In addition to being a member of the University of Connecticut's jazz faculty, trombonist Peter McEachern played live with Thomas Chapin many times and is featured on Chapin's recording of INSOMNIA.

A longtime friend, Peter describes Thomas as "bending the genres, that was a part of his brilliance."

"Bending them, merging them together. Like bending the traditional genre to fit in more to the freer genre and vise-versa. I think that’s what a lot of people took away from Thomas.

"In the 2012 release, the 3-CD set NEVER LET ME GO, musically he pushes those tunes to the limit, with his sound, with what he’s doing harmonically, rhythmically and spiritually. You can tell, he’s like going to the edges, he’s trying to push it as far as he can.

"With Artie Shaw's MOON RAY, he makes it a more modern version, obviously, and he makes it Thomas, you know. In a sense, what a jazz musician does is they re-compose the piece, and all the musicians in the group are part of that process. It’s got (pianist) Peter Madsen’s imprint on it; it’s got everyone’s imprint. But certainly Thomas's. This was his concert and his gig and it’s his concept to do these tunes. So I think the most credit for that reworking of the piece goes to Thomas; it was his conception."

Chuck Obuchowski has long been a fan of Thomas Chapin's music. In his role of jazz director at WWUH at the University of Hartford, Chuck interviewed Thomas  many times during the musician's return visits to his hometown.

Chuck: "I always had a sense of appreciation for the quest he seemed to be on, searching for deeper meanings in life and not settling on what we’re told or taking everything at face value, but looking for the meaning behind things. That was something I think we shared. I felt a kinship in that regard. Call it spiritual dimension of life, call it what you will, but he definitely was a seeker, and I was very respectful of that. I could hear in his music.

"I point to a piece like Sky Piece. The feeling that I get hearing that music, it just opens vistas in my mind or beyond my mind. When you hear some of the different places he went with the sounds and sometimes just the complete abandonment, the joy, the freedom in his music, all of those things combined.... But the spiritual aspect, it’s hard to put a finger on it."

In making her film about Thomas Chapin, Stephanie J. Castillo has been collecting photos from Thomas Chapin's archives at Duke University and from private collections.

Stephanie says:  Thomas took this photo on one of his trips to Japan, this one as part of the band led by Kiyoto Fujiwara in blue. Below him in the photo is pianist Peter Madsen. Next to Peter is Allen Won, who also played sax with Thomas on the tour.

Now to the tale of SPANKY HOUSE. This tune is featured in the last CD release of Thomas Chapin music. NEVER LET ME GO is a 3-CD set featuring quartet music recorded at Flushing Town Hall in Queens and the old Knitting Factory in downtown Manhattan. The CD set received rave reviews, with one critic putting it on his top 10 list for 2012.

I found SPANKY HOUSE to be fun romp and used it in my trailer for my online fundraising campaign at Kickstarter.com. I am told that Thomas wrote this music based on an experience he and Kiyoto Fujiwara and band members had while traveling through Japan. They passed through a town with "Spanky House" signs. Turns out they are "love motels", places where couples go to for private sexual outings. Use your imagination, and enjoy SPANKY HOUSE. 

Accomplished guitarist/composer/producer, Saul Rubin played with Thomas Chapin's Spirits Rebellious group in the late 80's. Saul went to school with Thomas at the University of Hartford's Hartt School of Music in Connecticutt. Here he recalls the days of the Spirits Rebellious group.

"It was a very fruitful time. Thomas was, I guess, was trying to deal with sobriety at that time. He was going through a lot of stuff, a lot of changes in his life, you know, personal changes. And that's why he’s writing these beautiful songs, very heartfelt, kind of low, simple beautiful music. It wasn’t straight ahead jazz. It was much more related to Brazilian and Hermeto Pascoal and that kind of stuff.

