BF: You made another major transition from being an artist to working with other artists and programs. How did you come to that decision and was developing your approach as a teacher similar to that search for your sound as an artist?
CH: I was really tired of touring. I had stopped touring with Barry [White]. He was coming to the end of his career. Somewhere in there, I had gotten a call to go to Ireland to do some work with The Cranberries. I was there for about three weeks. Might have been a little longer. But I was just kind of like, “I don’t know if this is for me.” I was kind of looking around at what I’m interested in. I didn’t feel that a lot of my interests were matching up with my environment necessarily.
Someone had said to me, “Oh, there’s a school out here. They’re looking for a piano teacher. Would you like to teach?” And I kind of didn’t want to teach, but I said, “Well, I’m really good at teaching. So let me just suck it up and do it. I could still play and I can figure it out.”…The owners of the school would go, “You know what? Your students sound so good. How do you do what you do?” I realized I was doing something different than what they were doing and I was getting a different result. The result that I was getting was really a combination of my experience not only as a student and having a fabulous music teacher, but my experience as a touring musician.
It never dawned on me that most of the teachers I was working with were not touring musicians. They didn’t have the same broad experience I had, playing all different types of music and doing improvisation and playing jazz and understanding chord symbols. A lot of them just read music and would just play what was on the paper, and there wasn’t that much feeling sometimes. It was a bit more mechanical. I had learned how to play with a lot of expression because that’s something that was very important to my teacher. And personality-wise, I found that I connected with a lot of the students [and] their families as well.
Eventually, the music school I was working with said, “We have some other clients. Would you like to travel to their home?” One of the first families they sent me to ended up being Eddie Murphy’s family. Eddie at that time had three kids, and I started teaching them. I worked with them for about eight years. I saw these kids grow up, and it was just so much fun. And it was really just giving me a chance to develop a methodology around how I wanted to teach.
BF: How did this side of your career grow from there? Can we talk about some of the other projects and programs you’ve been involved with?
CH: I had an opportunity to go to a youth center in LA. I started teaching at this center and I was like, “Man, these kids don’t practice. Maybe this isn’t right for me. They don’t pay attention. They don’t listen.” I went to sleep one night and I had an epiphany. I said to myself, “It’s not about that. They don’t have the same experience that I have. They don’t have the parents that I had. They don’t have the structure that I had. They don’t have the opportunities that I had.”
I realized that it was about what could I give them that they could benefit from through music lessons and through exposure? We had a really strong recording program. I started working on bringing celebrities in to work with the kids who wanted to write and who wanted to become rappers or singers or who wanted to have bands. I also looked at the kids who wanted to just play music. Some of them, I was able to help get into the summer program at Berklee College of Music, which led to full scholarships for a lot of them—because Berklee had come to me and asked me if I would be a partner in their Berklee City Music Network, which was awesome. For me as an alum of Berklee and really being connected with my experience there and how transformational it was, I really wanted to do that.
I was developing a different purpose, and I kind of just walked into this purpose. It wasn’t easy for me at first, but I was willing to be open. And I think that that’s a very important lesson for creatives in whatever field you’re in. Most of the time, we have our eyes set on something…But while you’re developing that, and while you’re getting to where you ultimately will land, there’s nothing wrong with giving of yourself. When you take the focus off of who you are, I think things just open up, unfold a lot differently. It’s just very eye-opening in more ways than one. I think it’s opening for your soul. I think you can realize things. And I think you’re able to manifest things differently for yourself because you’re listening with a different ear.
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