There are so many musicians out there that play in genres that I haven’t really listened to all that much. I feel like I am a very basic person for listening to mainly pop songs. But sometimes I do try to cross over to other genres or other decades from time to time. I enjoy some of the songs that I have listen to. There’s still so much that I haven’t listened to that I am hoping to get to eventually. Sometimes you just need to take a break and listen to some jazz.
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What an awkward segue. But jazz songs are often very relaxing for me. It always reminds me of being at a cafe on rainy day sipping on some coffee and eating a little of dessert. Something about the vibe of certain jazz songs give me a warm feeling inside. A few cafes tend to play jazz music through the speakers or actually have a live jazz band to play music. I’m aware that it’s an exaggeration or just a stereotype from decades gone by. But jazz and coffee somehow go well together.
While I do listen to a bit jazz, I don’t really have any particular musician or band that I listen to. I just open up my streaming service of choice to search for a jazz playlist and I let it play. There isn’t much else to it other than that. I don’t really notice who the artist of a certain track it. As long as I am enjoying the song that’s playing, that’s good enough for me.
One of the things that I often notice whenever I write about musicians is that they sometimes come from a family that either listens to music or plays music. There is something so formative about growing up in household that’s just full of harmonies and melodies. Everybody seems to be having a fun time when they listen to music. It’s a way for a family to connect sometimes. And it often leads a person to pursue it as a career.
Take Adam Glasser for example. He grew up with a father who was a composer. Adam’s family moved back to his father’s native South Africa while his father was studying music at King’s College in London. Eventually his dad came back to South Africa to become musical directors for a bunch of productions like “King Kong” and “Mr. Paljas.” The latter featured a few notable South African jazz musicians.
He spent his teenage years hanging out at the Dorkay House with a bunch of musicians including Barney Rachabane, Mackay Davashe and Allen Kwela. There was a very lively jazz scene near Dorkay House. The music from those musicians seemed to fill the air within the vicinity. But music didn’t seem to be the thing that he pursued in college. He apparently had a bachelor’s degree in European Literature. A clear departure from the thing he grew up on.
But when he moved to Paris in 1979, he started to study jazz piano on his own while making ends meet. He studied at Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts for a semester before he came back to London. He spent a few years playing music for a lot of different events and venues. By the mid-’80s, he was working with alto player Dudu Pukwana and playing in festivals around Europe. One of his compositions was feature in Dudu Pukwana’s album “Zila ’86.”
It was through the ’90s that Adam started to play the chromatic harmonica. He still spent most of the ’90s as pianist, including being a musical director for the Manhattan Brothers. In 1996, he won the Peter Whittingham Jazz Award which helped fund an unreleased live album. Somehow his harmonica playing lead him to be part of bunch of scores for films in the early 2000s.
It seems that by the end of the ’90s, the chromatic harmonica was his instrument of choice. In 2009, he released his album Free At First. He then released Mzansi in 2012. At that point, he had a net worth of about $1,250,000. He seems to still be an active musician until now. The main social media he uses is Instagram and he mainly uses it promote his gigs and classes.
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