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Thomas Spitzer

A long life of softball, software, and jazz.

About Me

I discovered jazz when I was sixteen in 1971. Things were happening fast at that point in my life. My mother, a holocaust survivor, had finally succumbed to cancer on the January Sunday in 1969 when the Jets won the Super Bowl. As a thirteen year old growing up in the NY suburbs, trying to concentrate on sports to take my mind off life, the Jets and Mets were a big deal. When I started high school in 1969 I joined the bohemian clique, in retrospect the only logical place for the son of a Jewish ex-communist in a heavily Protestant heavily upper middle class suburb of Manhattan.

My father remarried quickly, and by 1971 my bi-polar step brother lived with us for a short time. He brought Django Reinhardt records. My buddies and I were on the lookout for a genre that would distinguish us from the crowd, and this seemed very promising. We stumbled on another kid who had transferred from Catholic school to the high school and was pretty into getting stoned and listening to music, which were major activities at that point in time. He had a family history of listening to jazz, and turned me onto Dave Brubeck and others (we’re still pretty close, in fact all the surviving members of that bohemian clique are still pretty close). Being inquisitive, that made it go time for me and I spent the next few years working to make a few bucks to buy jazz records. Until I left New Jersey for college in upstate NY in 1973, I listened to a lot of WRVR when it was a jazz station featuring the late great Ed Beach, which taught me a ton.

In addition to jazz I had gotten pretty hooked on traditional blues – Muddy, BB, Lightning Hopkins. I found myself on the campus of a major educational institution in the middle of New York state, and realized that being away from NY with a bunch of overachievers from the Island and Westchester was not a great cultural situation for me. One of the first days there, I heard somebody playing blues harp outside my dorm. I went out to talk to him, and ended up in one of our rooms getting high and listening to blues records. He asked me if I was going to see the Dead the following week in Syracuse. I said, no, why would I, I was into jazz and blues, and what use would seeing the Dead be ? Well he convinced me, and one show hooked me on them too. Anyway, this guy Steve from Philly, he didn’t stay on campus for more than a year, but he got me into the Dead, but that’s really a different story.

In college I became a political activist, sort of following in my father’s footsteps. Merging my political and cultural leanings I decided that we should have a benefit concert for the African National Congress (this was 1976). I produced it and arranged for Gil Scott-Heron to be the headliner, as I had gotten heavily into It’s Your World and other albums of his early career. Other than shows I produced and a Duke Ellington orchestra show in a theater up there, I don’t recall a lot of local music. I did get down to NYC occasionally and saw a lot of music there, including seeing one of the all night Sun Ra loft shows downtown in the mid- seventies.

I got my engineering degree in 1977 with a focus on civil/public systems and urban planning. I had a political colleague (we were part of a collective that produced a syndicated leftist radio news program for college stations called Ithaca Rest of the News) who had gotten a professorial appointment at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. My best friend, and colleague who co-ran the Ithaca Real Food Coop with me from 1975 – 77, was moving to Lansing/East Lansing because his wife was matriculating in grad school at Michigan State. So I made a deal to drive my professor friend’s UHaul truck to Ann Arbor in exchange for being able to load my belongings on the truck. By September ’77 I was in Lansing, living in a house with the other couple.

I quickly got a job as a city planner under a federal program that gave cities money to hire people who had been unemployed for a certain period of time. Since I had quit my college jobs early and been unemployed for six or nine months, I qualified! Certainly it wasn’t the intent of the program, but not the last time I would take advantage of federal programs where I qualified by the letter but not necessarily the spirit of the program. Having been a city planner for a few years, where I worked on getting grant funds, I have a pretty good idea of how that stuff works.

Well, I again fell in with a bunch of miscreants. One of my motivations in moving to Michigan was to get with the real working class and figure out if it had any revolutionary potential. I quickly discovered that it did not, and was subverted into their special brand of nihilism. Really, don’t buy an American car built on a Monday!

However, these guys were pretty nice to me, and tried to accommodate my eccentricities. I had two social milieus, the one through connections into the working class via my job, and the other through connections to MSU grad students through my housemates. I managed to merge them. Through the University world, we had a friend who managed a bar with a tropical motif called the Boom Boom Room on the border of Lansing/East Lansing. I learned they had an empty banquet room or two downstairs. Through the city world, I discovered local jazz musicians. I pitched the manager of the bar on letting us use the banquet room as a jazz club on weekends. She agreed. It was a good spot for musicians who would not have anywhere else to play and we managed to keep it going for about a year, but frankly, having to be there every Friday and Saturday night with the same handful of people and the same rhythm section got tiresome. Plus, other things were happening in my life.

