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TUNE MASTER: Pete Jacobs of Pete Jacobs and His Wartime Radio Revue cranks out a tune on his clarinet during their performance at the Mission San Juan Capistrano.
LEONARD ORTIZ, THE REGISTER |
The one thing that Pete Jacobs knew from as far back as he can remember is that his would be a musical life.
Finding the right key – the right notes, the right rhythms – thatwas where things sometimes got tricky.
Was his life to be written as a classical score? As a child in the '50s he often drifted off to sleep to his mother playing Chopin on the piano.
Would it take flight on wings of improvised jazz? After discovering the Dave Brubeck Quartet in high school in the '60s he formed his own group and learned every track off the album "Take Five."
Maybe it was meant to be in service to God. A Christian group he formed in the '70s sold hundreds of thousands of albums and toured the world.
"There was never any question," says Jacobs, 56, of Irvine. "I never considered anything else, and anybody who knows me knew that."
But as the '80s rolled around, Jacobs stopped performing and focused more and more on off-stage musical projects.
He never really intended to retire from performing – he was just entering his 30s at the time – but after walking off one day he just never found his way back on.
And that's how it stayed for some 15 years, until Jacobs – while trying to lose a few midlife pounds – rediscovered the music and the instrument that nobody had thought of as cool when he was growing up.
And in them, he found the enduring passion of his life.
• • •
Jacobs' earliest memories play back with their own soundtrack.
"My mother taught me to play with two fingers from the time I could sit on her lap," he says. "I was picking out melodies as early as I could talk."
Though he seems almost embarrassed to tell you, he also discovered at a very young age that he had perfect pitch – the ability to identify or sing a specific note without hearing it or any other note first.
"I remember waking up in the morning, running downstairs to the piano to see if I could sing middle C, and then play it on the piano," Jacobs says.
When his parents separated, Jacobs went to live with his father, Donald, in Mecca, out in the desert past Palm Springs, and inherited his older brother's clarinet to play in the marching band.
"Clarinets were kind of dorky at that time," he says, laughing at how he wasn't all that enthused by his instrument. "Maybe saxes. But clarinets were sort of out."
Back in Claremont for high school he joined every class, band and group he could. "In the stage band we played jazz from the swing era through the modern era," Jacobs says. "I particularly liked the big bands, the Glenn Miller stuff.
"I just remember thinking, 'This is really good stuff, I wonder why nobody plays this anymore?' "
• • •
Not long after graduating from high school in 1969, Jacobs and a few friends started driving down to Orange County to Calvary Chapel. On the long commute to bible studies, Jacobs, the bass player from his jazz quartet and two sisters they knew sang to pass the time.
Before long, they formed a group, Children of the Day, performing soft rock and folk-styled Christian music. They lasted seven years, seven albums and many months on the road before the band broke apart.
"Bands are exponentially harder to keep together than marriages," says Jacobs, married to his wife, Hanneke, since 1972. "There were a lot of interpersonal problems, a lot of drama."
With three children at home, Jacobs left the road for other work.
He gave piano lessons and taught music at Calvary Chapel, started a kids' TV series, "Colby's Clubhouse," that ran on Trinity Broadcasting Network.
Somehow 15 years passed with Jacobs off the stage. Then in 1996, he joined Saddleback Church and started playing piano for Saturday services. One day a fellow musician there invited him to play a jazz gig at a nearby coffee shop.
"And that's when I realized how much I missed it," Jacobs says. "I was higher than a kite. I felt 20 years younger."
• • •
In early 1997, Jacobs looked in the mirror and decided it was time to hit the gym.
"I'm sweating on the treadmill, listening to all this music I don't like, and I think, 'There's got to be a better way,' " he says.
His solution arrived at a South Coast Plaza restaurant where he heard the Don Miller Orchestra, a swing band, and saw swing dancers jumping and jiving around the floor.
"I said, 'I want to play this music,' " Jacobs says. "I want to learn to dance like this – it looks like good exercise!"
He secretly signed up for swing dance lessons, and once his confidence was up, invited his wife to join him. A few months later, they went to Catalina Island for an annual swing festival.
By that fall, he'd lost 15 pounds or so – and booked a gig for a yet-to-be formed swing band he'd decided to create.
The Pete Jacobs Wartime Radio Revue – decked out in WWII-style military outfits – played their first gig on Jan. 17, 1998, a fundraiser at Woodbridge High School for which each player earned $76.92.
"I felt on top of the world," says Jacobs, now back on clarinet – for the first time since high school – to better lead the band. "It was good, and people loved it."
By that summer, they were playing the Orange County Fair – and have every one until this year. A few months later, they started a regular series of gigs at Disneyland.
They play as often as offers come in, but their biggest show to date comes on Tuesday when they play at Lincoln Center in New York City as part of a big swing bash.
"The '60s changed everything," Jacobs says, discussing why swing disappeared and why it eventually came back.
People stopped touching when they danced and music seemed so out of step with the sounds of rock and roll. But by the '90s, Jacobs thinks, people were ready for a little more romance in their dancing and their songs.
"And swing dancing provided a way for that to happen," he says.
