A free jazz concert this Sunday night in Bettendorf will not only be special for anyone who attends, but it’s extra meaningful for its headliner, pianist Michael Wolff.

The 71-year-old California native — performing at 6:45 p.m. at Rivermont Collegiate at the Polyrhythms Bill Bell Jazz & Heritage Festival — studied jazz piano with Bill Bell when he was in high school in Berkeley, Calif. Bell (1936-2017) was an East Moline native and Wolff has never played in the Quad Cities before.

“When I was in college at UC-Berkeley, he was the head of the Alameda Junior College band, and I went and I played in that band because he needed a piano player,’ Wolff recalled in a Wednesday interview with Local 4. “He’s the guy that really turned me on to Cannonball Adderley (the jazz saxophonist). But we stayed friends. I mean, he was friends with my family, you know, so. it was really important and he came and heard me just a couple of years before he died.”

He said Bell was a true mentor to him.

“He was a great musician and great teacher,” Wolff said. “What I really loved was when he would play and I could just watch him play and check out that magic.”

He had never heard of the Bill Bell festival (now in its ninth year), but as soon as Polyrhythms director Nate Lawrence asked him to play, he was in. Wolff was among the many shocked by Lawrence’s sudden death at 80 on Tuesday, Aug. 15.

“When Nate told me it was Bill, I love that guy so much and the fact that Nate was dedicating it to him, he knew Bill growing up and I just thought, wow,” Wolff said.

Even though Wolff has a regular trio, Lawrence recommended other top-notch players for him to perform with — Saul Lubaroff, saxophone; Frank Russell, bass, and Mike Clark, drums.

“These days, I can send out all of my charts by e-mail and I can tell them what to listen to on Spotify. It’s way easier,” Wolff said. “So we’ll have one rehearsal and they already have all the material and hopefully they’re looking at it and we’ll be great on the gig.”

“It’s not a challenge at all. I do it all the time,” he said. “These are guys I know and I know they’re professional and they’re really good. Having Mike Clark, he and I’ve been playing together since I was a teenager. He’s a little older. We have a band and we just played together this last weekend in San Francisco.”

Playing with a constellation of stars

Raised in Memphis, New Orleans and Northern California, Wolff attended college in Berkeley and L.A. but left early to become a professional musician, joining Latin-jazz great Cal Tjader’s band in the early ’70s.

He spent the next two decades gigging and recording with a veritable hall of fame, from Tjader to Cannonball Adderley, Tom Harrell, Sonny Rollins, Nancy Wilson and many others, according to his bio. In 1993, Wolff made his leader debut with a self-titled release on Columbia, and he has since put out well over a dozen albums touting A-list players like Freddie Hubbard, Sheila E and Terri Lyne Carrington.

During the mid-’90s, the rhythm section of Christian McBride and Tony Williams anchored Wolff’s records Jumpstart! and 2 AM. Wolff & Clark Expedition, the pianist’s still-active collaboration with drummer Mike Clark, has released two collections of delightfully funky 21st-century hard bop since 2013.

Wolff became a part of pop culture in 1989, when he began a five-year tenure as the musical director of the lively house band on Arsenio Hall’s groundbreaking late-night talk show. (Yes, that was Wolff accompanying saxophonist and Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton in 1992, and backing the likes of Ray Charles, B.B. King, Patti LaBelle, Whitney Houston, Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, Al Green, James Brown, Jerry Lee Lewis and Warren Zevon.)

Wolff got to live out his dream, playing alongside many idols.

“I loved Sonny Rollins. I love Nancy Wilson. You know, all those gigs were great,” he said this week. “On our show, I would play with them for one night. One of my best friends I got out of that was Warren Zevon. We were very, very close. He came on and played one day and I read a lot about him. And it was music. We both were readers, you know, so we plotted over books and that was fantastic.

“But then getting to play with Wayne Shorter and Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock, that was magic, super magic,” Wolff said. “And becoming friends with all those guys.”

Arsenio Hall loved music and all styles of music, making his show a true joy.

“Every time we went on to do the show, it was really exciting, really a party,” Wolff said. “It was hard work for me to get all the music together sometimes; sometimes it wasn’t. But, if an act was coming, I’d have to write out their music and for the band or whatever.

“It really changed my life. I met my wife there. She was a guest,” he said of actress Polly Draper (who became famous on the series “thirtysomething”). “You made lifelong friends. and, you know, that’s kind of what I’m about at this point — getting to play Sunday with Mike Clark who I’ve known and played with forever and who I know. And we’re both connected because we have Tourette’s syndrome and I used to be the chairman of the board of the association. Then we started playing together there on these conventions.”

From Tourette’s to cancer

Wolff has overcome Tourette’s and a rare cancer, as well as COVID shutdowns, to triumph in his storied career.

Wolff said his Tourette’s (which didn’t include so much verbal outbursts as physical tics) got worse as an adult, and while a child he didn’t know what was wrong with him, but he found peace at the piano.

“I didn’t know if there was something emotionally wrong with me or soulfully all wrong with me,” he said. “I just didn’t know; it was kind of a dichotomy between that and music. So what I loved was music. It was my savior.”

