Chris DePino, Dan Klug, Chris Morrison, and Morris Trent. Raheem Nelson Photos.
Chris DePino has loved the idea of performing at the Milford Arts Council (the MAC) since he first passed the building in 1972, and had less than a minute to get a good look at the spot. Over five decades and dozens of performances later, gracing the stage still feels like a homecoming.
DePino, a jazz musician, harmonica player and music educator who calls Connecticut his home, captivated a sold-out crowd on Friday night, as he and musicians Chris Morrison, Morris Trent, and Dan Klug performed on the MAC’s intimate and dramatic, low-lit stage. For the musician, a native of New Haven who has worked as a political lobbyist, legislator and Metro-North conductor, there was nowhere he’d rather be.
“I wanted to always perform locally, in front of the hometown crowd, so to speak,” he said in an interview before the concert. “And the Milford Arts Council was a perfect spot for me because I've been going there literally since 1972. As a joke, I will say, ‘I went everyday but I can only stay a minute. Watch your step leaving the train, Milford.’”
In some ways, the performance has been a lifetime—or at least 50 years—in the making. DePino, a son of Italian immigrants who grew up in New Haven’s Hill neighborhood, started his career not as a professional musician, but as a conductor for the Metro-North Railroad in 1972, when he was just 19. At the time, he’d been playing the harmonica for only a year, and the job provided him with an unlikely space for inspiration.
“I used all the free time in between the train’s layovers, and also literally the clickity-clack of the train, to provide the rhythm to keep inspiring me to practice,” he remembered. By 1978, he’d started taking lessons in the diatonic harmonica with Robert Bonfiglio, a classic harmonica player based in New York City. On his breaks, he attended classes at Turtle Bay Music School in Manhattan, making the walk from Grand Central Station to 52nd Street.
There, in a townhouse that housed music lessons for almost a century, Bonfiglio would be waiting to teach him. DePino studied there dutifully for three years before branching out on his own.
“That opened up the world of music to me in a way that I couldn't ever imagine,” DePino said. He switched from the diatonic to the chromatic harmonica, which has a larger range of notes that lend the instrument particularly well to jazz music (he can and will still play a mean riff to make you feel like you’re in an old Western). He was especially inspired by the music of harmonica player Toots Thielemans, after listening to whom “there was no going back.”
“It became the passion of the life,” he said. Three decades later in 1992, he began to perform regularly in jazz jams at New Haven’s Cafe Nine—a venue that he still cherishes. He lived many lives in between: train conductor, lobbyist, elected official, chairman of the state’s Republican party, and police commissioner just to name a few. But musician may still be, after husband and dad, one of his favorite titles to date.
Chris DePino: The passion of his life.
Friday, he brought that verve and personal history to the MAC, which sits just off the Metro-North stop in Milford in a building that underwent significant renovation in 2017. In the audience, a listener could feel the energy of the crowd, and of the band, before musicians even started to play. When they did pick up their instruments and began, everything was intertwined. Even the Metro North trains that flew by seemed to be in sync with the rhythm. It was a sight and a sound to behold.
In one number, for instance, he donned his old conductor’s cap with a call of “All Aboard!” and began to play the harmonica, turning it into an old steam engine and a modern wheel running on the train track all at once. He dipped into the harmonica’s lowest register, the notes glossy and soaked in nostalgia as they came one right after another. Within minutes, it had bloomed into a sound big enough for the whole room, singing over the stage as guitar came slowly in, bass thrumming and hot beneath it.
In another, he offered up the quartet’s take on the jazz trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, with a back-and-forth between the harmonica and the piano that nearly made a listener forget the brass and blues that had birthed the music in the first place. At first, harmonica floated over the stage, warbling and melancholic, so certain it almost seemed like a voice.
Not even 90 seconds in, Morrison entered the flow with shimmering, mellow guitar. Klug coaxed a whisper and hiss from the cymbals, a tap-tap from the drums. Harmonica flowed back in, and Trent glided into the fray, with a touch so delicate that his hands seemed balletic, trance-like. As they stepped deeper into this musical dialogue, it became a whole jazz jam in a single number, with room for solos that took their time. As he played, the harmonica rarely still in his hand, DePino swayed to the sound, and his gentle rocking became contagious.
By the end of the night, the band was in a groove, and the audience was on its feet. If you had listened, even for just a moment, it wasn’t hard to see why.
The following citizen contribution comes to the Arts Paper through multimedia artist, illustrator and graphic recorder Raheem Nelson, marketing director at the Milford Arts Council (the MAC). For more events at the Milford Arts Council, click here. The MAC is located at 40 Railroad Ave South in Milford.