Claudia Burson: Press

Two-year-old Seth Zaloudek sat entranced.
As his parents Rachel and Brett Zaloudek talked over brunch at Copeland’s in Rogers, he couldn’t keep his eyes off of the jazz trio playing under the Mardi Gras beads just down the aisle. As the family finished their meal, paid and walked toward the door, Seth stopped and climbed onto a chair in front of the performers.
He sat wide-eyed with his legs swinging as Claudia Burson’s fingers danced along the keyboard. Steve Wilkes played rhythmic drums and Mike Johnson strummed a deep bass.
Seth didn’t want to leave.
“He loves it,” Rachel Zaloudek said.
Burson smiled and laughed.
“We may have a future musician here,” she said.
Burson remembers when she first felt the allure of music. She was 8.
She was walking near her house on Janice Avenue in Fayetteville when she heard music drifting from a nearby house. Two neighborhood boys were taking piano lessons.
“I heard them and I just went crazy,” says Burson. “I never heard anything quite so beautiful in my life. I was just drawn to it like a magnet.
“I ran home and asked my mom if I could take piano lessons. I just had to do it.”
Her parents, Wanda Hazel and Joseph Eugene Burson, supported her, and she started taking lessons in the basement of Guisinger’s Music House on the downtown square.
Right away, she told her teacher she wanted to be a pianist when she grew up.
Burson has made a living of doing what she loves. Her career has spanned Fayetteville and Houston, and she’s played with jazz legends like Joe Lovano, George Coleman and Don Wilkerson.
For Burson, it’s all about the music.
“I always opted for the musical rewards rather than financial security because of the risk of burnout,” she says. “Your work should make you happy. If I ever get to the point when I don’t enjoy it, I’m just going to step aside and let somebody else take over.”
Burson has been a mainstay on the Northwest Arkansas jazz scene for nearly a decade. The Claudia Burson Trio, which has been together about four years, plays brunch at Copeland’s every Sunday and at Bordino’s on Dickson Street the first Thursday of each month. They regularly entertain at parties, weddings and other special events.
Johnson alternates with bassist Clare Starr.
On Jan. 15, the trio will play at the Walton Arts Center with singer Steve Lippa and the North Arkansas Symphony.
Wilkes, who has played with Burson for about eight years, says she’s respected musically by people around the world. Many have tried to entice her away.
“People have played with her and they want her to go on the road with them, but she’s here,” Wilkes says. “Claudia’s a gem and she’s one of the artists that the state of Arkansas should be very proud of.”
Burson says she’s happy playing her music and passing on the art of her craft. She teaches jazz privately and at the University of Arkansas.
Burson, who turns 61 on Dec. 16, has been pained with arthritis in her fingers for about five years. The only time it doesn’t hurt is when she plays.
“Playing actually helps,” Burson says. “A lot of musicians will say this - You can be sick, but when you’re playing you transcend your sickness.
“My mother told me I’d never get married because I was married to my music, and she was right.”

HATCHING AN INTEREST

Burson grew up in Fayetteville with her parents, younger sister Deborah and older sister Wanda, now Wanda Allen.
The love that was sparked the day she stood under her neighbor’s window grew, thanks to the tutelage of her piano teacher, a woman whose last name was Carnes.
She was a kind and patient teacher who made learning fun.
“The way she taught, it was just easy,” Burson says. “I just loved her. I had heard rumors about another teacher who would hit your hands with a ruler. I think that would have destroyed me - at a young age I would have hated music.”
She learned how to curve her fingers and place her hands just right on the keyboard.
Burson played the piano at Guisinger’s during lessons, but didn’t have a piano at home.
“When I started all I had was a wooden board about three octaves long,” Burson says. “It was painted like a piano and that’s what I practiced on.”
The old First Baptist Church on Dickson Street had a large dome and beautiful stained-glass windows. It was there she played her first recital, which she describes as a disaster.
“I was mortified I had to go,” Burson says. “I was supposed to play this bumblebee song, but I forgot my music. I told the audience and they all laughed.”
Her music teacher had an extra copy of the music, and Burson sat down to play.
“I remember my knees were knocking so hard that the crinoline in my dress made this sound - it was almost like paper crumpling,” Burson says. “I was afraid everyone could hear my dress and not my piano playing. I thought I was going to die. Afterward I told my mom I never wanted to play again.”
But she kept playing.
When she was 9, her parents bought an old upright piano that wouldn’t stay in tune. Once they realized it wouldn’t work, they bought a Wurlitzer.
As she got older, Burson wanted to try something different.
Her uncle, Kermit Burson, was a professional guitarist. She credits him and her father, who also played guitar, for introducing her to jazz. They used to play with her uncle’s friend Milt Turner, a pianist.
“I heard them play and thought it was the most beautiful music I ever heard,” Burson says. “I wanted to play music like that.”
Turner soon became her teacher. She loved the flexibility and self-expression jazz allowed. It was something the classical pieces didn’t offer.
“I loved that you could make it up, that you could create,” Burson says. “Before that, all I knew was the printed page, the notation. I wanted something more.”

