I walked into the LA Music Center a doubling woodwind player and walked out an oboist.  The New York City Ballet was in town and a distant relative was celebrating a birthday; her present was a matinee on a beautiful September Saturday. I knew that Bill Criss was playing first oboe with the pickup orchestra that had been hired for the engagement. William "Bill" Criss, formerly co-principal oboist of the Metropolitan Opera, had been a resident of LA since 1960 and, after abortive attempts at a new career (maître d, fashion photographer), had become a successful studio musician.

The first ballet didn’t involve the orchestra but rather a rock combo.  The second ballet, Pineapple Poll, changed my life.  The piece, taken from Gilbert and Sullivan operas, opened with a long oboe solo and I had never heard a sound like the one that came from Bill’s oboe.  (I still haven’t some 50 years later.)  Moreover, there was a kind of motion in the way he played the melody that I later came to find out was called “phrasing.” 

I had never met him although I had encountered him one summer about five years earlier when I was hanging out with some friends at the Music Academy of The West.  I was practicing in the small room where he gave his oboe lessons and he walked in and said, “why don’t you get out of here.”  He was well known for his beautiful playing and almost as well known for his disdain of doubling oboe players and his tendency to say whatever was on his mind.  In any case, I was determined to study with him even though a former teacher had told me I didn’t need any more lessons.

Between the previous July and the following March I hardly had a day off.  Studio work, including the Carol Burnett and Dinah Shore TV shows, records, commercials and concerts—it was all pretty heady for a guy who had a few years earlier been driving to students’ houses and playing a gig here and there.  Now, every spare minute was spent practicing the oboe. I took etude books with me to work and practiced before, during and after the sessions.  Any time off at home was spent with the oboe.  I didn’t know how I was going to approach him—I figured a phone call would probably end abruptly and unsatisfactorily—but when I figured it out I was going to be ready.  

I got lucky.  I went to hear the Bach Aria Group with another great oboist, Robert Bloom.  I went backstage after the concert with no goal in mind but to see Bloom up close and there was Bill, standing amidst a group of his students.  When they had dispersed, I approached him and told him I wanted to take lessons from him.  He looked surprised and said, “me?  OK, call me tomorrow.”

The next day, the tone had changed.  “Are you the guy from last night?”  Yes.  “Do you already play the oboe?”  Yes.  “Who’d you study with?”  Gordon Schoneberg.  “Why don’t you go back to him?”  He told me I don’t need any more lessons.  “OK, I said I’d teach you, so I’ll teach you.”  He gave me his address and a time.  I got there and heard a lesson wrapping up; I went in and saw, of all things, one of my oboe-doubler colleagues.  Apparently the rule wasn’t absolute.  The other student left and my lesson began. 

“Tell me about yourself.”  Instead, I told him about the impression his solo with the ballet had made. 

“Play something.”  At that point I nailed it.  I had heard the story of the famous jazz musician who went to Bill for lessons and responded to the request with a Charlie Parker solo—a lot of notes in a very short period of time and a real challenge technically.  “That ain’t nothing,” he told the Famous Jazz Musician.  (He didn’t say “nothing,” he used a four-letter word.)  

I couldn’t have played that anyway, but I chose to play the slow movement from a Vivaldi concerto I had heard on a recording by Harold Gomberg.  Bill looked surprised.

“You like baroque music?”  Yes.  At that point it was almost as if he was auditioning for me.  “I can teach you things that will get you through any commercial job,” he said. Brashly, I pointed out that I was already doing pretty well in the commercial music business.  I said that I thought his sound was the most beautiful I had ever heard and that I wanted to sound like him.  

“Thanks, but Tabuteau had the best sound.”  Marcel Tabuteau (1887-1966) was the progenitor of the American oboe sound and an entire approach to playing the instrument that had not existed before him.  I asked him to recommend a recording but he said that Tabuteau’s sound, for whatever reason, did not record well. 

“You had to hear him in person.  And anyway there are more important things than sound, like intonation, technique, and phrasing.  It’s a double reed instrument—you’re not going to sound the same two days in a row.”  

He took a little piece of paper and wrote a whole note with a fermata above it and "hairpins" below it, a classic “long tone” exercise.  “Make a kazoo,” he said, “because I want to hear dynamics.”  “Kazoo” meant a reed with no resistance.  He told me to bring the Barret method book to the next lesson. One of my clarinet teachers had told me that I had to practice long tones an hour a day and said that if I missed even five minutes one day he could tell.  It turns out he couldn’t but I wasn’t taking any chances.  I arrived with the Barret and a very soft reed. I passed the long tone test and he opened the Barret to a page of articulation etudes and played the first one, two lines of sixteenth notes.  It was Pineapple Poll all over again: the sound, the phrasing, the beauty and expression were overwhelming.  And that was an etude!  

