Norman Durkee has been the musical director for Teatro ZinZanni since 1998 when the show was first launched. Last Friday he was profiled on the Seattle Channel’s ArtZone with Nancy Guppy.
Norman Durkee has been the musical director for Teatro ZinZanni since 1998 when the show was first launched. Last Friday he was profiled on the Seattle Channel’s ArtZone with Nancy Guppy.
I would like to communicate with Norman. I’m writing a book and he’s in it. I’d like to get some facts straight.
I remember Norman from Mason Jr High in Tacoma. I even went to one of his weddings in Fircrest 1968.
I’m sure I’m just a small fuzzy memory to him. but I remember him welding metal sculpture in 1967.
Duff Hendrickson
I want to mention to Mr Durkee that I heard a copy of his “Plastic Radio” record the other day. It is quite bizarre. I like it. Mr. Durkee, do you have other similar recordings?
Is that you, Norman, playing piano on the recording by BTO of “Takin’ Care of Business”? Were you really a studio musician at the time, playing for the Steve Miller Band, or delivering pizza?
http://www.snopes.com wants to know.
It is true that Norman plays piano on “Takin’ Care of Business.” The Steve Miller Band connection is not true. Delivering pizza’s… unconfirmable.
Norm on KZOK said he was mistaken for the pizza delivery guy, he was actually recording commercials across the hall!
Randy Bachman just did a radio interview this week with Rich Stevens at 850 WFTL AM in Miami. Randy says Norm Durkee was delivering Pizzas to the guys working on the Steve Miller album. Durkee heard Bachman Turner playing Takin-care-of-business, and told them they needed some piano on it. The record company guy loved the piano part, and bachman says he had to go thru the phone book calling pizza places to find durkee, to do whatever paperwork needed to put him on the album.
Fabulous! We all seem to have a crush on Durkee. He is absolutely amazing!
I was listening to the underground rock opera PLASTIC RADIO on my computer this morning, Norman produced on vinyl working in LA a year prior to the class he taught a year at Evergreen State College guitarist Tim Eickholt and electric bassist/trombonist Chuck Deardorf got me to take the second and third quarter there, I’d been in the Evergreen jazz ensemble with as a single-reed player and flautist myself.
Norman gave everyone in the class a copy of PLASTIC RADIO and faithfully replaced my copies as they were stolen over the years, both vinyl or cassettes he’d dubbed. Until finally in Ojai, CA after a cassette version got stolen there in the early ’80s I guess is when we’d fallen out of touch.
I’d been friends then with traps, symphonic percussion & tabla performer Richard Aldorasi who’d toured with THE INKSPOTS when he was fourteen, who’d been amazed at PLASTIC RADIO. Though also seeing Betty Sterite-Manuel de Jesus who’d shown me her fine Buffet alto saxophone and Artley silver flute w/gold keywork her boyfriend Thurston gave her, who sang and played percussion in her husband Jose’ Manuel de Jesus’ band NATIVE SUN which had opened for Freddie Hubbard’s band at the Ventura Fairgrounds during the mid ’80s. She took me dancing one night to Tito Puente in Santa Barbara where we’d stood near the kitchen by our table with the big canvas roof pulled back overhead exposing the night sky.
I remember one person in Norman’s Evergreen class Scott Handley who played tenor saxophone in the Evergreen jazz ensemble had told me Durkee had some sort of a homosexual attraction to me.
Last time I’d seen Durkee was a few years after getting my BA at Evergreen, in the late ’70s when I’d phoned early one evening from Everett who’d mentioned I might drop by sometime who’d also commented about my liking coffee. Half an hour later or so found me at his home with Louise sitting in their kitchen with Norman in boxer shorts showing me a hat they’d gotten to fit their second son then an infant or toddler not immediately present, which had been some sort of Tibetan priest’s garb style.
I got my current copy of PLASTIC RADIO about ten years ago living in Eureka, CA on a compact disc from someone on the internet who came up in a web search for Norman who’d already sold the vinyl copy to someone in London but, made a dub for me who mostly deals in rare jazz recordings out of a room in his house in Grants Pass, OR. Otis something or another.
Once after cleaning the cd in the kitchen sink I’d tried to dry the thing out quickly in the microwave which hadn’t turned out too cool but, had by then imported the recording into my computer; now resident in another Mac subsequent to the first, all badly aging relics limping along during their last pre “vintage” existences when obtained by this SSDI/SSI, HUD section 8 recipient.
