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by Michael Herson
Walking up the steps to 25 Sickles St., it was quieter than I remembered. No merengue blasting from open windows, no boisterous dominoes game on the sidewalk, no car mufflers thundering down the street – just the sound of wind blowing through the leaves and the sibilant crackle of a welding repair on a fifth floor fire escape.
Even more striking was the silence outside of Merrill Clark’s window. After almost a decade of piano lessons from the self-described “multi-instrumentalist composer,” I had seldom approached the building’s entrance without hearing his voice or a live instrument as he wrapped up a lesson. And for the first time, I was not here to work on my tetra-chords or a new composition for an upcoming recital.
“So this is a personal interest piece, I guess?” Clark said as he sat down. “Well, I joined the Nazi party in about 1942,” he joked, his voice trailing off into laughter. “Everything I said about the goats is not true.”
And, needless to say, neither is his Nazi membership.
Like many artists, Merrill’s life in music began inauspiciously, moving here from Salt Lake City in 1979, sifting through different jobs to make ends meet.
“I was a security guard, so I could work late at night, I drove a truck…I worked in a day care center where I tried to teach [music],” he said. Unfortunately, Clark’s music instruction clashed with the school authorities, and the job eventually ended.
In his studio, he looked up at the ceiling through his thick frames. For a man of his talent, jobs like this usually do not last long.
“I play guitar, bass, string bass, piano,” he said, folding his arms. “I’m a virtuoso recorder player, hand drums, I teach drum set but I don’t play it…electric cello, composing, song writing…I can coach trumpet and sax. I’m a poor tabla player but I can teach beginners.”
Though he was taught basic piano and guitar at the age of seven by his grandfather (another in a pedigree of multi-instrumentalists), he is mostly self-taught. Recently, Clark completed a 15-minute arrangement of Horace Silver’s “Nica’s Dream” for the Sweet Plantain Jazz Quartet. Some of his original compositions include “The Trombonist from Hell,” (look it up on YouTube to truly understand the title) and he is currently waiting for a venue to perform his decade-old CD “Twisted Bits of Sound.”
After “seven years, seven months, seven days, seven hours. And seven seconds,” working as a sleuth listening for copyright infringement, Merrill’s goals were set on starting String Song Productions Inc., or just String Song School. Established in 1992 with his wife Brenda Vincent, they became firmly rooted as members of the Washington Heights-Inwood community, stationed in the “noise complaint capital.”
The folk-guitarist “weenie” on the third floor, Clark said, has lodged noise complaints ranging from a crying newborn to Clark’s “illegal music school which plays from 10 in the morning to 10 at night.” Clark’s response to the police was that they don’t start until three, which is when school lets out.
The String Song School has a good record of maintaining students. Whether it’s a typical pupil, a few children of celebrities (whose names he would not give) or some “Dominican kids from the neighborhood” who train on scholarship or merit, start around five years of age and finish around college.
Though the String Song School is currently bouncing back after the recession, Clark’s objective is very specific, one that transcends money: reversing the younger generation’s trend of shortened attention spans.
It seems that Merrill’s reverence of the renaissance man is under attack, that the ability to be competent in many fields is being replaced by “specialization.” For someone who can teach Bach sonatas on flute and “Rhapsody in Blue” to a 12-year-old, his need to address this pattern is a matter of urgency. Clark is so deeply entrenched in the multi-faceted world of music that, for him, distractions such as video games and compulsive Facebooking are the antithesis of true knowledge.
Merrill’s practice room shows an honest reflection of his dedication – rows of books on music composition, handwritten notes on manuscript paper, shelves stacked with cassette tapes, a drawing by Steve Brodner of Merrill’s former Mohawk haircut, his upright bass resting in the corner next to a poster of the Jazz Tree, chronicling the genre’s evolution.
And as I sat at the piano, remembering the old days of Hannon exercises, balancing quarters on the backs of my hands (which I could keep if they didn’t fall off), or weekends of frantic rehearsals with Clark wildly gesticulating, red-faced as he prepared us to play an ensemble, there was something that needed to be done – I played him my latest composition.
And when I finished, he nodded his head.
“I’d like to hear you improvise over that,” he said.
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