Pete Greco and Wes Lewis in the WNHH FM studio.
Wes Lewis found his passion in his saxophone. He ventured into a neuroscience lab and discovered a second passion — thanks to a saxophonist’s brain tumor.
Lewis was a University of Rochester undergrad at the time. He had played the sax for years. He had a summer internship in the lab, where the team tackled a case study involving an alto sax player and teacher who suffered auditory hallucinations caused by the tumor. He would hear buzzing sounds.
The tumor was benign. The doctors wanted to remove it anyway to eliminate the hallucinations. The challenge: How not to wreck the patient’s musical ability in the process.
Lewis was the only musician in the lab. He designed experiments to test the brain’s musical functioning. The resulting data guided the surgery, to preserve the brain’s ability to process melodies.
The surgery worked. The patient’s hallucinations stopped. He continued playing and teaching music.
Lewis, meanwhile, had a new career path as a science researcher. He’s now studying the genome at a 300 George St. lab as a sixth-year Yale PhD student in bioinformatics.
Meanwhile, he continues picking up the sax to play around town. On Thursday he brought the sax to WNHH FM’s studio to fill in the vocal pauses in a performance by local singer-songwriter and guitarist Pete Greco on the “Acoustic Thursday @ Studio 51” program.
Greco, too, has a day job separate from music, teaching manufacturing at Hillhouse High School. He’s working on his third album of original songs while gigging regularly with a four-piece band.
His tightly crafted songs draw on R&B, folk, country and gospel roots. The four songs he played on “Acoustic Thursday” chugged along on a rolling, gentle rhythm with an Otis Redding/Leon Bridges retro-soul groove, flavored with matter-of-fact world-weary gravel-inflected vocals reminiscent of Chris Stapleton. In “Photo,” from Greco’s 2004 release Conventional Sounds in Folk Music, that recipe delivered a wistful longing about a missed former lover:
It’s late, and I’m tired
Dinner’s cold …
Everything, everything, everything’s
Like a hurricane
Every day, every day, every day
Seems to wash away.
So tonight I’m gonna look at you
Like a photograph
It’s like holding up a mirror straight into our bed.
I know I was wrong
And I’ll try to be strong
But my heart can’t make it last.
Tonight I’m gonna look at you like a photograph …
You can find out more about Greco and his recordings here. And you can catch him playing at Three Sheets on Elm Street on Friday, April 25.
It turns out Greco and Lewis both grew up in Buffalo; they didn’t discover that until Thursday’s show. They may even have been present in at least one jam venue.
Click on the video below to watch their full performance as well as a discussion of their careers and their music on WNHH FM’s “Acoustic Thursday @ Studio 51.”
Previous “Acoustic Thursday @ Studio 51” performances:
• Psycho Brat
• Ceschi
• Joshua Roman
• Wally
• Israel Corona-Galan, Brendan Castro & Matthew Munzner
• Brandt Taylor & Chris DePino
• New Haven Kapelye
• Shellye Valauskas and Dean Falcone
• Brian Ember
• Sketch Tha Cataclysm
• MJ Bones
• Johnathan Moore
• Johnathan Moore II
• Charlie Widmer
• Sam Carlson
• Gary Aronsen/77 Apes
• Steve Mednick
• Frank Critelli