, and often ventures out upon its surface in a boat of some sort - he currently has about seven options with which to engage the seething sea. Excessive, you say? Perhaps it's an addiction. No doubt terminal.

At a young age (10?) Mark sacrificed a promising career on the Pots and Kettles Little League baaseball team to take piano lessons, thus pleasing his mother immensely. Though he once poured nail polish remover on the keys of the family piano to display his displeasure at having to practice an hour every day, it wasn't long before he found that he actually enjoyed making music. The turning point came when he hooked up with an irascible old music teacher, "Mad" Max Ouimette, who revealed to Mark the secrets of the Rosetta Stone of music, the Circle of Fifths! Max led Mark down the path of improvisation, and freed him of the need to read every goddam note on the page. Max supplied Mark with professional "fake books" and before long, Mark was familiar with many Standards and Tin Pan Alley songs and was able to entertain family and friends with stirring renditions of Whispering, Girl of My Dreams, It's the Talk of the Town, and Darktown Strutter's Ball (ouch)!

Then came puberty...and Mark was distracted for, oh, let's say 20 years or so. Somewhere in there came learning a few guitar chords and the thought that guitar players were sexier than piano players, and besides, a guitar was easier to carry around than a piano. So Mark packed a guitar off to college, and picked away at the edges of the Folk and Protest Song movement - nothing too serious, mind you, but enough to gain an appreciation for traditional music, and inevitably, the Blues. Rock and Roll was swirling around the background all this time, but he escaped its clutches, and to this day, he can't figure it out.

So where did his interest in jazz come from? Was it the post-pubescent realization that jazz could be cool, that chicks might dig a cool piano player...? Maybe, but the roots go deeper. Mark's father Norm had been a well-known radio personality who had access to the latest popular music of the day, and the equipment to play it on (and even make records right there in the living room). Norm liked Swing and Big Band stuff, and "crooners", and even novelty music, and the ambient sounds in Mark's environment while growing up were peppered with a variety of music that must have osmotically penetrated his psyche. To his enduring chagrin, Mark's family, particularly his grandmother Grace who also took lessons from Max and had a Hammond B-3 in her living room, were also fond of the Lawrence Welk Hour on TV. Ouch again! Needless to say, Mark needed to sort though a lot of stuff to come to his own musical sensibility. Some will say that he hasn't arrived yet, and they may be right.

It was probably the Dave Brubeck Quartet that steered Mark back towards jazz, especially with the popular "Time Out" album. Other early influences were Oscar Peterson and his Trio, Vince Guaraldi, and Ramsey Lewis, whose "In Crowd" was a huge cross-over hit. It was mostly listening and absorbing in those days, with not much access to a piano to try to crack the code and develop the feel for jazz. But the appreciation was there, and after a short career as a teacher and yacht broker, Mark decided to get back to the piano and work on his chops. He played a lot of solo piano during the 80's and early 90's, working in the Gig Harbor and Tacoma area mostly. The tunes started coming back, and began to take on a bit of styling here, a little twist there, a change from the usual tempo maybe, altered chords, surprise endings, all sorts of dangerous detours. When Mark began to sit in with Ed and Tom in the early 90's, he realized he had developed some bad habits from being his own musical boss, and he began to focus on ensemble playing and the need to fit his instrument in with the group. And 15 years later, he's still working at it, and though he is now much more comfortable in a group setting, he knows that there is always a higher level to strive for. When Lorraine began singing with the group, this became even more evident, and thus the Musettes are always trying to improve their sound and emphasize quality and not volume or showboating.