An Evening with John Strickland

So I’m sipping on a vodka tonic and contemplating starting dinner when I get a call from the drummer for The Bodhi Coffel, the roots-and-blues band I’m in. He says that in the last hour, it’s come to his attention that there is an opening-night reception for a show by our mutual friend, painter John Strickland. It’s going to be held in one of those collective-workspace-type facilities, this one on the north side of our city.

I’m immediately game. Dave, the drummer, picks me up about twenty minutes later.

“Painter John Strickland” was a necessary characterization to get the first paragraph dealt with, but let me tell you about John Strickland.

His main day gig throughout his life was being a high school English teacher. For many years, he plied that trade at Broad Ripple High School in Indianapolis. One of his students there was John Hiatt, who, as we know, went on to be a beloved singer-songwriter. It was Strickland who mentored the young Hiatt, telling him to remove all doubt as to what he should do with his life and focus on what he knew his calling to be.

Later, Strickland went on to teach at Franklin High School, in a college town about twenty miles south of Indianapolis. He got a house in the woods of south-central Indiana, which is where I first met him.

John is also a world-class jazz bassist. I can vouch for that, as I’ve jammed with him, but I’m jumping ahead. I met him in the course of working on the article that got my magazine-writing career going. It was in the early 1990s. It was on Indianapolis’s jazz legacy. John figures into that story in many interesting ways.

While we conversed for that piece, he told me a story I’ve never forgotten.

He was personal friends with David Baker, the Indy native who came out of the club scene along Indiana Avenue (as did Wes Montgomery, Freddie Hubbard, J.J. Johnson and many others). Baker went on to found the jazz studies program at what is now the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University. Strickland had been taking private cello lessons from Baker and they struck up a friendship.

One night in 1965, they went to see John Coltrane at the Pink Poodle on Meridian Street in Indy. The crowd was mostly middle-class black people, who expected to hear standards, ballads and the early modal-yet-melodic forays of Coltrane’s solo-career beginnings. Coltrane apparently got on stage and started in with that late-period cosmic stuff, all the honking and wailing, and the crowd booed him.

John Strickland happened to run into Coltrane wandering around Monument Circle in downtown Indy the following morning and approached him. He said something to the effect that he was sorry he’d been received the way he had the previous night. Coltrane mumbled something about having eaten nothing but bananas for the previous month.

Our conversation

I’ve stayed in touch with Strickland over the years, certainly not with the regularity I should have, but it is what it is. My drummer buddy has been in more frequent contact, having bought several of Strickland’s paintings. My drummer’s buddy’s wife is an orthopedic nurse, and she worked for many years with a now-retired orthopedic surgeon, who says that Strickland’s brother, also an orthopedic surgeon, was one of his mentors. 

The turnout at the reception for this latest art show was great. I ran into many friends with whom it was a delight to catch up.

There was quite a group of people wanting to talk to John, so I used my face time with him judiciously. We’d both gone to Wabash College, in Crawfordsville, Indiana, and discovered that we’d both taken English courses from the great Bert Stern. (I particularly recall a William Blake symposium that met in the evenings at Bert’s home, and how each class session commenced with a plate of his wife’s marvelous cookies.)

Along with being a painter, jazz bassist, English teacher and poet, John was also a body builder. There is a story that goes around about how he one time dealt with an obstreperous student by lifting the student’s desk, student and all, and carrying it out into the hall.

His desk-hoisting days are surely over, but John Strickland is as prolific as ever when it comes to painting. His current show displays the breadth of his approach to visual art, ranging from geometrical studies to abstracts that juxtapose urban busyness with the airy space of infinite sky to evocative portraits.  

I got back home and commenced dinner preparations. Not only was my heart full for having had yet another encounter with this singularly great human being, but I was reminded once again that such gems of humanity are all around us if we’ll but take the time to look.