Bob Sinicrope, Music Department 1973–2024
I recognize that I’m one of the last things standing between you and the party. A perilous position. Not to worry: We were told we only got a minute for each year served (right?) so you should be out of here in time for a late supper.
From the age of five, when he performed in his family’s backyard variety show to raise money for polio research, Bob has lived to serve. In high school in Meriden, Connecticut, Bob led the Key Club and for his efforts was named Key Clubber of the Year. As a math major at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, he was one of only five juniors selected for the school’s honor society and was later elected president of the math honor society. After college, he joined Peace Corps as a volunteer in Montego Bay, Jamaica.
While all of this was going on, Bob was also developing his chops as a musician. In high school, he played with a rock-and-roll band so successful that its gigs began to conflict seriously with class time. As a means of making ends meet for college expenses, Bob played bass in the polka band “Johnny Prytko and the Connecticut High Tones.” (Rumor has it there is a polka version of “Ob-la-di Ob-la-da” out there somewhere. One person who has heard it observed that someone in the band should be arrested for “taking a song across state lines and murdering it.”) During his time in Jamaica, Bob was commissioned to write music for Jamaica’s National Dance Theater Company. His composition “A Question of Balance” premiered there in 1972. That experience so inspired Bob that he enrolled at Berklee College of Music when he returned to the states. While at Berklee, he also worked as a substitute teacher for Boston Public Schools.
So, when Bob came to Milton as a full-time math teacher the following year, 1973–74, he brought not just a way with numbers but a way with the world. Bob challenged Milton to move beyond its exclusive focus on Western European music and include jazz in its curriculum. What began as a single combo with six students grew at one point to 75 students and 10 combos, the top units able to hold their own with very best in the country.
It was a revolutionary, ground-breaking program. The prominent jazz pianist, Aaron Goldberg, Class of 1992, told me that almost all of the top jazz musicians in the U.S. come from 50 dedicated jazz programs; there was no precedent at a “liberal arts” school like Milton Academy for generating the musicianship and swing Bob’s groups achieved. Added Goldberg, “Until I left Milton and became a teacher myself, I didn’t fully appreciate how extraordinary it was. Bob did it his own way without any sort of a model.”
Milton combos have won numerous awards from Downbeat Magazine, MusicFest USA, the Berklee College Music festival. They have played in the White House twice for the Clinton’s and at the inauguration of Deval Patrick ’74 (a former math student of Bob’s); performed for Desmond Tutu and Hugh Masekela; appeared four times on NPR’s “Says You”; and, until the club closed during COVID, were a spring fixture at Ryles Jazz Club in Cambridge. Even more remarkable, Bob produced all of this excellence despite the fact he made it a matter of policy, of philosophy, of a fiercely held belief in the universality and necessity of music, to accept all comers. No high-stakes auditions, no cherry-picking. Bob worked with anyone who came through the door.
At the jazz program’s first performance here in King Theater in 1991, famed South African jazz pianist Abdullah Ibrahim heard the Milton students perform his compositions and immediately declared that Milton had to come to South Africa. Thus was born one of the signature features of the Milton Academy Jazz Program: the South Africa jazz tour. Thirteen times Milton has travelled to South Africa over spring break, amounting to 431 total participants over the years. Each time students brought donations of instruments, charts, and other gifts for schools and music academies in the townships, over $300,000 of materials in total.
This was not musical tourism. Bob wanted students to understand South Africa in all of its complexity and richness. They visited the Apartheid Museum. They toured Robben Island, the prison where Nelson Mandela was incarcerated. They spent a day at a subsistence community where micro-financing was slowly lifting families from mud huts to one-room concrete block homes. They worked closely with the Amy Foundation and were the featured act in a Township Jazz Festival. They played with students at the Music Academy of Gauteng School and in Soweto and experienced what truly exuberant playing feels like. As Chats Devroop, a South African saxophonist and close friend of Bob, shared, “Bob brought Milton to the world and the world to Milton.”
Bob himself has also made a mark outside Milton. Just a few highlights: For almost 40 years, he was a featured instructor for the Jamey Aebersold Summer Jazz Workshops in Chicago, Louisville, and London. He founded two bands, named, fittingly, SoundsGlobal and World Leaders. Bob was the first and only full-time high school teacher in 60 years to be elected president of the international organization Jazz Education Network. In 2007 he was the inaugural recipient of the John LaPorta Jazz Educator of the Year Award. The roster of people Bob has played with and for includes such jazz luminaries as Victor Wooten, Danilo Perez, Joe Lovano, Babatunde Olatunji, and many more. In the past year his book Pathways Towards Greatness— Walking Bass Line Construction—F Blues hit the shelves and has already received a great deal of critical and commercial attention. His SmartMusic interactive/online F Blues improv books have been used in 63 countries. For Kevin Chaplin, managing director of the Amy Foundation, “Bob’s impact goes deep. He has brought so much joy to thousands of lives, has brought so many people together. He is one of the most remarkable human beings I know.”
