Tribute to Bill Chase

Click here and here for other Tributes to Bill Chase.

The wife makes me watch America's Got Talent. Now I don't mind Dancing with the Stars, the women have fantastic costumes, but AGT is at times like fingernails on a chalk board. Tonight something caught my ear more than a ten year old with a forty year old operatic voice.

Quick Change is a group that was guest appearing, a group that had been on the very first season of the show. They performed to Chase's Get It On. Who cares what they were doing, did you hear those trumpets?

Some history:

My senior year in high school Bruce bought two albums. Chase and Chase Ennea. We always recorded the lp's on cassette and listened to the cassettes using the lp's as masters. That way the records didn't get scratched up. When I went to college I took the two cassettes and drove my dorm mates crazy listening to them. No one has ever hit the high notes on trumpet like Bill Chase. He reached for the rafters on every song. In Ennea the song Boys and Girls Together has a rift where you think he's gone as high as possible and then effortlessly he goes up about four steps. The group had four trumpets on one song during the rift they sound like sea gulls. Tragically just as he was getting recognized the band was killed in a plane crash in 1974. There are very few people that I've come across that ever heard of him. I was pleasantly surprised when I checked on the internet for this post to find you-tube, my space and facebook sites devoted to him.

Technology changed and I converted over to cd's. Bruce boxed up the lp's and has them buried in his garage. The cassettes gathered dust. Then this summer I found a little gadget that converts cassettes and lp's to digital on your computer. A few years ago I bought a stereo that converted lp's to cd's and I'm still converting them, wife has over 50 Elvis albums alone. This summer I've been bringing the cassettes back to life and the first cassettes were the two Chase's and I've been in heaven listening to them all summer.

Funny how just as I pulled Bill Chase out of the dust bin that he'd be resurrected on a national show, even though just about everybody watching wouldn't know who they were listening to.