After the articulation etudes he assigned one of the duets that are the main substance of the book.  At the next lesson I began with the first of them, thirty-two measures long.  He was working on a reed and didn’t look up until I finished.  I wondered how much of what I had done registered, but he gave me a note-by-note critique; he hadn’t missed a thing.  And that’s the way it went for the next two and a half years.  He demonstrated everything, using whatever reed he was working on in whatever stage of development it existed at the moment.  I never got over my initial reaction to the amazing beauty of his sound and the passion that went into even a simple two or three note figure.  It was as if Heifetz had taken up the oboe.  

At one lesson I got one of his rare compliments—sort of.  “That was good,” he said.  “Good sound, good intonation, good phrasing.  But I didn’t feel anything.  Play it again and this time I want to feel something.”  Another time I must have looked stunned, because he said, “Hey, I tell you when I don’t like it…”

There was some gem of information at every lesson.  He freely quoted other oboe players and acknowledged what he had got from them.  First and foremost was Tabuteau and there were frequent references to Bob Bloom, Marc Lifschey, Harold Gomberg and various other Tabuteau students.  The respect was mutual in every instance.  Bob Bloom said his favorite oboe players were Bill, Marc Lifschey, and Ray Still (his student and an awesome oboist).  Once, after Bill had laid a particularly effective gem on me and I thanked him, he said, “Hey, I didn’t spend all those years sitting next to Bloom and not learn something.”  Gomberg sent two takes of his Mozart Quartet recording to ask Bill’s opinion about their relative merits.  Lifschey asked for advice in sharpening a knife.  And so on.

As my career gathered momentum I worked with him on a variety of studio sessions—movies, TV shows and records.  Neither of us was entirely comfortable with the kind of competitive energy put forth by a lot of our colleagues, so lunch breaks were usually away from the crowd.  If his cronies (mostly Norman Herzberg or Dominic Fera) were on the session, I would adopt my fly-on-the-wall persona and enjoy the interplay.  It was yet another part of my education. 

Gruff for sure, but Bill had a good heart and there were many encouraging moments.  When he bought a new English horn, he asked me to play a duet with him to “check the intonation.”  (He didn’t need me for that but it was a compliment.)  Once, when I had gotten him a job playing first oboe on a movie (Silent Running), he gave me a reed—a good one.  Bill told me that one of the reasons he didn’t like to teach doublers is that they thought they could learn the “trick” of making a reed.  He claimed he “didn’t know anything” about reeds and sometimes referred to it as a “curse.”  (You had to be there, facial expressions and whatnot.)  His reeds were very hard to play—tiny opening, much resistance—but they were stable.  He challenged me once to put my hands around his neck (talk about trust!) and see if I could keep them from moving when he started to play.  I could not.  “I’m like a weightlifter with my neck,” he said.  Twice he borrowed reeds from me, another compliment.  One time it was to try new oboes at the Lorée factory when the LA Chamber Orchestra was in Paris.  He returned both of them. A few times he even referred to me as “talented” (I’m not, I just practiced a lot), which I assumed to be some sort of psychological ploy.  (I appreciated the effort.)

After two-and-a-half years he told me I didn’t need more lessons but was free to come back any time for help with a specific piece.  I did that twice, once for a lesson on reeds (“Now that you know I was serious about learning the oboe and not just trying to learn a few tricks, can I come over for a lesson on reeds?”  “Sure.”), which turned out the way he said it would—not much help.  The second time was to play the Schumann “Romances” for him.  He fixed on one passage, made me play it a lot of times—his way of determining that I wasn’t just making a lucky guess--gave me an outrageous compliment (again, you had to be there) and turned me loose.   

Bill died on December 12, 1984, nine days after his sixty-third birthday.  Between his teaching (USC and The Music Academy of The West) and his recordings, and the people who were lucky enough to have worked with him (including a lot of musicians on other instruments) Bill touched a lot of lives.  I think about him every time I take an instrument out of the case.

P.S. William Criss-wise I am twice blessed.  William "Sonny" Criss had a similar effect on my jazz playing.  Please see belairjazz.org/inside-studio-a.html