The problem with telling the story of Derek Geary is deciding where to begin. Do you start with his hockey skills or his genius at the piano. Or focus on how he had to choose between the two when he had the rest of his life waiting for him, if only he could figure out what the “rest” part was supposed to be?
“That’s part of my story,” he said. “I’ve always been torn by trying to do too much.”
Six years ago, Geary fled the National Hockey League’s Boston Bruins’ training camp because he couldn’t abandon his passion for the piano. He moved to Austin in 1996, released his first CD, “Wire,” late last year and is working in a liquor store so he can scrape together money to feed his interest in composing and performing.
Geary, 30, first strapped on hockey skates at age 5, a common practice in his hometown of Gloucester, Mass. “You knew he was good at hockey right from day one,” said Steven Geary, his father.
Piano lessons followed a year or two later. Geary immediately bonded with the instrument, practicing diligently on classical pieces even as he was dreaming up his own. “I wasn’t some child prodigy genius, but I got into it,” Geary said.
When he was 10, Geary’s time investment with the piano paid off. “One day I heard him playing a song which didn’t sound anything like the songs the teacher had given him and I asked him where it came from and he said, `Oh, I just made it up,”‘ his father said. “I was amazed and it sort of took off from there.”
This first composition, “Avalanche,” inspired more than 40 others. Geary also began working with a new teacher, John Heiss, to concentrate on writing music. “I’ve worked with thousands of musicians, and he was special even when he was 12,” Heiss said. “He had a feeling for the poetry of what he did. He used the piano as an instrument for painting, making texture, making mood scenarios. In five seconds I went, `Mmm, this is a kid who’s got something.”‘
Geary’s natural gifts extended to the ice rink, and he divided his time between gliding on skates and gliding his fingers over the keys, seamlessly linking these interests.
“He had grace on the ice,” Heiss said. “When he was skating up to make a goal, he looked like a pianist about to play a beautiful symphony. He’s very musical in his hockey and he’s very graceful in his music.”
Even so, Geary exceeded expectations when he checked the newspaper on the day of his graduation from Gloucester High in 1988 and saw he had been drafted by the Bruins in the sixth round. Surprise? Shock? Euphoria? Geary wasn’t sure how to feel, so he spent a year at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., trying to figure it out. Five more years in college, first at Boston University and then Dartmouth, were filled with hockey and music, but Geary also discovered another passion, film, which eventually became his major.
And then he had to choose.
“I had managed to do all three at a pretty high level, and it was hard to just choose one because you’re shutting the door on the other two,” Geary said. “The logic was that this was my time to make it really happen in hockey.”
Geary moved back to Boston and started playing hockey intensely, but just three days into the Bruins’ training camp, something stirred him into an action different from pounding players on the ice. “I had this current of feeling that maybe I wasn’t committed to hockey,” Geary said. “I just felt like I couldn’t do it. My heart was not into it. I just didn’t want it enough.”
The note was short. All it said was that he had decided to quit, and it was the only thing Geary left behind when he departed suddenly from the training camp. Phil Muller, one of Geary’s closest friends, was with Geary both on the day he was drafted by the Bruins, and the day he chose to give it all up. “He felt relieved,” Muller said. “I think he was ready to say, `OK, I gave it a shot and now I’m going to start on music.”‘
Even today, Geary is trying to work out for himself what that means. “You know, it’s this whole thing about living in the past,” Geary said. “When I go for runs, I daydream about the games I played in and goals I should have scored. I see a lot of people I played with making millions of dollars in the NHL as I’m struggling to pay rent, working in a liquor store.”
While Geary’s music is a hybrid of jazz and classical, the tracks on his CD “Wire” settle, simply, into a realm of their own. “Derek is not as avant garde as some, but by no means is he imitative or routine,” Heiss said. “He works in what I might call a somewhat conservative way, but with tremendous fantasy and the kind of heart that ought to someday win him a large audience. I think Derek is someone who’s yet to be discovered, really.”
Not willing to sit still waiting for fame, Geary is working to make his music available to the Austin crowd. His CD can be found everywhere, and he gives concerts as frequently as he can afford. But he admits his work is not easy. “I definitely don’t know where all this is headed,” he said. “I’ve been kind of discouraged just trying to make a living with this, trying to figure out how to do what I want to do. It’s the human struggle. With me, it’s a blank piece of paper and an empty room and an instrument. Are you going to sweat it out and make it happen?”
These periods of despondency about where his life is headed are as natural to Geary as scoring a goal or creating a composition.
“He’s one of the most focused people I know in everything, especially his music,” Geary’s girlfriend, Kristen Woolf, said. “That goes along with it, the focus and determination, the ups and the downs.”
But what exactly does Geary want? Does he know now? He thinks of going back to graduate school. He’s considered returning to his passion for film and combining this with music by writing film scores. Questions about the future weigh on Geary almost as much as memories of his past. “Where do you dedicate your energy?” he said. “Do you focus on solo piano and try to take that to a whole new place, or do you expand your sound? I feel like you can spend your whole life discovering the possibilities of the piano, but the whole universe is there and I still want to explore.”
