GETTING INTO A MUSICAL NEW YORK STATE OF MIND

When he was 15 or 16 and growing up in Cape Girardeau, keyboardist Bill Gerhardt hung around with older musicians like guitarist Steve Pirtle and drummer Greg Shivelbine. He'd find himself jamming at late-night joints across the river he was much too young to get in. "I always went in the back door," Gerhardt says.

Leaving Cape Girardeau in the early 1980s, he attended the highly regarded jazz school North Texas State University and played with show bands in the West, the Caribbean and Atlantic City before settling in Charlotte, N.C., to play jazz festivals and clubs for a period. He also lived and performed in Amsterdam for four years before relocating to New York City earlier this year. "I've never really had a plan as far as, I'm going to go somewhere," he said in a phone interview from New York City. "I just sort of followed what happened with good musicians leading the way. I always tried to play with better and better musicians."Gerhardt and his Cotangent Jazz Quartet will perform Saturday at the Osage Community Center in a benefit for the arts programs in the Cape Girardeau schools. The concert, called "An Evening Among Friends," will be presented at 6:30 p.m. Tickets are $20 each and are available at Shivelbine's music store and at the door.

Music was in the Gerhardt house as he was growing up. His father, Bill, played piano and listened to jazz records. His uncle, the late Leonard Clayton, was a drummer. Gerhardt's brother, Kermit, also was a drummer, in a band called the Blue Rhythm Boys. "I knew I wanted to play music since I was a little kid," he says. "I used to have premonitions about it."Gerhardt graduated from Cape Central High School in 1980. He says his early piano teacher, Mary Travis, made playing the piano fun. Then came other teachers: St. Louis pianist Herb Drury and Cape Central band director Bill Ewing, the latter now deceased.

One of the first songs Gerhardt wrote for his former band Faction was titled "Mr. Ewing." "He had that wonderful sense of calmness," he recalls. "I appreciated his relaxed approach to teaching music to young kids."Once he decided to live in Charlotte, Gerhardt's bands became progressively more jazz oriented. "It was my first opportunity to write and have a group of guys playing the music once a week," he says. "It was a workshop period."Finding steady work was the hard part. When a friend invited him to visit Amsterdam, Gerhardt went for three months and stayed four years.

In Amsterdam, he benefited from an ironic truth discovered by many American jazz musicians. "After I moved to Europe I started being able to work because I was from someplace else," he said. Gerhardt puts the members of the Cotangent Jazz Quartet at the top of his list of good musicians he has worked with. Parisian bassist Francois Moutin and drummer Tim Horner are "probably some of the best musicians in the world," he says. The band is completed by Gerhardt and New York City saxophonist Marc Mommaas.

Between them, they have been part of some 30 recordings.

Though some of the members have played together before, Cotangent is a relatively new group that plans to record later in the winter. Some CDs of past work will be for sale at the concert.

The real reason he came from Amsterdam to New York was to record a CD backing up saxophonist Greg Marvin. Others appearing on the CD are drummer Billy Higgins, bassist George Mraz and trumpet player Tom Harrell. Higgins, a former member of Ornette Coleman's group, is one of the most recorded drummers in jazz. Harrell toured with the Stan Kenton and Woody Herman bands and with Horace Silver.

Gerhardt had the opportunity to take over his sister's apartment for awhile and decided to stay.

Getting established in the city that never sleeps isn't a simple thing. He does computer graphics and consulting work on the side. His steady gig in New York City is at the Cucina Fella Fontana, an Italian restaurant with live music in the bar upstairs. "I'm there every Sunday," he says. "No cover."