One of my nearest and dearest friends and mentors was a voice teacher at Interlochen Center for the Arts named Mary Chelf Jones. She was born in Central Kentucky in a historic town called Harrodsburg. After I graduated from Interlochen Arts Academy, Mrs. Jones asked...
By Mike Holtzclaw About a year ago, Kevin Cole sat at a piano for the first time since the eight-hour surgery that had removed a tumor from the right side of his brain. He needed to see if he could still play, and he started with a passage from “Rhapsody in Blue.”...
By Howard Reich, Chicago Tribune Kevin Cole’s comeback. Chicago singer Paul Marinaro wasn’t the only important artist to overcome a perilous health scare. Cole, the leading interpreter of George Gershwin’s piano works, was based in Chicago from 1994 to 2016 and...
Yes, he still can play the piano. And how. In March, Kevin Cole — today’s leading piano interpreter of music by George Gershwin and contemporaries — endured an eight-hour surgery to remove a noncancerous tumor from his brain. Cole was back on his feet in weeks, but...
By Howard Reich, Chicago Tribune Forty years ago, a very fortunate young piano major at Northwestern University began writing about music and the arts for his hometown paper, the Tribune. That first piece, published in March of 1978, led to uncounted evenings with the...
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