It was nearing the witching hour on Halloween 1981, just after Ray Charles had played the Homecoming concert. Clifford Solomon, the great alto sax player who recorded with bluesman John Mayall and producer Phil Spector, stepped out of the Jorgensen Center for the Performing Arts and headed toward the band’s bus. He asked the young man standing nearby where one could get a drink.

Morris “Mo” Pleasure ’86 (SFA), already a multi-instrumentalist who had led his own band in high school, offered to accompany Solomon to a nearby watering hole. By the time they had finished their beverages and a discussion about music, the veteran musician was sufficiently impressed to give Pleasure his card. Within a year of meeting Solomon, Pleasure was playing with Ray Charles’s band.

Pleasure grew up in Guilford, Conn., and began playing the piano at age 4. He also was proficient on bass, trumpet, guitar, drums, and violin, and as a teenager started earning money fronting his own group, The Pleasure Band. In deference to his parents, he enrolled at UConn as an engineering student. In his heart, though, he knew that he was a musician.

After two years on the road with Charles, Pleasure returned to UConn to major in music as a seasoned performer with professional connections who would later help him find work in New York City.

“I got a wonderful musical education at UConn,” he says, crediting faculty such as Ellen Rowe, Neil Larrabee, and the late Hale Smith with helping to refine his talent. “I was playing in all kinds of bands – country, rock, top 40 – working all the time, but it was my teachers who helped me stay focused on professionalism.”

Now a producer and president of his own label, Watersign Records, Pleasure has performed over the past 20 years with George Duke, Natalie Cole, Dianne Reeves, Roberta Flack and Janet Jackson and served as musical director for Earth, Wind & Fire. Throughout, he says, the lessons learned at UConn about being a professional musician have served him well.

A Pastiche of Musical Variety

Pleasure is among many alumni who have distinguished themselves as professional musicians. From jazz artists to folk singers to composers, they all, like Pleasure, acknowledge a debt to UConn.

Saxophonist Mark Small ’97 (SFA) played gigs as a high school student in Norwalk, Conn., but started to consider a music career when he met bassist Dave Santoro at UConn. Santoro, now on the faculty at Berklee College of Music, introduced Small to prominent Boston saxophonist Jerry Bergonzi, who performs with Earl MacDonald, director of the UConn Jazz Studies program. Soon, Small was playing regularly with top Boston bands.

“I saw good people performing and I realized what I had to do,” Small says. “Thanks to Dave, I got really organized at UConn. I began to think and operate like a professional musician.”

After graduation, he played professionally in Boston and New York City. Now a resident of Brooklyn, he has toured the world three times with popular singer Michael Bublé.

Acclaimed jazz singer/composer Marilyn Harris ’72 (SFA) says that, like Pleasure, she too was guided by Hale Smith, who taught musical composition. “Hale showed me how to have a music career,” the Hartford native says, “and I will always be grateful.”

The key, she says, is versatility. After graduating from UConn she moved to New York, finding work copying scores for the pianist/composer Gil Evans and other New York musicians. Later she wrote advertising jingles before moving to Los Angeles, where her performing and recording career took off. Now living in Arizona, Harris says establishing and maintaining a fan base is always challenging. Professional musicians have to be willing to find alternative ways to perform. “We cobble together a career over the years,” she says.

Many Ways to be a Musician

A career in music does not always mean a focus on performing. Composer and organist Peter Niedmann ’90 (SFA) has enjoyed a multifaceted career as director of music at the Church of Christ, Congregational in Newington, while also performing weekly at Hartford’s ON20 Restaurant. He has written a variety of compositions, commissioned by many organizations. To make it as a professional, “you’ve got to be blessed with talent,” he says, “and you need self-confidence. Finally, you have to be able to market yourself and find ways to make a living.”

Composing was the emphasis of Dana Wilson‘s ’75 MA work as a UConn graduate student in the 1970s. Now a music professor at Ithaca College, Wilson has written for ensembles, including the Buffalo Philharmonic, the Netherlands Wind Ensemble, and U.S. military bands. His compositions have been performed all over the world.

Folk singers have always found persistence is a virtue in carving out a career. Lui Collins ’74 (CLAS), who began establishing herself as a performer at UConn coffee shops and other venues near Storrs in the 1970s, has released nearly 10 solo albums in the past three decades. She enjoyed a long career as a performer traveling the country, before settling down in Vermont to devote time to her children.

She still performs occasionally, but closer to home. Most of her time is devoted to a program for babies, toddlers, and their parents, called Music Together, for which she says her UConn education in music theory was great preparation.

“People need music. They thrive on it,” she tells aspiring musicians, but she is quick to temper that optimism with a dose of reality. “Follow your bliss, but don’t ever expect it to be easy. There are many ways to be a musician. Tenacity is the thing you need most.”

If the struggle for success in music sounds as if it can reach operatic proportions, that’s because it can. It is something to which Laurentiu Rotaru ’07 MM, who earned his master’s degree at UConn, can relate. Winner of several singing and opera competitions, Rotaru has performed as a soloist in numerous ensembles in his native Romania and in Greece, Austria, Hungary, and the U.S. as Leporello in “Don Giovanni,” Don Basilio in “Il Barbiere di Siviglia,” Méphistophélès in “Faust,” and many other roles. In 2004 he debuted at Carnegie Hall.

Yet Rotaru, who graduated from theological school in Romania and contemplated a career in the clergy before turning to music, could not speak English when he migrated to the United States in 2001. Today, thanks to the fact that he’s not only a talented singer but gifted with a bass vocal range, the rarest in opera, he has become a much sought-after performer.

“This is a very tough business,” he says. “Someone who wants a career in music should think very carefully. To succeed requires a very great commitment.”

Musical Calling

Several alumni have found careers in music, even as they pursued other studies.

An honors student in business, Manchester, Conn. native Vanessa Kafka ’06 (BUS) was a popular performer on and off campus. She released her first EP in 2005. A 2008 Northeast tour in support of her debut album, “Into Place,” helped her establish a solid fan base.

Naomi Sommers ’01 (CLAS), who studied literature and music at UConn, devoted herself to music full time after graduation, settling in Boston in 2001 to launch a solo career. She has released four albums, including 2008’s “Gentle as the Sun,” produced by Jim Rooney (John Prine, Iris Dement, Nanci Griffith, Bonnie Raitt). That same year she performed at the GRAMMY Foundation’s Starry Night Fundraiser in honor of Beatles producer Sir George Martin, sharing the stage with legendary guitarist Jeff Beck and composers Burt Bacharach, Jimmie Webb, and others.

Connecticut State Troubadour Lara Herscovitch ’95 MSW says she “narrowly escaped law school,” instead embarking upon a career in social work. Though she began playing piano and writing when she was young, music remained principally a hobby until Bridgeport’s Acoustic Café opened in the 1990s and she began performing at “open mic” nights. “Suddenly, I was awake,” she recalls. “I knew music had to be part of my life in a more serious way.”

While continuing her social work career, she has successfully taken on a parallel music career, performing at such notable venues as the Towne Crier in Pawling, N.Y., Club Passim in Cambridge, Mass., and at Bleecker Street’s legendary Bitter End, building what music website smother.net calls “a rabid fanbase.”

“Being a musician isn’t a choice,” she says. “It’s hard work. Why would you pick this? You do it because you must.”