RED BIRD CAFE

Burson’s father, known to everyone as Gene, for more than 30 years owned the Red Bird Cafe, a breakfast-and-lunch spot in downtown Fayetteville. The diner, which her father sold in 1993, was located across from where the federal building is now located.
“Back then you could get a cup of coffee for a dime,” Burson says. “A ham sandwich was 35 cents. A hamburger was a quarter.”
Claudia started working there when she was about 14 with her sister Wanda. She still remembers her first day waiting tables, because she spilled water on a customer.
“She had on this light pink wool suit and I was just mortified,” Burson says. “She didn’t get angry. She was very kind. I didn’t know how to serve people, but I sure learned.”
The diner was a home away from home, and she made friends in the close-knit downtown community. By the time she graduated from Fayetteville High School in 1964, she was doing everything from waiting tables to cooking and cleaning.
Burson studied a year at the UA under classical pianist Beatriz J. Pilapil, then left school to work several jobs and save money to go to the Berklee College of Music in Boston. It was a dream she couldn’t afford until she was 30, when she studied there for a summer.
In the meantime, she spent four years as a cashier and office clerk for Southwestern Electric Power Co., and three years as a proof operator at First National Bank. She continued working at her father’s diner and played for the UA dance department.
The dancers practiced in the women’s gymnasium, which now houses the Arkansas Center for Space and Planetary Sciences. The old gym, with its hardwood floor, had bad acoustics that made practices comical. But Burson needed the money and had to grit her teeth and bear it.
“The line of 30 tap dancers would just take off from one end of the women’s gym to the other,” she says. “It sounded like a freight train. In an enclosed space it was just too much, but I just kept on playing.”
At age 23, Burson joined her first rock ’n’ roll band. It was called Changin’ Time and included David Renner, Linda Legg and Lonnie and Ross Hawkins. The band played local hotels, clubs and parties.
The experience taught Burson, who had always played alone, how to play with other musicians.
“When I started playing with groups I had to learn where not to play,” Burson says. “I tell my students I play music like I drive my car - I just try to stay out of the way.”
After a few years Changin’ Time broke up and Burson joined another band called Sundance, with Dan Kerlin, Steve Davison, Glen Hendrix, Charlie Franklin and David Roitman. Their music was an eclectic mix of rock ’n’ roll, folk and jazz.
Sundance spent five years together playing gigs at clubs like the former Library Club on Dickson Street in Fayetteville.
“It was great because we all collaborated,” Burson says. “We were a unit. We all worked together.”
After Sundance, Burson joined a band headed by Mike Sumler. It was Sumler who led Burson to Houston in 1978. He left after six weeks, but she stayed for 20 years.