My final year as Dumi Mariarie’s individual contract student at Evergreen the ’75-’76 school year in his office alone together he’d told me “Bob, you have absolutely no talent but, a great love of music; so keep on playing your flute.” Okay…
I remember the last vinyl PLASTIC RADIO Norman sent me got stolen in Arroyo Hondo, NM from my ’62 Ford Fairlane four-door station wagon “White Cloud” sold me by a man working at the Manson, WA NAPA store, when I was hanging out with a couple Rebecca & “Little Brother Coyote” met at Ed Silver and Latesia’s place on the nation outside of Wapato, WA where people gathered following the ’78 Naches, WA Antahkarana Circle of Healers gathering over a three day weekend in some old winesaps the artist as a blacksmith orchardist Carlson let us use; who were friends of Dan Frank Kuehn who I’d spent a couple nights with or so, jamming on flute with him one evening on twelve-string and his friend Art on a steel-stringed six string guitar; during the time he’d had the manuscript nearly completed to MONGOLIAN CLOUD HOUSES he’d shown me and later mailed me a signed first edition copy of I still have, now in a revised second edition; .
My oldest held possession is currently a wool alto saxophone mute missing the brass insert, from Pender’s Music store in Denton, TX I’ve had since ’70 or ’71. Though I’m currently a little freaked out as the apartment is a huge mess, which flunked the HUD inspection two years ago for over-crowding. I’m “bobstad” at both and so lots of stuff there too about me. In varying states of decay or polish as feasible literary gems.
Also thirty-thousand pages of hand printed stuff, mostly letters to friends or dreams written down, since starting to feel guilty tossing whatever didn’t get in the mail when living February & March ’92 at room #23 in Spokane’s skid row hotel THE SARANAC while generally living out of a ’66 VW “square-back” sedan I’d gotten in ’82 in Ojai and sold the fall of ’94 for $200 to young Todd Molyneux in Spokane, the son of the criminal couple depicted in the book and movie THE FRENCH CONNECTION born subsequent to those events whose father died in NYC when Todd was five there and mother in Spokane when he’d been a fourteen year old.
Long stories right, here the first year in B’ham riding my thirty-seven or so year old ten-speed from an Eureka flea market I got for $20 and made rideable again, the exact same model Windsor Carrera Sport I got new here at the Fairhaven Bicycle store the summer of ’73 working a student ninety day temp job while at Evergreen someone in Ojai drove over with a four-wheel drive truck who’d not liked the friend of a friend of a friend I’d left the bike with who’d been a dishwasher at an Ojai bowling alley using my bike to go to work on…phew, where were we, I’d ridden with a badly injured foot to wait for an evening bus, which can occasionally be exacerbated done sitting on my heels smoking crack cocaine May of ’97 playing the gold-plated ’29 Buescher alto saxophone I’d then recently picked up in Berkeley from a Berkeley Flea Market Want Ads paper ad thats a horn I still have along with two other altos acquired since then, another Buescher an Aristocrat made in ’51 and a Yamaha YAS-23 that reminds me of a ’67 Buffet I had six months, a little though quite subtly so.
Waiting for the evening bus near the corner of Cornwall and Alabama heading to the stop at Alabama and St Paul; sitting on the curb next to the bus kiosk after a young woman feeling flirtatious for unknown reasons had ridden by on her blue cruiser type bike pedaling off into what was a warm enough evening; I’d seen an amazing looking cloud formation of what had appeared to be an alto saxophone with a clarinet’s body superimposed over top of the main key-body section of the alto. Primarily amazing for the strong definition of that image above the western horizon.
Which now strikes me as a little more curious since the last Antahkarana Circle of Healer’s gatherings I was at to date was the one the first weekend or so of June ’90 near the Methow River and the town of Methow, WA about twenty or thirty miles guessing north of Pateros, WA.
One of the highlights was sitting with everyone who’d gotten there by then and felt interested, Friday evening just after sunset looking at the western horizon and an amazing celestial convergence which had been the focal point of that gathering; with the horns of the crescent moon as if a smiley face with the planets Venus, Mars and Jupiter, one of the latter two behind the other forming a halo, so sort of like a black-eye if you follow my simile, which may be a little flakey; but, a good way to remember this rare vision.
I think if I’m not mistaken the last time this was visible had been in the 1600s in the Indian Ocean, viewed by a man from Ireland voyaging aboard a ship with a Jewish physician there who’d known to look in the sky for the convergence, which there is a famous historical novel written about; as the Irishman had been given an impossible task by the abbot of a convent with designs on the property owned by the Irishman adjacent to the church’s property.
