Introducing Don Gregory Schatz
To readers of my poems and monologues now playing never did it. I abandoned trumpet in favor of the piano and rhythmic and melodic similarities to jazz free of its architectural limitations. It was complicated and interesting.
I was concurrently drawing traces of reality. Many felt a breadth of knowledge about art and music as well as literature, history, philosophy and religion in my life and work and ability to distinguish the valuable quickly.
A number of events carried me. Three that seem paramount are the Holocaust, my quest for a personal connection to God, and knowing Eunice forever. My uncle Norman Schatz had returned to Chicago from World War II. A number of my relatives on my mother’s side perished in the Warsaw Ghetto. Shown photos, I realized that I could have been one of those corpses. Life was shadowed. “I could see beyond existence.” Visual work became a way of memories. I covered canvases with faces. While music distracted, images reconnected.
In Spain, I once had a mystical experience difficult to articulate. In France, I thought a “plastic tree” could be constructed. A third word epiphany “invisible plastic tree” could be conceptualized.
More than was the case with music and art, I saw no limits to poetry. “I have my own voice because silence is my first language.” A priest encouraged me to visit Thomas Merton. Experiences at Gethsemani became building blocks for my future stoppages.
I worked part-time at the University of Chicago where I met Eunice Russell, a graduate student. Her Christian faith and friends attracted me. We were married on April 13, 1969. One day earlier baptized.
Eunice is a wise and humorous woman of deep religious inspiration who unlocked the door to my Jewish roots as well as new-found hope that someday . . . “Isaiah Israel came out of America Post America, life is caught.”
In this website Jesus might fill “I wake up each morning, look at a distance the Old World still and the New One desire.”
I am a composer creating a pathway Spirit you don’t have to start at the beginning. Appreciation is freely acquired by those who are reborn for all of time.
Boston 2010
