I haven’t been bowling in many, many years, but today I went Bolling, Claude that is, the famous French pianist, composer, arranger and conductor, a couple of whose compositions made up the program presented by the Richard Sladek Trio (plus one).

Bolling’s jazz compositions have been on my radar for a while but I haven’t worked up the nerve to try to learn one of them after listening to his recordings. My fingers don’t function on that level.

Listening to Sladek at the piano seemed like a much better idea. And it paid a psychic dividend of a sort. In reading his bio in the program, I first was struck by the fact that, among his past gigs, he had been a staff accompanist for the Second City Touring Company. My kind of guy.

Reading further, skipping over all his other credits, something else caught my eye. He’d been a musical composer/conductor for 16 years with the theater troupe Wavelength. I was there when Wavelength was born, having taken improv classes with its founder, Jim Winter, with whom, and two others (one of them being Paul Raci, the Academy Award-nominated actor I wrote about two years ago), I actually sang the Banana Boat song on the Second City stage during a skit (as previously reported), which goes a long way toward explaining why I wasn’t invited to join the new group being formed at that time.

If I had only hit one or two notes correctly, who knows. But things turned out pretty well, so I was satisfied with introducing myself to Sladek after the performance and sending my regards to Jim, my long-ago friend from another life.