Volume six number Two, Two Thousand Ten | summer

Glacier National Park:

100 Years of Inspiration

Are Wolves Here to Stay?

Goodbye Wives and Daughters:
Remembering the Smith Mining Disaster

The Changing Face of the Montana Farmer

Composer Phillip Aaberg Finds His Way Home

MUSIC FINDS ITS WAY HOME
art

After a Grammy nomination and playing music

with some of the world’s most famous vocalists,
Phillip Aaberg’s inspiration still comes from the place
it started, in the tiny Montana town where he grew up.

S
ometimes, you can go home again.
You can win a music scholarship to Harvard. You can help make a
bunch of hit records. You can tour with Elvin Bishop and Peter Gabriel,
with all the fame and the fans and the accolades that go with a great big
road show. You can write your own songs and make your own records and
you can be nominated for a Grammy. You can master classical music, and
rock and blues and jazz, and you can gather it all up in your head, blend
it, and send it to your fingers, which is how you share the magic.
You can do all this, and you can still go home to Chester, Montana, add your small
family to the 700 or so people who remain in that wind-battered burg on the prairie.
You can move into the house where you were raised, make your music in a grain bin and
when the work is done for the day, when the breeze comes up on a hot afternoon, you
can relax in the shade of your grandfather’s favorite tree and wait for your son, wait for
him to come bouncing home from the same school where you studied music and math
and basketball, the school where your mother took her lessons, too.

