by Nick Ribush

Harold Koch was born in Manchester NH and has always lived in that area.

He started playing piano when he was 5. There was a piano at home (his mother and elder brother played) and he found that he could pick out with one finger any tune he heard. People were quite impressed with his ability and sometimes suggested he should take lessons but at that point he didn’t see the need. He found he was reasonably advanced playing out of the John W. Schaum piano book that he didn’t really need lessons.

Then one of his friends who had taken lessons played “Mary Had A Little Lamb” for Harold with a stride left hand, so he grabbed onto that to go with his one finger right hand melody picking.  Several years later, however, he took some lessons from a teacher who taught him the more advanced chords, from adding sixths, sevenths and ninths to diminished and augmented chords, which really helped his playing.

His brother used to listen to jazz on the radio, in particular the Chamber Music Society of Lower Basin Street on the Blue Network with Henry Levine and his Dixieland Octet and other musicians. So his brother got to like jazz and bought Harold a couple of records, one by Bunk Johnson and the other by the Lower Basin Street band. He grew to love Dixieland, but the thing he really loved was his grandmother’s phonograph. His uncles were in their twenties in the 1920s and had bought a whole bunch of Victor scrolls 78s, and Harold thought that was the living end of music. He copied the arrangements on piano as best he could. He never had any favorite pianists or looked to any pianist in particular, but would simply try to imitate the arrangements on those records.

When Harold was in 8th grade in high school a drummer friend gathered together all the kids who could play music and created a big band. The friend loved Glenn Miller charts and stuff like that, so that was the first band that Harold really played with. He couldn’t read music and didn’t have a chord book; he was just able to hear chord changes by ear for most simple tunes. For songs with more weird changes he’d have to figure the chords out but could still get there by ear.

After school he played with small bands around Manchester. In the 60s he went to work at Sanders Associates, a defense contractor in Nashua, where he became a senior electronics tech. There was a band there and Harold played with them at the Nashua Club in Nashua for ten years.

In 1971, a friend at Sanders who played trombone told Harold about a job that he had at the Groton Inn with a wonderful banjo player called Jimmy Mazzy and a wonderful clarinet player called Elliot “Lee” Childs. So he joined the band and played there the whole winter of 1971, which for Harold was the best music job he ever had. And that’s how he met Jimmy. He recorded some of these gigs on reel-to-reel, the tapes of which he still has.

Some time after that he lost interest in playing with the bands around Manchester and found greater satisfaction in simply playing piano at home every day.

Occasionally over the years Harold would go the Colonial Inn to hear Jimmy and sometimes sat in, but mostly he didn’t play with bands, so this gig at Trail’s End on November 22, 2015 is a bit of a departure for him and a welcome one for us who got to hear him. We’re certainly hoping for more.