TAKING FLIGHT

In Houston, Burson rented a small apartment in the funky, eclectic Montrose neighborhood near the city center and rode her bike everywhere she went.
She got a part-time job as a typist for an electronics firm, befriended other artists and musicians and tried to break into the music scene.
“It took a long time to get established there,” Burson says. “There was a lot of competition. It was hard to land a steady gig. People would get them and hold onto them for a long time because they were so hard to get.”
By the 1980s, she was a fulltime musician. She played with musicians like Johnny Pena and jazz singers Betty Elkins, Mickey Moseley and Horace Grigsby. She struck up a long friendship with Noe Marmolejo, director of jazz studies at the University of Houston.
“They all taught me a lot,” Burson says. “They brought me up.”
In 1993, Burson went to Washington with jazz singer Kellye Gray and represented Texas during a ceremony honoring then-Gov. Ann Richards.
One of her most memorable performances was for the opening of the Moores Opera Center at the University of Houston in 1997.
She was to open for jazz legends Joe Lovano, George Coleman, and Joe Henderson, all tenor saxophone players.
Marmolejo asked her to play an extemporaneous introduction, completely off the cuff.
“I worried about it all night,” she says. “I stayed up late and then decided I needed the rest and went to sleep. When I got to the concert I decided I was just going to jump off the cliff, let my wings go and hope it worked.
“It did.”
Burson began playing and found the music just flowed from her.
“It was the fact that I let go of everything, that only the moment mattered and that moment became grand beyond my expectations,” she says. “It was the greatest feeling. It was a real defining moment for me.”
On her visits back to Fayetteville, the Burson family would gather at her grandparents’ home in Habberton. The house would fill with music as they held big jam sessions. Her father and uncle played guitar while she played piano and her grandfather played fiddle.
The children would gather around her grandmother’s pump organ and try to play, too.
“Everybody played something,” she says. “It was a lot of fun.”
In 1998, Burson’s father died suddenly. Having lost her mother five years earlier, Burson decided it was time to come home.
“I was losing my family, that’s why I came back,” she says. “I really missed home.”
She kept her Yamaha studio upright piano, but gave most everything else away, and moved home.

HOME TO ROOST

Burson moved into her parents’ 1973 one-story ranch house with her sister Deborah.
Nestled on 2 acres on Fayetteville’s east side, it is a popular spot for birds of all kinds. Burson says she sees blue jays, cardinals and wrens, just to name a few.
“We call it Burson International Airport for the Birds,” she says.
When she’s not playing piano, she likes to work in her garden growing vegetables including corn, tomatoes, potatoes and onions. She also likes to tend to her chickens and quail.
It’s just one of the things that makes her unique, Wilkes says.
“Here’s this woman who lives in the country in the Ozarks and loves to garden and raise chickens,” he says. “She’ll be out with other musicians and suddenly say, ‘I have to go home and feed the chickens.’ Yet you can talk about all of these ethereal things that jazz is.
“She would fit as well in a city like New York as she would in Fayetteville. To find all of those things in one person is very rare.”
For 14 years she had a mutt named Cricket who followed her everywhere she went. Cricket would show up for her gigs unexpected. She would be playing at a club on Dickson Street and look down to see Cricket crouched under the piano.
“She was my faithful companion,” Burson says.
Burson now has a dog named Paddington, who is part Shih Tzu and part poodle.
Upon her return to Fayetteville, Burson began playing around town and teaching at the university, where she gives private lessons and teaches two jazz combo classes.
Mark Cain, an organic farmer in Carroll County, has been studying under Burson for about four years. The 53-yearold remembers when he first saw her play for the Summer Jazz Concert Series at the Stella Boyle Smith Fine Arts Concert Hall.
“As soon as she walked out onstage I knew I wanted to study with her,” Cain says. “She just had this very unassuming confidence. Some performers bring a lot of attention to themselves when they’re onstage. Claudia just goes straight to the music.”
She’s a devoted and patient teacher who wants to help her students find their musical voice, he says.
He describes her style of playing with one word: Sensitive.
“Every time she sits down to play the piano, there’s so much soul in it. There’s a deep well of creativity there.”
Robert Ginsburg, president of the North Arkansas Jazz Society, met Burson shortly after she returned to Fayetteville. He describes her as an unpretentious “farm girl” and a jazz virtuoso who enjoys sharing her music.
“She is very generous in her musical abilities and in her playing,” Ginsburg says.
Through the Summer Jazz Series, Ginsburg has brought in well-known musicians like guitarist Ted Ludwig and pianists Bruce Barth and Benny Green. Burson has a knack for attracting their praise. She’s a musician who practices the give and take of jazz with grace, he says.
“She just connects musically with these people and they are often surprised there’s someone of this caliber in little old Fayetteville, Arkansas.”
Cain says he’s glad Burson is in Fayetteville. She’s a good friend, listener and teacher.
“I don’t think I would have this opportunity to study with Claudia if Fayetteville weren’t like it is,” he says. “In a bigger city there would be too many people clamoring for her attention.”
Burson says she’s just happy to keep on playing.
“My father said, ‘You’re going to get burnt out,’ but it hasn’t happened yet,” she says.