My younger brother, John, has been playing piano as long, if not longer, than I’ve been playing bass. Our musical paths took us in separate directions as John, went to school to formally learn how to play, read and teach music, and in fact, is now a full time music teacher at one of the local school districts. He is classically trained concert pianist and also is a church choir director and accompanist, and a weekend musical warrior as JohnnyPiano from johnnypiano.com. He stays busy for sure. John played in my first band, The Plan, back in high school…he was our secret weapon for sure as none of the other bands in our school had a keyboard player so we could play all the Top 40 hits of the day. The fact that we could play “Jump” from Van Halen, with that cool keyboard intro, kept us busy every weekend during the spring semester of my senior year.
These days, we rarely get to play music with each other as we live in different cities and don’t see each other as much as we would like. However, last year, the church we grew up in, First Presbyterian Church of McAllen was celebrating 110 years and asked us to play a concert one Sunday after the Church service. We worked on the music on our own and got together a few days before to rehearse and then we played the show….went really well so we decided to try and play a few more gigs whenever we could.
John gets gigs left and right for wedding, corporate events, cocktail parties, etc. so whenever he gets a few gigs on the same weekend, I’ll drive down and play them with him as The McLeod Brothers! Pretty cool….