BOWLING GREEN – Jeff Halsey studied trumpet and piano as a child but found his instrument of choice by chance.
“I didn’t really pick it. I mean, it just happened,” he said.
His father, Tracy Halsey, worked full time in a day job and led his own band in the evenings. One night, which happened to be the biggest night of the year for musicians, his bass player called in sick for a New Year’s Eve gig.
“I was 13 years old and his bass player called in sick on that day,” Halsey recalled. “My dad said, ‘I want you to play bass tonight.’ I didn’t even know we had a bass in the house; it was upstairs
or something and it only had three strings on it, one string was off.
“I didn’t know anything about the bass. My dad said I want you to go ‘doom, doom, doom, doom’ all night long,” Halsey said, singing a progression of four notes. ‘Try to lock in or synch with the drummer, what he’s playing on the ride cymbal.’
“I didn’t know what I was doing but the guys in the band seemed to like it. And then some of the older guys spent a lot of time with me.”
It wasn’t long before Halsey found every note that could be plucked on that big standup double bass.
That was the start of his long and illustrious career as a bass player.
Halsey has performed with some of the most respected names in jazz, including Dizzy Gillespie, Budd Johnson, Yusef Lateef, Pete Siers and Stanley Cowell, to name just a few.
Meeting the late great pianist Claude Black was the turning point in his career, Halsey said.
Black, who was from Detroit, is a legend in Toledo for playing all over town, but especially at Murphy’s Place with bassist Clifford Murphy. Black passed away in 2013 at age 80.
“Claude was really the first training ground for me,” he said.
Black hired him to play at a club in Grand Rapids, Mich. six nights a week for two or three years.
“Through Claude I got to play with a lot of great people, including J.C. Heard.”
Heard, also from Detroit, was the drummer for the prestigious Jazz at the Philharmonic.
“Everybody knew him and when I played in his big band, we traveled around the world and were kind of like the ambassadors for the Detroit Montreux Jazz Festival.”
Halsey also “climbed over the fence,” as some jazz artists call it, landing a teaching job at Bowling Green State University early in his career.
He found that performing and being a music professor were two sides of the same coin. The teaching job provides a steady income and gives him the opportunity to help young musicians. Performing allows him to collaborate with other artists and create something special.
“People ask me, ‘What do you do for a living, do you have another job?’ They don’t think you can make a living playing music. My vocation is my avocation,” Halsey said. “And basically, throughout my life, I’ve been able to play my bass with a whole lot of great musicians, and then I get to come home and talk about it with my students.”
Now, after 42 years teaching at BGSU, Halsey is fully retired. But he has a lot of work to do before he leaves the campus.
“I kept every piece of paper back when paper was, well, when we didn’t have the internet and there was no email. I kept every piece of paper in a folder,” he said, adding, “This is not fun!”
It’s actually the second time he retired from BGSU.
“I put my in papers in November 2019 to retire June 1, 2020. They started a search for my position and then COVID hit in February 2020 and [BGSU] froze all the positions,” he said.
The university asked him to stick around, but instead of keeping his full-time tenured position he was offered a part-time job as an adjunct professor.
“A nice thing about being an adjunct is you don’t have a lot of the pressures of being a full-time tenured faculty,” Halsey said. “There was all the documentation and promotion and that kind of stuff, and I had none of that as an adjunct, so I enjoyed those four years.”
While he also enjoyed performing regularly with his jazz colleagues at BGSU, Halsey said it’s time to step aside and make way for the new jazz faculty members.
“We’re very cohesive,” he said of the music department faculty.
“We enjoy performing with each other. It’s kind of a diverse group of very talented players. So, I will miss that aspect of this, playing with them and working with them, because they were great.”
Halsey will still keep performing, of course. Bass players are always in demand, and a stellar musician like Halsey is always getting calls for gigs.
He recently played four nights at Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Mich., and said he loves playing at Arlyn’s Good Beer, a brewery and jazz haven in Bowling Green just a mile from Halsey’s home.
“I’ll be busy on many weekends, and I’ll be quiet sometimes and I’m fine with that. If somebody calls me to do a wedding, I’m not going to jump on it. I only want to play creative music or play music with creative musicians.”
