click here for a sample of Bryan Lubeck's music.
The difference between Bryan Lubeck’s two lives is as plain as day and night. By day Lubeck, of Valparaiso, Ind., is a marketing manager for a Fortune 500 company. By night he is a guitarist who melds jazz, R&B, Latin, pop, and flamenco and classical into one seamless composition. The combination has landed his work on WNUA-FM (95.5) in Chicago and him on Midwest stages opening for top smooth jazz names like Brian Culbertson and Richard Elliott.
With such a schedule, you might think Lubeck is dancing on the lip of a volcano. But a conversation with him soon dissuades that wayward thought. After a day of work and an evening of rehearsals, he tries to talk about his tipping point of success while still trying to entertain his 3-year-old son, Rhett, at almost 10 p.m.
“He brought me my pick, since he heard us talking about it,” the contented father says with a smile. Just as he combines different forms of music into one, Lubeck, 38, is more interested in blending his three loves — his passion for music, his family and his profession — into a balanced life than he is in a musician’s life on the road full-time.
“I have a kind of A-type of personality,” he says, “but I’ve always been a pretty balanced person. People focus on one or two things that they ‘super like’ and then the other stuff kind of drops off, but right now I’m having a blast with my balancing act.”
Fans seem to be having a blast as well. Lubeck’s CDs have sold thousands of copies, and his performance schedule now takes him to venues for hundreds of people, and sometimes thousands — such as at this summer’s Smooth Jazz at Sunset in St. Joseph, Mich., and Smooth Jazz at Southshore in Michigan City, Ind.
The draw is Lubeck’s pleasant generalist material, which he compares to that of smooth jazzers Earl Klugh and Marc Antoine. Lubeck composes songs around metaphors, such as a sunny day after a rainstorm mirroring a person’s internal cloudiness masked by a happy face. He also creates minute-long melodies with muses that stem from Harlequin romance novels and non-traditional lullabies for his son.
“There’s a ton of finger-style guitarists out there,” Lubeck says, “but there’s not a lot of us in the smooth jazz format. It’s more of a uniqueness, where here’s this guy who plays flamenco stuff with jazz and pop. People seem to dig it.”
From musical theater and Six Flags performances to collegiate performance groups, the Ball State University graduate ran the gamut of musical expression since he took the stage with a Goshen, Ind., youth group at age 10 in various festivals.
After college he played cover tunes in bars, with his original material occasionally sneaking in. And although people were responding to his work, it wasn’t until he saw guitarist Marc Antoine in concert that Lubeck realized that his brand of music had mass appeal.
“I just went, ‘hey, now I have this validation,’” he recalls. “Smooth jazz doesn’t have to make a statement — you can just go out there and make music that people can make up their own storyline to.”
Lubeck made a vocal album entitled Mysterious Woman in 2003, and in the same year landed a chance to open for Craig Chaquico, a former guitarist for Jefferson Airplane/Jefferson Starship. His wife, Donna, gave birth to son Rhett soon after, so Lubeck had to learn how to play music quietly in the house. That gave rise to a second CD, Acoustic Vineyard in 2004, an entirely instrumental work. The CD set him on the same stage as saxophonist Richard Elliott the following year, and Lubeck drew even more validation from the standing ovation.
“At that point I knew I needed to stop singing and do more instrumental music,” he says.
The second CD has sold thousands of copies via Tabor Hill Winery and the national retail chain Hobby Lobby, as well as international sales over the Internet. Along the way, Lubeck’s live performance schedule has taken him to venues across the Midwest.
More lies ahead. “Every year I go, ‘it can’t possibly get any better,’” he says. His next benchmark: “I think the next thing for me is to get a popular tune on the radio — one that gets played every other hour because people are so into it.” Until then, Lubeck will keep juggling the facets of his life that he puts into song.
Requests for “daddy” fill up the space behind Lubeck, who gently asks, “You need some paper? Here, draw Daddy something.”
Several minutes later the tyke is getting up and pointing at his father’s guitars. Lubeck reminds the boy that he has a guitar of his own, and ask, “Why don’t you go and get it?”
Rhett scampers off and his dad says, “He seems to be really into his guitar — as much as you can be into it at three.” The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
click here for a sample of Bryan Lubeck's music.
| 
subscribe today!