“I think it’s energy and so I play the piano but my energy is, it’s not intellectual for me. It’s very emotional and I feel the music in my solar plexus,” Wolff said. “I feel it very tactile in my hands and that’s how I learned to play. Just sitting at the piano and hearing records and hearing music and then my dad had a great jazz collection. He loved jazz and I would just try to imitate it.

“I wasn’t even that great at it. I would just create my own things, you know, and I felt good doing it. I just felt soothed,” he recalled.

“That focus is really great for me. And I’ve always felt that,” Wolff said. “When I was a teenager playing the piano, it was just magical to me.”

Wolff was first diagnosed with cancer about nine years ago, initially thought to be a kind of lymphoma, but then was found out he had a super rare type of sarcoma that only about 300 people were known to have had, and there was no treatment.

“Then I had a genius doctor,” he said, noting he was given a pill for something else that attacked his cancer.

“It gave me a lot of wisdom; it was a hell of an experience, and the fact that I survived it made me really look at life differently,” Wolff said, adding he got back to performing in 2019.

“I was the guinea pig,” he said. “I asked my doctor, what’s the research on this? He said you’re the research. So at the end, he wrote a big article on it for the New England Journal of Medicine and another drug company came in because my drug was for another cancer, it’s hard to get the insurance to go for it.

“Another drug company came in and created a drug for it. And now when I asked in the last year or so I asked the doctor, now what’s it like when people come in with my disease, what percentage can you treat? He goes, ‘I cure 100% now because of your case,'” Wolff recalled. “So no matter what I do the rest of my life, that collaboration with that doctor did that.”

“My view of life, art and music has changed, developed, matured, widened and focused simultaneously,” he said, noting he continued to practice and compose diligently throughout his fight. “I savor every day, every view, every person I love and every note I can play and hear.”

Writing his life story

The 2020 COVID lockdown gave the pianist/composer/bandleader time to set down his eventful life story. “On That Note: A Memoir of Jazz, Tics and Survival” was published in fall 2022. It’s described as more than a memoir.

“It is like a Jazz score with words, taking the reader on the wild journey of Wolff’s singular life,” his website says. “It is a life driven by a passion for music and a passion for being alive. Sometimes hilarious and sometimes harrowing, Wolff’s story instantly sweeps us up with it and charms us with a unique voice.”

Celebrity friends delivered raves:

“Michael Wolff may have been the first true jazz genius I met in my career. I got to know him on tour with the great Nancy Wilson. Michael helped to teach this young, very green Cleveland comic, the show-business ropes! He was as bright and savvy a man as he was a musician! I’m so very glad he wrote this book because I want the world to know this unique musician, who stood by my side through every night of The Arsenio Hall Show. The story of his life has been a wild, amazing, and emotional ride!”

— Arsenio Hall 

“When I was reading it, I felt like I was right next to him. Jazz is mysterious to many of us, but to Mike, it’s like eating: Elemental, spicy, easy.  From a granular and hilarious remembrance of misspent youth in Mississippi, to a very original tale of making it in New York City—unpaid New Year’s Eve gig in a mausoleum, while living inside a shoebox–this book is a profound act of love and comedy in the name of Count Basie, Monk, Miles Davis, assorted underworld types and family. Funny as hell and riveting to the end.”

— Holly Hunter

“In his rare, guileless and amazingly symphonic memoir, Mr. Wolff cracks open his soul, and deftly melds one kind of keyboard (QWERTY) with another (piano) . . . treating us to his singularly cool, masterfully improvisational style.  The music/the voice is one of pure jazz — the message is one of hope, healing and survival.”

— Tony Shalhoub 

Wolff said Wednesday writing the book was much harder than writing and playing music.

“Writing the book was hard. It was just demanding,” he said. “I started writing it and then I got really sick with cancer. And so I was sick for about four years and I had to interrupt that and then I got back to it.”

Treasuring live concerts

With everything he’s been through, Wolff is especially treasuring being back on tour, including Europe this past spring.

“I feel like it’s very enriching and I hope by sharing my music with people that come to hear it or listen to the records that it’s saying something to them,” he said. “It’s just a feeling and I like it when they get something out of it. I can tell when the audience is with it, you know, and I love to do it.”

Audiences are happy to be back going to concerts and musicians like Wolff love playing for them.

“People right now have an appreciation now for live music. It’s not as much taken for granted,” he said.

The Sunday lineup of free jazz — at Becherer Hall Auditorium, Rivermont Collegiate, 1821 Sunset Drive, Bettendorf — is:

• 3:30 – 4:15 p.m.: Guitar & Trumpet Duo with Edgar Crockett (trumpet) and Steve Grismore (guitar)
• 5 – 6 p.m.: James Culver, drums; Corey Kendrick, piano, and Andy Crawford, bass.
• 6:45 – 8 p.m.: Michael Wolff Quartet, with Saul Lubaroff (saxophone), Frank Russell (bass), and Mike Clark (drums).

For a complete lineup of this weekend’s festival, visit its Facebook page HERE.