Today we’d like to introduce you to John Croarkin.
Hi John, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
I am a musician who started playing bass guitar in rock bands as a teenager. I switched to flute when I was 17 after becoming a fan of Jethro Tull. Then I discovered other great jazz flute players such as Roland Kirk, Eric Dolphy, Hubert Laws, Jeremy Steig, Herbie Mann, Hermeto Pascoal and Joe Farrell.
I soon realized that playing only flute kind of limited my aspirations to be a successful improvising musician so I added saxophone to my musical studies.
I am a continuing student of music and have had the opportunity to study with many great teachers in the colleges (Truman University & U.W. Madison) that I attended as well as private studies on my own. Some of my mentors include Jazz bassist Richard Davis, Jazz saxophonist’s Roscoe Mitchell, Berkeley Fudge, Kidd Jordan, and Ronnie Cuber. as well as great Brazilian musicians; pianist/flutist Jovino Santos Neto and composer/bassist Itiberê Zwarg. I have also studied with the great Norwegian classical flutist Gro Sandvik, and modern flutist composer Robert Dick.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Well the life of a musician is usually not as glamorous as it seems especially when you are married and have children and are trying to support the family through playing music.
After moving my family around the U.S. for a few years from Madison Wi. to New Orleans to Colorado while trying to break into the large scale recording scene with the group I was touring with for 7 years I decided I needed to figure out a musical day job so that I could get off of the road and give my wife and kids a more stable home/school life. After the final move we made with the band from Colorado to Wisconsin, I choose Green Bay because rent was cheap and my wife had family there.
I soon realized by moving to the kind of place where musicians normally don’t move to there were actually opportunities for me. I set up shop in my back bedroom with an 8track recorder, a sampling keyboard and my Atari computer and started getting work writing music for industrial films and commercials. It is a long story but eventually over time I partnered up with a fellow musician in town, a fantastic guitarist named Mark Plopper who happened to be doing the same thing as I was and this gradually turned into the flagship recording studio in the area.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
Well I worked as a recording engineer/composer for 20yrs at the studio my partner Mark Plopper and I started.
Honestly after so many years it started to seem like work and in a sense I felt like I had kind of sold my soul to the advertising/ corporate world and I wanted to go back to playing music full time again and write music that I wanted to write.
In 2010 our youngest daughter was living near Seattle getting ready to have her first child and we felt she needed us so I quit my job and my wife and I moved there. I found out very quickly it was very easy to become a starving artist but I have no regrets. In 2015 at the nudge from our other daughter who had been living in Minneapolis, the whole family relocated to the Twin Cities, and I’ve been happly living here and plan to stay put.
It is great to be a part of the vibrant musical community here and I’ve been enjoying being a freelance musician since I arrived. My speciality is playing Brazilian music and living here I’ve been welcomed into the Brazilian music scene playing with several of the groups here like Pavel Jany’s Ticket to Brasil, Daniel William’s Carioca Quarteto, Choro Borealis and others.
I also love to write original music and record. I have released 2 ‘Pifanos on the Misi-Ziibi’ and ‘Rainy Day Pizza Delivery’ albums of my own compositions since arriving here and am currently working on a third. I’m very proud of my record “Rainy Day Pizza Delivery’ Which was recorded remotely during the pandemic. During that time pretty much every musician in the world was out of work and many of us fortunately had home studios. I was able to connect and record with many great musician friends from Seattle, NYC, Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco, Brazil, and Japan to play on my record. Despite being a dangerous time this was a very positive time period musically for me!
We all have a different way of looking at and defining success. How do you define success?
For me success is feeling that I am still progressing as an artist and having the love, support and respect of my family.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.johncroarkin.com
- Instagram: @bassflute2018
- Youtube: @JC-rz1pw
