Steve Auerbach Music

Shortcuts

• Address
• Telephone
• Opening Hours
• Alerts
• Contact The Business
• Claim ownership or report listing

• 

  Want your business to be the top-listed Media Company in Salt Lake City?

ABOUT ME

I used to joke that I was raised at the intersection of Broadway and Madison Avenue. The two streets do not intersect, but for me, they did. My dad was a 'Mad Man' - a Madison Avenue women's fashion advertising man and my grandfather was the Concertmaster at The Broadway Theater for 20+ years.

Sitting in the orchestra pit with my Grandfather as a young boy and hearing how all of those instruments sounded together up-close left me in awe of my grandfather...and music, itself. That, plus seeing how the graphic artists pasted-up ads for magazines gave me a taste for visual and musical arts.

Sticking to music, I started on clarinet at age 9 or so in elementary and continued in high school band and jazz ensemble. By age 12, I tried guitar because I had become a huge rock fan by then - but I didn't do very well with it. At age 15 I heard Chick Corea play synthesizers with Return to Forever, Rick Wakeman with Yes and Joe Zawinul with Weather Report and I knew that I had to learn synthesizers, but piano first! I took a few private piano lessons and talked my high school jazz director, Bill Ellington into letting me play piano in the jazz band. Mr. Ellington had been playing piano and conducting the jazz ensemble a la Count Basie. Mr. Ellington allowed it and gave me a practice room key on the condition that I meet him after school for jazz piano lessons. A practice room key! I had the 'keys to the kingdom'! My music friends met me there after-school to jam until the janitor kicked us out! We had kids piled up in there with amps and drums and horns and stuff - it was crazy fun! Growing up in the 1970s in New York, thanks to the Civil Rights Act of 1968, NY schools were by then, integrated. So I was bussed to the black neighborhood for school and vice-versa. This provided me black music partners who shared albums and tapes of Parliament-Funkadelic and Al Green I shared the same from Frank Zappa and Led Zeppelin. In my high school years, Bill Ellington managed to inspire music careers for me, the A&M Records R&B hit-machine Atlantic Starr, Mark Plati my High School Jazz Ensemble bassist and David Bowie music director and co-producer and many more. Mr. Ellington was also my mentor for my senior project; writing, arranging, copying, rehearsing and performing two pieces for a 20+ piece big band that I talked my friends into doing! I played jazz, rock and funk keyboards and blues harmonica throughout my teens. Back then, you only had to be 18 to get into a nightclub. So between 17 and 19, I had been gigging and recording with a couple of bands in New York. I didn't like the scene and moved to Los Angeles.

In LA, my first friend was Peter Wesley, a DJ at at Madame Wong's and Cathay De Grande - two seminal LA punk/new wave clubs. He invited me to a house party the night the Talking Heads album, Remain in Light was released. It was totally different music from any we had heard before; Talking Heads meets Afrobeat. It was groundbreaking. There were a bunch of kids my age at the listening party - we were all dancing like maniacs to this new music. Four of the kids also played music, so we got together and jammed on some funk in a Chilean kid, Alain's mom's garage. We tried to make a funk band, but Alain Johannes got a contract with MCA that year with his band, What is This? (later Queens of the Stone Age, Them Crooked Vultures, PJ Harvey, Chris Cornell, Arctic Monkeys and more) and the other kids; Hillel on guitar, Mike (Flea) on Flugelhorn and Jack on drums went on to become the Red Hot Chili Peppers that summer.

 ...