"His flute playing was very reminiscing of Rahsaan Roland Kirk, but he could play very clearly like a classical tune as well. He had a depth of sound. He didn’t have one sound on flute; let’s say he had a lot of different sounds on flute. And also on the saxophone. I mean, he was very diverse and sonically, as well as a great, great composer.

"Thomas was always uncompromising. He always did the music he wanted to play, and I always admired that about him. He was in a position to be able to play art music, creative music. And I think part of the problem he had, ...I mean there was part of the success, but also part of the problem ...was his association with the Knitting Factory, because to the jazz world he kind of got labeled as a downtown player. He got put in that box of the avant-garde jazz world, but he was not an avant-garde jazz artist, he wasn’t. He was such a great musician. I mean he played all."

Arthur Kell is a bassist and composer whose
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."

Ted Chapin is a retired architect and a full-time artist, and helps to keep Thomas's legacy alive. The Chapin family are pictured here:  brother Ted, mom Marjorie, dad Edward, Thomas then called Tommy, and sister Sarah, also known as Sally.

Ted:  "We had gone to Manchester, Connecticut for that last concert, which was a fund raiser.  Everyone knew he was dying. . .

"All these musicians had come up from New York, and were doing a benefit concert, and there were people who were turned away. It was standing room only. It was an amazing concert, and not just because of the quality of the musicians. It was because of the poignancy and everything. My father was in the  green room; Tom was well enough to be there and to be part of the scene. He was just barely well enough to get out on stage. He played the calmest piece that he had ever recorded, which was Aeolus, a sublimely meditative piece for the flute. This is absolutely the calmest piece. Oh my God, to be making that your very last piece.

"Then three days later, he was in a Providence, Rhode Island hospital about to be put on a respirator. He had a massive infection. He never recovered from the respiratory problem, so these were his last moments of consciousness. I was ushered in, and everyone was given five minutes to go see him and say goodbye.

"I just said something to the effect, 'My God Tom, that piece you were playing in Manchester, was so beautiful. What was the name of it?'  And he looked at me, and you could see that little flash of annoyance, like, 'what do you mean, you don’t know? Don’t you remember? That’s Aeolus.' And I said, 'Yeah, the god of the wind.' And he said, 'It’s dedicated to you.'

"I checked the back of the record  when I got home and exactly, yeah. It says right there in print, Dedicated to my brother Ted, god of the wind."

Bassist/composer/bandleader Mario Pavone has a stellar reputation among fans of avant-garde jazz, particularly given his years as bassist for the Thomas Chapin Trio. He was a longtime friend who shared a closeness with Thomas musically and soulfully.

Mario  anchored the trio's music with a powerful, mystical style. Here he talks about the tune, Changes Two Tires.

"I’d been driving all over like crazy with the Buick so, the three of us get out and take a stretch. Thomas asks, 'How‘re you doing man, I know you had to rush to get back. ...Oh my God! You got a flat tire. Okay we got time, no problem.'  We go around and change the tire, get it done, all set. We go in and play the next set. We played four sets that night.

"We’d go back out and, 'Oh my God! I got another,' and Thomas goes, 'My God you got another flat tire, how can it be?'

"Well, it turned out, of course, I had changed a good tire instead of the bad tire. He almost falls off the sidewalk (laughing). I changed the good tire and we go around, you know. He checks everything, 'Better make sure man, you know.' He goes back in a few minutes and then he scribbles down some notes. And it ended up a tune that we  recorded.

"Changes Two Tires, like a kind of a reference to an Indian name, Changes Two Tires. Yeah, that was pretty funny, and we had a lot of laughs about that...."

Terri Castillo Chapin met Thomas while he and a group of musicians were playing in Grand Central Station. They were together for ten years,  and married just before Thomas's passing in 1998.

