\n<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd I don\u2019t think much past that,\u201d he said, \u201cbecause I\u2019m not going to waste a day where I feel good.\u201d<\/p>\n
Even so, a rash of recent activities conspicuously included reunions with formative associates. After the interview at his home, London raced to Park Slope to play with the improvising conductor Walter Thompson. The day before, he\u2019d been in Houston, performing with Itzhak Perlman in a revival of the violinist\u2019s celebrated Jewish-music odyssey, \u201cIn the Fiddler\u2019s House.\u201d That engagement reunited London not only with Perlman, but with the Klezmer Conservatory Band<\/a>, whose founder, Hankus Netsky<\/a>, had initiated him decades earlier into a then-unknown world of Jewish music.<\/p>\n In a video interview, Netsky \u2014 now the co-chair of New England Conservatory\u2019s Contemporary Musical Arts Department \u2014 recalled the determined 12-year-old trumpeter from Long Island he\u2019d met while working as a teenage counselor at Lighthouse Art and Music Camp in Pine Grove, Penn.<\/p>\n \u201cI always tell my students that if you want to be a creative musician, you\u2019ve got to have technique on your instrument, you\u2019ve got to channel your life experience, whatever that is, you have to know a certain amount of repertoire, and you have to have creativity,\u201d Netsky said. \u201cHe had all of them, obviously. But the creativity was off the charts.\u201d<\/p>\n Raised in what he called a religious Reform Jewish household in Plainview, London gravitated toward rock music in high school. But at the school\u2019s radio station, he discovered recordings on Strata-East, a Brooklyn label<\/a> run by the jazz musicians Charles Tolliver and Stanley Cowell, and was taken with one of its more adventurous releases: \u201cSound Awareness,\u201d<\/a> a choir-enhanced, percussion-heavy forebear of what\u2019s now called spiritual jazz, by an artist called Brother Ah.<\/p>\n Enrolling in Brown University, London discovered that Brother Ah, born Robert Northern, was teaching improvisation there. When he decided to pursue improvised music as a career, London left Brown and auditioned for the New England Conservatory, where Netsky was teaching. He failed the audition, but paid to take classes anyway, and played in a workshop band Netsky led with the pianist Jaki Byard.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n