That sense of a larger social purpose has suffused all that Bob has done. Josh Nash ’94, parent of Jonah ’24, echoes that sentiment, pointing to the life lessons learned as Bob’s true legacy. He remembers vividly the day that Bob stopped class and asked him, “Are you here?” Says Josh, “This is where Bob was decades ahead of his time. He was teaching me what it means to be present, to show up fully. He saw me for who I was and didn’t give up on me. ‘Own the good, own the bad, figure out what you can improve.’ Bob was right on so many things, out-there, metaphysical stuff.”
For years, having gank was the highest praise Bob could bestow. Onomatopoeia for the sound a bass string makes when you really dig into a groove, gank meant you were fully into the music, into the moment; the jazz equivalent of flow, presence. It encapsulated the truest, fullest form of showing up.
To Aaron Goldberg, “if you boiled it all down, simplicity was the key. Be honest; play it if you can hear it. It’s a kind of integrity, the difference between real expression and B.S.” Aaron remembers first playing for Bob. “He asked me to play a chord. I asked ‘What do you mean by chord?’ He asked me to play something I knew so I played some Rachmaninoff. ‘That’s a chord,’ he said, ‘A bunch of notes together.’ That’s when I began to learn the beautiful architecture of music and the powerful things that can happen when notes and people come together. Togetherness is what makes a group. What your peers are playing is more important than what you’re playing. It’s the roots of community, of democracy. And the end result is beauty.”
There have been many wonderful and important collaborators in Bob’s long career but none so wonderful and important as his wife Frances. Bob met her, fittingly, in a spiritual workshop. They were married in the old trustees room in Straus in 2002 and Frances has been a fixture in Bob’s and, in no small measure, Milton’s life ever since. A can-do person of the first order (among many things, she once re-shingled her house single-handedly), Frances has been a source of interstitial wizardry: serving as graphic designer of ads for the Nesto Gallery; designing posters for the jazz ensembles many concerts and tours; taking countless pictures of those concerts and tours. Every bit the chronicler that Bob is, Frances has ensured that the doings of Milton jazz are securely and fully fixed in posterity. Thank you, Frances!
There has been another constant in Bob’s life. Every person I interviewed noted at some point Bob’s love of bad jokes, particularly his feeling that, if you can tell a bad joke once, why not tell it twice? One interviewee reported “the unexpected and delightful connection” he felt at this spring’s 50th jazz celebration when, as Bob was telling one of those chestnuts, he saw all past and present Milton jazzites exchanging sideways glances and mouthing the punch line right along with Bob (Even here Bob promotes togetherness)! As some of you may know, I am not exactly immune to the charms of a bad joke myself, but I bow now to your greatness, Bob.
It feels entirely right that the Milton Paper tribute to Bob was entitled “The Man Who Loves.” And not only because Bob taught a course on love during Milton’s spring project period for three years. William Cronon, in “Only Connect…,” his seminal essay on the makings of a truly educated person, lists ten non-negotiable traits, from the ability to listen and hear to the ability to get things done to the insistence on rigor not for its own sake but as the way to truth. The final and most essential quality is the ability to connect:
A liberal education is about gaining the power and the wisdom, the generosity and the freedom to connect. It is about exercising our freedom in such a way as to make a difference in the world and make a difference for more than just ourselves…(It) nurtures human freedom in the service of human community, which is to say that in the end it celebrates love.
In his senior spring, Sam Dunn ’22 spent an afternoon ostensibly helping Bob organize his classroom. Sam marveled at how meticulously Bob had recorded and sorted every single Milton performance, every single chart, CD, and DVD (1,400 charts and books, 2,000 CDs, and 100 DVDs in case you were wondering) and soon realized Bob didn’t really need his help. “His memory is encyclopedic!” At one point, Bob put on Abdullah Ibrahim’s “Mountain” and the two of them listened to all 40 minutes of the recording in silence. “By the end of the third song I was tearing up; he was, too. I realized that he just wanted to spend time together before I left Milton. It was a sharing of humanity. That is what will stick with me: the care, the love. He goes beyond because he feels that’s what we deserve. He made me completely rethink the student/teacher relationship.” Concluding, Sam mused “Sini defines a life well-loved. He is such a deeply spiritual man, spreading wisdom, spreading love.”
One parent, Suzanne Magaziner, who saw three children go through the jazz program and who, as a result, was herself part of three different tours to South Africa, remembers Bob insisting that everyone learn and use the Zulu greeting sawubona: “I see you.” Can there be a more powerful way to recognize someone else? It speaks to that core principle of teaching and community—meet people where they are; it speaks to connection, to love.
So, Bob, sawubona, we see you, especially today. Thank you for 51 years of keeping us in tune with the world, with ourselves, with each other. You have touched so many people with your music and, even more powerfully, with your heart. Thank you.
Rod Skinner ’72
Former Dean of College Counseling