Terri's pick? The Thomas Chapin Trio does their take on the Beatle's Ticket to Ride at the North Sea Jazz Festival in 1995.
"This was one of his favorite encores. He knew it was a great way to end the show and would get the crowd stomping and yelling," says Terri.
"He only played the Ticket to Ride tune as an encore if the audience was hungry and wild enough to want more from an already satiated and give-all set, as the Trio was prone to do. Often in NY the more "staid" crowds rarely got this treat (which was a disappointment to me because I ALWAYS wanted to hear that raucous version of RIDE!), but in Europe, Japan and Canada, where there is no shame to shout, hoot and holler (and drink) during performances, they got this rocket-fueled encore and it drove everyone mad with ecstasy.

Drummer Mike Sarin said of the Ride performance, "'Ticket to Ride' was always fun for me. I enjoyed the audience reaction when they recognized the familiar melody—definitely something they were not expecting. In Thomas' arrangement, the A sections were fairly straightforward, but we played the bridge in a punk/thrash feel that younger audience members went nuts over."

Michael Sarin came from Seattle to New York City to be part of the downtown music scene in the mid-80's. He became the Thomas Chapin Trio's third drummer.

Ahab's Leg features Michael's "athletic" drumming; recorded live at UC Davis, Calif. during the Knitting Factory's U.S. Tour.

"There’s just the energy that I always felt, like more than any other group that I’ve ever been involved with, especially when you got done. It felt like you’ve been involved in some sort of athletic activity, in a good way, not in a bad way, because there’s a lot of music. I’d sort of use all parts of my brain, my body, cause it was physically demanding. It was more like playing in a rock band cause it was high energy.  There were a lot of fast tempos, and it would go on for a long time. It just required a lot of physical energy, which was great.

"I mean, we could play for a long time. Some of the tunes were really long, they were like these long journeys. 

"So, I  know a couple of tunes that we played were 20-minute tunes long, and that’s pretty long. I mean, if we were playing more than one set in the night, we'd try to stretched it so the tunes would probably be that long or something. But if we played one set, they could be long.

"I do remember Mario (Pavone, the bassist) one time, yelling out from the band stand, 'I’m tired!'. It became a joke, a running  joke in the band for a long time, cause we were playing on and on and on. Thomas thought that was the funniest thing. 'I’m tired.’ it was hilarious."

Marty Khan, producer/agent/critic advised Thomas Chapin on business matters and was also a reviewer of Chapin's music. From New York City, he lives in Tucson, AZ now.

Marty commented to me in his on-camera interview for the film about how he viewed two of Thomas's CDs -- Insomnia, which featured brass players with the Trio, and Haywire, that featured string instruments with the Trio. Golgotham is featured here from Insomia.

"Essentially what he was doing is he was expanding the framework. It was like a landscape as opposed to a portrait. It contained all these other elements. You do a landscape and essentially you may have a central element of the landscape, but you have to have a balance of the way the mountains look and the way the field of flowers look, and so forth and so on, to somehow frame that which is in the middle of the landscape.

"In Insomnia and Haywire, that is what he did. He utilized these other colors, these other flavors, these other elements to enhance the music.

"For me, again personally, I prefer that in most cases. In some cases maybe not. In a John Coltrane Quartet, which to me is the ultimate perfection of all creation, if I can be that bold. In its perfect manifestation of what the creator, actually both that creator and the player creator try to explain in the most transcendent manner, it was such a perfect element that it was what it was.

"You can add more to it, and it wouldn’t take away from it but it wouldn’t necessarily enhance it. But Coltrane wasn’t that kind of a composer. He didn’t work in that manner; in fact, even when he did a brass album, he had somebody else do the brass figures which he then worked with.

"Thomas was all contained, and I am not comparing him in any way, shape or form. I am not saying one was superior than the other in any kind of way. But it wasn’t just another element of expression. My feeling was I knew more about the man, I knew more about the message in the more expansive works using brass and strings. And so those are the ones that I keep going back to. I’ve listened to all of Thomas’ music, but I’ve listened to Insomnia maybe ten times as much as anything else and Haywire maybe five or six times as much as anything else."