The church man had told the Irishman he could keep his land if within a year he could discover a river that ran up hill; which he’d succeeded in doing by going to southeast Asia, where there was a short river that flowed in and out of a lake near the ocean with the tide.
Somehow the Irishman kept his land, and if I’m not mistaken saw in the sky, this same celestial convergence quite a large crowd of us did that three day weekend in the woods.
Sort of a bummer in other respects as our group had gotten on the Rainbow Family’s list of things to do, so their 24 hour a day cannabis driven drum circle all three days, driving many people nuts. I’d ridden there with Todd in his VW window bus along with musician friend Jessy Chrisman from Priest Lake, Priest Rapids or some damned Priest place in Idaho, though late of Spokane, who’d brought with him a black naugahyde covered single bed mattress which struck me as licentious in the extreme for some reason.
I saw the young woman I’d sat next to Friday after sundown to view the sky on a big rock together; Sunday afternoon as people were leaving, apparently ravaged quite heavily in the interim. Though still game and reflective if a little shell-shocked looking, were my impressions from having not known her prior to the event and only in passing there.
My reunions were significant ones, with one woman Melissa Queen Pratibha of the Mount Madonna Center in Santa Cruz, CA whose grown daughter Aurora accompanied her I’d been used to having in my lap as a precocious five year-old when several of us were wintering ’77-’78 in the three story old post office building when owned by an older woman massage therapist Rosetta Hazen of Winnemuca, NV then last I spoke with on the phone had moved to Soap Lake, WA of the tiny grapes of wrath orchard town of Manson, WA I’d been led to by student friends from Evergreen to keep me from becoming a permanent liability and embarrassment to my musician friends in Olympia following Evergreen.
And also with then two and a half year old Jenny Rose, daughter of friend Stacey Bander conceived about the time when somnambulant sex was a topic following the ’87 Antahkarana Circle of Healers gathering near Malo, WA outside of the town of Republic, WA. I tend to believe also yielded male progeny with Richard Cooper’s wife Carmella who’d brought me home with her and her third child Spring Song then a two and a half year old they were raising with Richard’s children Ben and Shoshona.
Carmella sending me along after the first half of the summer spent with her and the three children at their home and Richard’s peyote church, to a Sufi camp led by “Afri-I” aka “Gentle Spirit” & Boyd Knausse, around an old fine stone cabin on a bluff on the south shore of the mouth of Sheep Creek overlooking the Columbia River at the Canadian Border, just across from the town of Northport, WA where I last saw Stacey and Jenny Rose the summer of ’97 who’d had a small house there when I’d been staying with friends in Onion Creek, WA about ten or fifteen miles distant from them or so; instigating romantic relations with a bluesy vocalist Corinna Hildahl a dozen years my junior a close friend of a woman my age Fran Morgan, Corinna hadn’t seen in six years she calls “Franigan” I’d shared an apartment with my final year at Evergreen the winter of ’75-’76 when we’d both been music programmers on KAOS-FM that one of my sisters also at Evergreen and her Mexican boyfriend squatted in the dining room of, showing up broke from Mexico and a language intensive there the boyfriend had organized for Evergreen students.
Then sort of a “fast forward” moment discovering my Romani/Gypsy ancestry reading Franz Liszt’s THE GIPSIES IN MUSIC circa ’98 I’d noticed homeless living in vehicles wintering in and around Berkeley there was a copy of in the arts and music room in the main public library on Shattuck Avenue. Which I got the Eureka Public Library to borrow me a copy of that had caught my eye for a description of a violinist if memory serves who’d seemed interesting. That all thanks to a spring seminar in ’73 with now retired Evergreen professor emeritus and Marxist Tom Rainey during a student designed segment; where I’d done an oral history with my mother talking together four hours into a tape recorder about her life, her family and their ancestry; leading soon to my getting a grant from Humboldt State University’s multi-cultural center director Marilyn Piak-Nicely to have Voice of Roma president Shani Rifati come and speak about Kosovo and the Romani, early in April of 2000 on campus; .
So, Norman; am I “skunkman”? “Doc” maybe? And who is “Bonus”? etc. My rattle trap of a brain gets pretty mixed up and confused.
Though I did enjoy a fairly fine Friday night out last week; my first ever experience of a drag queen and/or burlesque leading quickly enough a few days later; to an insight that as chanteuse drag queens and female impersonators can be quite vividly different from each other though a person would hope also indistinguishable too as things continue evolving in the world towards less untoward existences for everyone.
Anyway, what is going on w/you? Personally I mean.
