A Family House of Music

To walk into the 23-room, circa 1910 home of Rocco and Denise Patierno in South Orange, N. J., (pop. 16,964) is to step into a world where the air is alive with music. Bass guitars, keyboards, banjos, an accordion, a trombone, and an old mandolin lie around the living room, where a well-used drum set seems to cast an all-seeing eye on this musical family.

Danny, 16, strums a guitar nonchalantly, while brothers Charlie, 18, and Michael, 15, wander through their own musical explorations. Sister Amy, 14, stays away from instrumentation for her natural talents as a singer, and Bryan, 10, is learning the tenor sax. They come by their talents naturally, born into music.

“I was the only one in my family who had any interest, talent, or motivation for music,” father Rocco says of his childhood with his own four siblings in nearby Passaic. In the fifth-grade, he picked up a trombone and he’s been pumping the slide ever since.

Mother Denise grew up in this house, where she still cooks on the original stove. Being Irish and the daughter (one of seven children) of a 1940s big band singer, there had to be music. Everyone sang. She gravitated to the guitar, banjo, and accordion—and to the professional stage, joining a 1930s, old-time jazz band, where she met Rocco.

Love of music—and perhaps because they both came from small towns—had something to do with their getting together. Charlie, Danny, Michael, and Amy followed in quick succession. They took a break of four years before adding Bryan to the talented mix.

“It was sort of our mission to pass this down,” Denise says of the musical skills and creative juices that permeate the house.

Charlie climbed on a piano stool to practice for the first time when he was only 4 and sat down behind a drum set in the fourth-grade. Danny and Michael took to the guitar. Amy began singing and dancing in the fourth-grade and enjoyed a brief flirtation with the flute—and, most recently, Bryan climbed into the drummer’s seat with a trio of his fourth-grade schoolmates for a musical review. “I was pretty bad at it,” he says ruefully.

Rocco has worked in the Wayne, N.J., school system since 1972, “In every capacity you can think of,” while Denise specializes in musical education for preschoolers. They both play weekly gigs with Hambone Kelly’s Great Nostalgia Band, and Denise sings with a women’s barbershop quartet. Charlie led his two brothers into the Columbia High School drum line, with Amy joining the color guard. They performed in the Scholastic Marching Bands Championships in Williamsburg, Va., last spring.

“Even if I don’t go out of my way, music will always be a part of my life,” says Danny, who has added the harmonica to his pursuits. The family’s range of interests is matched by the diversity of their overlapping talents, and none of them have any idea where music will take them. “I think they enjoy the idea that they’ve not as yet defined themselves,” Rocco says proudly of his musical brood.

Charlie and Danny have formed their own band, which they define as “experimental,” writing their own music and lyrics. Charlie hopes to go on to the University of the Arts multimedia program in Philadelphia, leaning toward writing and scoring, with a view of perhaps working in film. “I listen to every kind of music,” he says. “All of it influences what I write. ”

Michael wrote, directed, edited, and scored a three-minute short for a school film program. He and Amy are in the cast of the school play; Danny is an assistant director, while Charlie is in the orchestra pit on the drums.

And as they move through high school to that day when they graduate, Bryan—the drums behind him—has already stepped up to the tenor sax, sailing on those waves of music that his siblings navigated so well.

Freelance writer Warren D. Jorgensen is a frequent contributor to American Profile.

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