Lonnie Schumacher

Acoustic Upright Bass & Electric Bass Guitar

A life-long Fort Pierre, South Dakota resident, Lonnie is bottom-end man of the group. He has been playing bass guitar since he was 14 , after receiving a Montgomery-Wards Airline arch-top acoustic guitar for Christmas from his parents back in 1967. That led to learning a few chords, starting a garage band with school buddies, and evolved into the 4-string bass guitar path of self-expression. Playing in numerous local rock and country bands, he has continued to hone his craft, becoming a proficient upright player and cultivating a love of jazz music over the past few years. “Just as singers get off on that neat three part harmony, when we achieve that instrumental nirvana of musical communication, it makes up for all the practice and hauling gear.” He is self employed with his business “Lonnie’s Home Work” (see LONNIE’S HOMEWORK page) and can fix just about everything and we mean everything. When a friend told him he had taken the whole weekend to fix a couple second story window flashing’s, he replied, “you should have called me, I could do that in my lunch hour!” An electric bass guitar player for eons, Lonnie started playing the upright acoustic bass after a purchase in 2000. With the kind of music the trio does, the upright sounds much more natural and colorful. Pictured with “Anna Nicole” his curvaceous blonde bass, he is also a collector of electric bass guitars and bass amps. Vickie, his ever-so-tolerant wife, has been putting up with him and his stringed instrument collection for more years than normal people should have to.

“Music helps not the toothache.”

George Herbert.

“A legend is an old man with a cane known for what he used to do.”

Miles Davis.

“The basic difference between classical music and jazz is that in the form the music is always graver than its performance—whereas the way jazz is performed is always more important than what is being played.”

Andre Previn.

“The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes—ah, that is where the art resides!”

Artur Schnabel.

“A musician may suddenly reach a point at which pleasure in the technique of the art entirely falls away, and in some moment of inspiration, he becomes the instrument through which music is played.”

Edwin Diller Starbuck.

“Music is too idealistic a thing to permit itself to be bound to concrete references. You cannot have a white horse in music.”

Paul Rosenfield.

“There’s only one way to sum up music: either it’s good or it’s bad. If it’s good you don’t mess about with it; you just enjoy it.”

Louis Armstrong.

“Forget the notes so that you can play them.”

Jan Sardi.

When asked to define jazz, Louis “Satchmo Armstrong replied, “Man, if you gotta ask, you’ll never know.”

Louis Armstrong

“Canned music is like audible wallpaper.”

Alistair Cooke.

“Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there.”

Miles Davis.

“Disharmony is simply a harmony to which many are unaccustomed.”

John Cage.

“Discord occasions a momentary distress to the ear, which remains unsatisfied, and even uneasy, until it hears something better.”

Charles Burney.

“Let us not forget that the greatest composers were also the greatest thieves. They stole from everyone and everywhere.”

Pablo Casals.

“Jazz is about the only form of art existing today in which there is freedom of the individual without the loss of group contact.”

Dave Brubeck.

“What we play is life.”

Louis Armstrong.

“Music is your own experience, your thought, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.”

Charlie Parker.

“Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.”

Igor Stravinsky.

“Jazz is about the only form of MUSIC in which the same note can be played night after night but differently each time.”

Ornette Coleman.