During the seventies, I had learned something about computer programming. I had to take some courses for engineering, and ended up working as a staff member on an academic program developed around a computer simulation of Lansing Michigan, which was part of the reason why I had moved there. I worked on a number of projects in the seventies that anticipated technologies that are universally used in the 21st century (like route optimization, which many of us use every day in Google Maps). In fact in 1976 I designed the drive train that Toyota uses in the hydrogen powered Mirai, but failed to build a prototype so I couldn’t patent it.

This all led to me being one of those early buyers of an Apple computer, and the legendary guy who carried his little computer in through the back door of the office building so that what passed for an IT department of the time wouldn’t know about it. I used my little Apple computer to create economic models for proposed redevelopment projects, which were hopeless at the time due to the prevailing 15% interest rates! Between the economic situation, my ambitions, and my frustration with how slow city governments move I left city hall in 1983 to strike out on my own, founding GPS Associates and GPS Systems with two other guys. One of those guys was a public administration colleague who left the area to become the director of the economic development group in Clear Lake Texas, around the Johnson Space Center. He invited the other two of us down to look into picking up some business. We went to a cocktail party with a bunch of space engineers. One of them asked us who we were with and we said GPS Systems. He was very impressed and said that we were the hottest thing in the world at the time, which we did not yet know. So we asked what was the secret? Well, it was the Global Positioning Satellite! So we got familiar with GPS about fifteen years before anybody else, again, ahead of our time.

During the mid-eighties I developed a lot of bespoke software on Apple Macintosh PCs for small businesses, government agencies and statewide non-profits. In 1987, sensing better opportunities, we moved to Chicago. I had spent ten years in Michigan. During that time we had been to some major concerts at Ann Arbor’s Hill Auditorium, including the night when Dexter Gordon and Johnny Griffin returned to the U.S.; they played this show the night before their “official” homecoming show at Carnegie Hall in NY. I also remember seeing Woody Shaw, and a handful of others out there, most notably Elvin Jones at Baker’s Keyboard Lounge in Detroit. After that show I introduced myself to Mr. Jones and he graciously allowed me to chat with him for a few minutes, me being an absolute nobody at the time!

In Chicago, I “reunited” with my NJ bohemian buddy Bruce Dold who was heavily involved in “the scene” as a Tribune reporter, jazz writer and DJ; Bruce would go on to become publisher of the Chicago Tribune thirty years later. Even in the late eighties, Bruce knew most everybody in town so we were able to get great tables at all the Chicago jazz clubs. Unfortunately, we stayed there less than a year.

During that time, I had developed a relationship with the CEO of a software company based in Sausalito CA. He invited me out to talk about joining forces, so I visited the bay area on July 24, 1987. Its an easy date to remember because that evening a friend and I attended one of the more widely remembered Dylan and the Dead shows at Oakland Coliseum (decent video is available on YouTube). Parenthetically that was one of a number of relatively famous Dead shows I made it to, in addition to the Cornell show and the night they closed Bill Graham's Winterland (New Year’s ’79).

So I moved to the Bay area in September of 1987, and worked in the software industry for over thirty years. It is said that I invented eCommerce. Certainly I was involved in the development of several of the first Business to Business eCommerce platforms including SBT’s WebTrader in 1993 and EC Company’s service in 1996 – 97. We had a family and I was pretty engrossed in work and family affairs. In the early bay area years, I played a good deal of softball, which I had done in Michigan (there’s a story there and it will show up again later, but not worth belaboring in this context).

In 1996 I was commuting from Marin County to Palo Alto (that chapter will have to be published elsewhere), which took about an hour and a half each way. I hired another guy in my neighborhood to join me, and he turned me onto the great College of San Mateo Jazz station, KCSM. I just loved Alisa Clancy’s morning show. We would listen to it in the car every day. Obviously there was a lot of music happening in the bay area, with jazz and blues concerts and festivals happening all over. My son, who was born in 1995, became a musician and music afficionado. He had a guitar teacher who played at SF Jazz (whose name escapes me). My son and I went to the Concord Jazz festival together, we saw Herbie Hancock and Kamasi Washington at the Greek Theater and we saw the post Sun Ra Arkestra at SF Jazz, all great performances. I had seen a very late Sun Ra show at a club called Slim’s in SF in around 1991, which was pretty cool.

