Requiem for Brian

Dear Brian,

I wasn’t going to write anything, as I wasn’t someone who knew you intimately as a friend, roommate, or collaborator, but it occurred to me this week that you must have touched the lives of thousands of people in your lifetime, creating a web of connections, and I’m just one of those strands, but perhaps my remembrances will help fill in a few holes, and trigger a few other memories.

I remember you and Steve and a group of other players playing at Victorian’s Midnight Café, after being inspired by another jazz player’s system of and signals to communicate during a piece. You’d point to tell someone to solo, give another player the finger to tell them to stop soloing, and built whole pieces on the fly via improvisation. During one piece Steve’s phone rang, and I thought he’d ignore it, but he answered it, and passed it to you and that became part of the piece. The keyboardist did a fantastic solo that ended with him playing the keyboard with his nose while making chicken sounds. I could tell that everyone on stage was having a great time playing, and making music.

I remember a gig at the Distillery with Steve and others. halfway through the first set someone threw something at you from the bar. Ever the gentlemen, Steve issued a warning, followed by an offer of a round of drinks for the guys who had just been so rude, but when a bottle flew minutes later and hit an instrument, the gig was over. Such was the life of a giging musician in the campus area.

I remember coming to see the Brian Casey quartet playing in the basement of Donatos on a weeknight. Gina Jacobs was running the till, and I think the two of us got an almost private show. I had been listening to early Chet Baker, and the quartet had the ability to weave counterpoint in the same way Chet did, through a set of original tunes. I imagine there were a lot of almost private gigs like that. It clearly wasn’t about the money.

I remember lots of gigs at Dicks Den with Honk Wail and Moan. I learned that they never started quite on time, and that when they did, they’d always start with “Moanin”. The break between sets might seem as long as the first set was, but the music was worth waiting for.

I remember a Sun Ra gig at Little Brothers. The hall was pretty dead when I got there, but at about 10PM, it seemed as if the whole crowd from the dance concert that had been going on the same evening came down, and the energy flowed from the audience to the stage and back again. Jim Capeletti did a movement improv at the foot of the stage, and Jordan Fuchs came over to stick a dollar down his pants, as if he were a stripper. If your fellow musicians were your biggest fans, then dancers must have been a close second.

I remember so many dance concerts with your music: SadFish with Stacey Reichman, Dither with Gina Jacobs, Tere O’Connor’s Dance Downtown piece with your crazy songs that you called “pop songs”, but were anything but. I remember you standing in the middle of one of the Sullivant Hall studios halfway through a performance and saying “special sensors placed under your seats during the first part of tonight’s performance have been gathering data as input to allow us to present you with the most pleasing music possible for the second half” And then you did a lovely Baritone solo.

I remember stopping by Lillian Gray’s house once, and the two of you were engaged in a songwriting session. I think you played me a selection, and I said “It’s not done yet, right? There’s no chorus!”, but I was wrong. You embraced the music as it came, and didn’t force it to fit the mold. I think that’s one important lesson that I learned from you: that you shouldn’t color within the lines, and should accept the accidents as treasures, Straight lines might look nice at first, but the ones that bend a little because they were drawn with a human hand are more interesting in the long run.

The other thing I learned was fearlessness. You were never afraid to share your creative work, sing, dance, wear loud shirts, cut your own hair, or play a new instrument in front of people. I think that if someone had handed you a bassoon, you would have been happy to be on stage struggling with it a week later while playing a new composition. “I’m an artist,” John Lennon once said, “and if you give me a tuba, I’ll bring you something out of it” You did that with every instrument you touched, I think.

To whomever is handling the Casey music archives, two requests: there’s a recording of “Marla”, a Mary Adam 12 outtake from their first album in Brian’s collection somewhere, but he wasn’t interested in go rummaging around in the past, only looking ahead. It deserves to be heard. I can still hum “Under the Hudson Street Bridge” from the Brian Casey quartet shows. I hope some of those tunes were recorded. There are so many more. Please tell us that those musical moments weren’t ephemeral, they were too good to only be heard once.

Pity those of us left behind, as we’ll have to make do with a musical universe that’s a little smaller without you. We can only hope that wherever you are, you have your wry smile and horn with you, and are busy writing new tunes for a new audience.