BY SCOT T
MCMILLION

PHOTOGR APHY
BY T H O M A S L E E
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“I felt really lucky growing up the way I did. I got to do all the things the other kids did. I played
basketball and baseball. But I had this other thing that the other kids couldn’t do.” He nodded
at the nearby grand piano in the windowless studio, the grain bin attached to his home.
60
And you can listen to the wind and the quiet. You can stand and see the
Sweetgrass Hills looming in the north. You can hear the approach of a train
from the east and maybe smell the coming of a storm from the west, and while
you might or might not see antelope on that day, you will know they are around
somewhere. And all of this — the wind and the weather and the animals, the
sound and the smell and sights — combines in your ear, the inner part, where
you make music.
This son of yours, this laughing boy, is the fourth generation of your family
in this house and you have come home, where he can grow up much as you did,
with sports and music and friends and elders in a place where almost everybody
knows almost everybody. It can be done. You have proven this.
And that, in a nutshell, is the story of Phil Aaberg, a kid from Chester who
became one of the nation’s most accomplished pianists and composers.
“High, deep art,” is the way George Winston, another Montanan who
wows the world with a piano, described Aaberg’s music. “He’s just the greatest
composer. He captures Montana as well or better than I’ve ever heard anybody
capture anything.”
Elvin Bishop was more succinct: “He’s the best piano player I’ve ever
heard,” the rocker once wrote.
Aaberg was always something of a prodigy at the keyboard. He first
demanded piano lessons when he was 4 years old, inspired by church music,
and put on his first recital when he was 8.
After the show, people clapped and his piano teacher’s mother gave him
$10. Something clicked in Aaberg’s young head. Applause and money? For
doing something fun? What’s not to like?
“I felt really lucky growing up the way I did,” Aaberg said. “I got to do all
the things the other kids did. I played basketball and baseball. But I had this
other thing that the other kids couldn’t do.” He nodded at the nearby grand piano
in the windowless studio, the grain bin attached to his home.
He credits his small-town upbringing with giving him the confidence to
succeed as a musician. It was easy to be the best in a tiny place, and nobody ever
told him no, he couldn’t aim even higher.
Rather, his mother, whose husband had left her to raise two small boys
alone, had done so in an era when single parents stood out in a crowd, deter-
mined that her sons would be somebody. No questions. Period.
His talent was obvious, and his mother encouraged him, scraping together
money for lessons and driving him to concerts in Havre, Great Falls and Shelby,
which seemed like the bigtime, compared to Chester. There were summer music
camps, contests to win, and frequent trips to an acclaimed teacher in Spokane,
too far to visit weekly but close enough for regular train trips.
Woven through all of it was practice and more practice, three or four hours
a day at the keyboard, learning Beethoven and Bach and more. And it paid off.
When it came time for college, he aimed high. Dartmouth, Yale, the University
of Chicago and Harvard all offered scholarships. He chose Harvard, which is a
lot farther from Chester than 2,000 miles of highway can explain.
“It was a little like being on the moon,” Aaberg said. But he didn’t know
enough about the place to be nervous. He just set himself to his music. “I was
blessed by naiveté.”
Boston offered concerts of all kinds, as many as three a week, and Aaberg
played in lots of bands, from blues to bluegrass. He played rock. He played funk.
M O N T A N A Q U A R T E R LY 61
 He played New Orleans jazz.
“A lot of stuff was out of school, and my grades reflected
that,” he said.
After college, he joined a band and they all lived in the
same house in New England and played in the same venues
with people like Bonnie Raitt and the J. Giles Band. It was
fun, but it didn’t scratch the itch inside him.
“I wanted to play in a blues band and I wanted to study
Beethoven,” he said. So he moved to Iowa, and focused on
sonatas in the daytime, the blues at night.
Then his first wife decided she wanted to try California.
“And I thought, oh, that’s where they make records,” he
said.
Once in Oakland, word spread of his skills, and he lined
up lots of work, mostly as a session player in recording studios,
playing with Elvin Bishop, Henry Gross, the Pointer Sisters,
Peter Gabriel and more.
“I played on a lot of top-10 records,” he said, but being a
sideman is a tough job. “I didn’t want to go in there and have
to sound like somebody else.”
He went on a couple tours, but the road didn’t appeal
much. He wanted to stay home with his three young sons.
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Living in Oakland, he picked up work closer to home.
He composed jingles for Saturday morning cartoons, Peanuts
specials, small movies, even the California Milk Board.
“I’d get $20,000 for a half hour’s work,” he said. “It was
the kind of work musicians would kill for, but it was killing
me. My stomach hurt. My shoulders hurt.”
So, at the age of 32, he quit. And he came up with a plan,
writing his goals on a couple sheets of paper.
He wanted to play chamber music and he wanted to
compose and play his own music. And he wanted to support
his family doing it.
“Nobody does that,” he said.
But he knew he had to try. He gave himself a year.
“If it didn’t work, I was going to take the civil service
exam and be a mail man. And as soon as I made that decision,
it was like a miracle cure.”
The pain lifted from his shoulders and his guts and in
short order he had a record contract with Wyndham Hill, a
popular independent label.
“I toured the world, playing my own music, which I never
thought was something I could do,” he said.
And it lasted for years, until the company was purchased
Gloster’s origins go
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by a corporate giant that favored formulaic music and frowned 90, in the quieter stretches. Then pull off on some high point,
on his politics, which favored letting nature be nature. So watch the horizon, and listen to Montana rendered as melody.
Aaberg found a way out of his contract and formed his own You’ll get the point.
label, Sweetgrass Music, named for the hills north of his Aaberg knows that few students will match his success.
hometown. Doing so takes luck, talent and perseverance, especially
His second album, “Live from Montana,” earned him the perseverance.
Grammy nomination in 2002. It was recorded in the Chester But success in the arts is possible. He repeats this message,
High School gymnasium, the place where Aaberg played wanting it to stick.
basketball. “I go into a place and I say, ‘art happens here. I want you
The Grammy nomination arose from the same place to be a part of it.’”
Aaberg did: Chester. Home. He wants to see the evolution of a Montana musical tradi-
Shortly afterward, he moved back to Chester for good. He tion, something based not on the tastes of Los Angeles or New
cleaned out his grandparents’ house, added the studio, and York or Nashville. And it’s starting to happen.
brought his new wife Patty and their son, Jake. Now 60, he “Montana is increasingly starting to have its own voice
wonders sometimes what took him so long. Throughout his and style,” said Erik Funk, a longtime friend of Aaberg’s who
career, he’d written songs with rural Montana in mind: the composes classical music for musicians around the world from
stretch of the prairies, the cleansing winds, the blessed abun- his home in Bozeman. “It’s not just an American sound or a
dance of quiet. western American sound. It’s a Montana sound. And it’s as
“I think I was always trying to get back here,” he said. subtle and varied as the topography of the state.”
“Every time I crossed the pass and saw the prairie, my mind What Aaberg wants is a musical version of something the
opened up and my lungs opened up. And I thought, ‘Why am lucky ones among us already understand.
I not doing this?’” A place called home.
Work followed him: composi-
tions, movie scores, albums, commis-
sions and concerts. He stays as busy as
ever, producing albums for friends in
his grain bin and writing more music
all the time, jotting it on napkins or
the back of his hand, recording it on
his cell phone or his computer, refin-
ing it later, putting Montana in your
ears.
“I know I get a lot more done here
than I ever could before.”
But he’s brought more than
himself back to Chester. He’s brought
a message for kids a lot like himself.
Through a nonprofit foundation
he calls Arts Without Boundaries,
he stages seminars and free concerts
in small venues around the state.
Sometimes he performs, sometimes he
brings in other top talent.
The message is a simple one.
“Here’s what I do,” he tells the May 29 – September 11
kids. “This music comes from where Sponsored by
you came from.”
If you doubt that, pop one of his
CDs in the stereo and drive the Hi-
Line. Or Highway 191. Even Interstate Bozeman, MT | 600 West Kagy Boulevard
406.994.2251 | museumoftherockies.org
M O N T A N A Q U A R T E R LY 63