Sorry if this diatribe isn’t exactly literature; where my friend Sarah “Fred” Sherburn-Zimmer I keep in touch with emailing trounces on me if I send her something not well enough polished.
Bert Wilson and Nancy Curtis also endured me over many years prior to my discovering fred, when the product was even worse-both hand printed in letters as well as later via email; I guess is called “scree” I remember getting chided for when I’d first had a computer and didn’t know what email was, posting at before the whole website got reorganized, when I’d started out after picking up the first of now three used Macs April of ’03 I’d put on lay-away November of ’02 when the owner of Arcata’s BOHEMIAN BOOKS was telling me I “had” to have a computer. Never thought I’d do that where my skills are still puerile if not primitive.
I hate these damned website which erase links not formated to their standards. For the record and I’ve not read through my previous post entirely; I’d mentioned I’m “bobstad” at both [http://www.fordfestiva.com] as well as at [http://www.theicarusproject.net] both of which I’d tried to designate by using the >< keys though not in that order, at the peripheries of the web links instead of as now the ] [ ones I hope will work better.
Something tells me being computer literate as a prerequisite to social meaning is a losing proposition; perhaps not unlike the many other prerequisites most people will never fulfill, though established long prior to the popularity of computers. Even an abacus is lost upon the masses, so why press any greater complexity until that is generally mastered in most places?
I'll try to read through the rest of my post to see if there are other glaring omissions but, its been a long day, I'm tired and need to shut this machine down so I can sleep.
Take care.
I sent your message on to Mr. Durkee in case he isn’t checking the blog. Thanks for the stories.
I LOVE YOU UNCLE NORMAN ! HOPE TO SEE YOU SOON (:
I LOVE YOU UNCLE NORMAN ! HOPE TO SEE YOU AGAIN SOON! COME VISIT!
XOXO THE TAYLOR FAMILY
I don’t have the excellent personal contact with Mr. Durkee that several of the posters have had, but I can say one of his albums made my Mom very happy for many years.
In the late 1980′s, a big exhibit called “Son of Heaven” toured the country, and Mr. Durkee produced an album of music with the instruments and tones of the period. The album was for sale in the gift shop at the exhibit.
Mom played her cassette copy often, for over twenty years, until age and a cranky tape player finally stretched it too far.
If Mr. Durkee sees this, or someone can pass it along to him, we’d very much like to find a new copy. If he hasn’t got any for sale, please at least let him know that he made something that moved someone and that they enjoyed for many years.
Mr. Durkee,
I just listened to your brain concentration music on youtube, and fell in love with the song “follow the moth”. I would love to have a copy of this song in it’s entirety, by itself, without the other songs, but I am having no luck in tracking it down online. Please let me know if there is somewhere that I can purchase this song. Thank you. Mickey
[...] steady gig and an opportunity to play with Jessica WIlliams. So I went to Seattle to audition with Norman Durkee the musical director for TZ. Meeting Durkee was another life changing event and I got the [...]
I really appreciate all the info on Mr. Durkee here – last time I tried to do an internet search on him a few years back, there wasn’t much to be found. I have been listening to Plastic Radio ever since a bootlegged cassette tape of it was given to me by my high-school teacher in the mid 90′s. It’s had a profound influence on me, and it continues to be one of my favorite albums ever made. I hope that one day, some label out there can give his work a proper re-issue – I’m sure there are many more out there who would be thrilled by his work…
hello Norman
Corinna,
Wondering where you are?
I’m in Bellingham.
Several people here mentioned Plastic Radio. I was given a copy years ago by a friend who had connections to some of the players on it. However, I was never able to get a list of who played what on this wonderful “opera.” Does anyone know who the participating actors and musicians were? Also if Norman Durkee has done any similar works I’d love to hear them.
I took a few (too few!) lessons from Norman in Tacoma in the mid-1960s, when I was in middle school. He was my first piano teacher.
He didn’t remember me when I met him by chance some years later, but we both remembered the Morris Minor he drove at that time.
Anyway, it took me a good few years, and several different jobs, but I now have a little steady job of my own, being “sort of in charge of the unconscious, the stuff behind things” (to quote the YouTube clip) twice monthly at the lovely Mor Mor Bistro in Poulsbo, Washington–a more humble example, to be sure, but the same basic job.
It’s an interesting coincidence. I have had other music teachers, and I owe them a lot too. But I think the early foundation I got from Norman helped me in ways I’m still discovering.
Be well, Norman–RM
I spent too many hours in the recording studio with Mr. Durkee in the 80′s to know him as anything other than genius. I’ll leave it at that.