Another item of note from my time in the bay area. My son got us back into Judaism after we had been heathens for so many years. I joined the great little Congregation Shir Ami in Castro Valley and became their “social action” coordinator. That led me to joining the board of directors of South Hayward Parish, a community of several Jewish and Christian progressive congregations that provided services for area residents needing support with food and shelter. We also coordinated the southern Alameda MLK day observances, which led me to becoming the MC and a friend and associate of the Alameda County black clergy, which is a space I never dreamed I would enter!

In 2019 our daughter was heading into the last year of law school in St. Paul, Minnesota, and their physical condition was deteriorating. It was apparent that they would need help to make it through the year. The little custom software design and development business that I’d been associated with in the bay area since 1998 was disintegrating, and the bay area itself was getting less attractive as a place to live, so I volunteered to become a homemaker in Minneapolis. My wife stayed behind in the bay area, because she was a very senior person in the nursing ranks at the area’s largest health system.

I moved into a condo in Hopkins MN, and spent weekends cooking and cleaning at the daughter’s apartment in south Minneapolis. As I was getting adjusted to that COVID happened. I had read a review of these cheap Emotiva speakers before I left CA, and ordered a pair so I could listen to some music on a decent system (added them to a vintage 2009 Denon receiver I had bought off eBay for $100, which I still use in my office to this day); that was kind of a lifesaver, since there wasn’t much to do other than YouTube and Spotify.

Now, one of the things our business had done was built an R&D center in China back in 2006, so we had pretty good communications channels with people in Chengdu (provincial capital of Sichuan province, great place to eat!). We were tracking the progress of the epidemic there in December 2019 and January 2020; the early lockdowns there affected our business, and we knew it was only a matter of time. In fact, I’m pretty sure my business partner contracted the illness in December 2019 when he came into contact with Chinese tourists while on a business trip in southern California in December 2019. But of course, patient 0 was not identified for another six weeks. Again, we were ahead of our time.

In my official biography, I will go into much more detail on that period. Suffice it to say, the pandemic ended my wife’s nursing career and provided the finishing blows to our business. In May the Minneapolis police murdered George Floyd down the street from my daughter’s apartment, making that neighborhood a pretty dicey place to live. In September, I went back to California to pack up and arrange to sell the home we had lived in for twenty years, and then we totally uprooted to Minnesota where the three of us moved into the Hopkins condo and got COVID together. We managed to buy another home shortly, a townhouse in a community of older folks in Bloomington. Its not officially a retirement community, but it’s a de facto one. The daughter still lives in the Hopkins condo, with us two parents as domestic help. They did pass the bar and work full time, so that’s all good.

Like most of the country, cultural activities were suspended for a while here. I did learn about and start listening to the area Jazz station, Jazz88, which is associated with the Minneapolis School District. Nice station, but they mostly play music that is very familiar to me. During the early part of this century, I subscribed to Jazz Times, and later started using All About Jazz to keep up with new releases. I was a pretty early subscriber to Spotify – not the best sound quality but the best UI for playlist management, IMHO. I’ve been creating playlists from articles and reviews that I’ve read in these publications for the past fifteen years, and that’s mostly what I listen to. Right now, I’m listening to my Larry Coryell playlist, and its playing selections from his album Monk, Trane, Miles and Me which I’ve always rather enjoyed.

In 2022 I volunteered at the Twin Cities Jazz Festival in St. Paul. I also started playing softball again, in the West Metro Senior Softball league. I manage the league’s web site. I’ve become a bit of a softball junkie, playing on two traveling teams (one of which just took 3rd place in the 70 year old AA division in the senior softball “World Championship” tournament in Las Vegas – yes, I’m pretty good). We started going out to music again, discovering the area clubs and concert venues like the Dakota, Crooners, the Uptown Theater, and more. I still work part time, mainly with a company called Pivot Payables, where I have a part time role as VP of Engineering, from which I coordinate the company’s software development efforts and IT infrastructure and cybersecurity posture. So, keeping busy and in shape.

My Jazz Story

My Favorite Local Jazz Venues & Festivals

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