friendship with Thomas started in high school when the two attended Phillips Academy at Andover in Massachusetts.
Their friendship and music-making carried on into their lives as part of the Spirits Rebellious group, which Thomas formed so that he could explore, compose and play Latin music. Arthur and Thomas shared a love of world music.
"Thomas was into a lot of different things. A lot of it was developing while he was playing with Lionel Hampton, which is more of a mainstream jazz situation. But he also visited Panama and was playing with musicians down there and also in Venezuela. So he was picking up a lot of influences from around the world and was interested in many things. Definitely he had a Brazilian period that he was very focused on. In the late 80’s, Brazilian was very popular with him.
"He was on the road a lot with Hampton and was out of town a lot, but towards the end of that, he started a band called Spirit Rebellious, which had a lot of Brazilian flavored music of Hermeto Pascoal or Thomas’ own original music. It was usually a quintet. I played with that band for maybe about three years; this is like late 80's. We did a lot of gigs around, mostly around New York, Connecticut Jazz Festival, pretty much local stuff.
"He was a natural band leader, a natural showman in a way, and he was not shy at all on stage. I mean he wasn’t going to just play the melody and take a solo and be reserved about it. He was a forward player, but he was also sort of a very energized personality. He would dance a lot on stage, but mostly in body movement, not so much in formal dance. He would move a lot on stage and always did as he did in high school."