What does formal training in engineering bring to music? Talk to Forrest Buchtel, Jr., a musician who built experimental equipment for Edward Teller, and other Nobel Laureates doing high energy physics at UC Berkeley; a musician who designed chemical and medical equipment for Varian Associates; and a musician who received what he thought was a prank call from Woody Herman asking to join his band during the start up of Plasmatics, a plasma physics company, of which Buchtel was a cofounder, for just a temporary gig. Ten years later and after world tours as lead trumpet and featured soloist with Woody Herman, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Teo Macero, Gunther Schuller, Blood Sweat and Tears, Malo, and Jaco Pastorius, Buchtel, the musician came back to Berkeley and engineering. Mr. Buchtel went on to design the first and only megamp switch. Forrest believes that music and technology can go hand in hand where one hand washes the other. Finally, in this new millennia music and technology today are being pushed together thanks to advancements in computer technology applications to music. Today, it is Forrest's goal to bring his unique perspective to flexible musicians who wish to grow by thinking a little outside the box. Toward that end, Forrest has teamed up with Gary Anderson and Cynthia Daniels in an attempt to combine musical composition with today's recording technology. It is Forrest's hope that this combined teamwork will result in a musical product that can cross the full spectrum of music pedagogy: graded from 1 to 10. It is hoped that there will be music that is easy enough for young players to play without hurting themselves trying to hit double high C, and rich enough that mature musicians can find music worthy of their attention. Forrest believes that a fresh approach is needed to present to younger players with jazz-influenced music which is up-to-date, but which can be played without the need to first go through ten difficult books of chords and "approved" scales to play through those same chords. It is important and Forrest's goal to create music which is attractive to students and teachers alike so that all participants can feeltheURGE

His father was notable composer and music educator, Forrest Buchtel Sr., who taught at the VanderCook College of Music in Chicago. His mother played viola with theWoman’s Symphony of Chicago. His sisters were also accomplished musicians who played with various symphonies across the United States. So little wonder that Forrest Buchtel Jr. went into…mechanical engineering? “I went into engineering largely at the suggestion of my parents,” Buchtel said.“They thought I’d be a terrible musician because I didn’t really read music.” Instead, Buchtel was gifted at playing by ear, a gift that had little value to a classical musician.“Had I grown up in a jazz family,” he said, “people would have gone stark nuts that I could play anything I heard. ”Engineering seemed like a good alterna-tive for someone who’d excelled in physics and math in high school, and after complet-ing his BS in mechanical engineering in1960, Buchtel landed a position at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory atthe University of California, Berkeley. For someone who describes music as his “life’s blood” and “source of energy,” and who had probably spent as much time playing jazz as taking engineering classes during college,the transition to the working world of the engineer was difficult.“The first years were tough,” Buchtel said. “I was making a contribution, but I moved much more slowly than other engineers. But I ended up doing some really good work.”That’s a characteristically self-effacingway of putting things, says internationally renowned chemist and Berkeley Lab colleague Dr. Leo Brewer. “Buchtel was smart and quick on the uptake. He was so good, he’d be loaned among research groups, and he worked for many demanding people,”Brewer said. Among them were Nobel Prize-winning physicists Emilio Segré and Owen Chamberlain, discoverers of the antiproton for whom Buchtel built hydrogen target systems for cyclotrons, and Nobel Prize-winning chemist William Giauque, who discovered adiabatic demagnetization as a means to reach very low temperatures. In Giauque’sLow Temperature Laboratory, Buchtel designed and built test equipment for calori-metric research at 10-5degree Kelvin.In 1966, Buchtel joined Varian, Inc.,as the design engineer on a project to develop a gas chromatograph. He and project manager Lou Rigali went on to found Plasmatics, which made low-tem-perature ashing equipment. ENGINEER BY DAY,MUSICIAN BY NIGHT While working as a full-time engineer,Buchtel also was playing his trumpet inclubs around the Bay Area. He refers to it asa “wondrous” time. “At the end of the week,I’d had quite enough of discipline and prob-lems and schedules and budgets, and on Friday night, I was swinging again. Then on Monday morning, I’d go back to where logic prevailed,” he said. “I got a great deal of solace and security from that.”In 1970, his life took a major turn when he was invited to join Woody Herman’s band as lead trumpet player. One gig led toanother and over the next dozen or so years, Buchtel was lead trumpet and featured jazz soloist with Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Elvis, Malo, Jaco Pastorius and Blood,Sweat and Tears, among others. He also continued to take on engineering jobs, working with the Space Science Lab atBerkeley and Physics International. In themid-1980s, Buchtel returned to Illinois to take care of his ailing father, who’d been given three months to live. With a changeof diet and the care and attention of his son, he lived almost ten years. When hisfather died in 1996 at the age of 97, Buchtel decided to follow through on an idea he’d had 20 years earlier: to team upwith Gary Anderson, former musical direc-tor for the Woody Herman band, and record a CD. They are now putting the fin-ishing touches on “New York Confidential”with Buchtel’s group Urge, which includesan all-star lineup (to hear cuts from theCD, visit www.feeltheurge.com).Asked to describe himself as a musicianand Buchtel takes a long pause before say-ing, “For just a short while, I may have been one of the best lead trumpet players around. And everywhere I showed up, someone would just want to trounce me because I had a reputation for being so strong. ” When he was younger, he wanted to take on all comers, to be king of the hill, to be the Ferrari of trumpet players. Now,he’s content to be more like a classic RollsRoyce, which, he says, “goes around corners okay, not as fast as a Ferrari, but man, that’s a smooth ride!” He takes pride in both his engineering and musical accomplishments. As an engi-neer, he was always happy to be where the rubber meets the road, he says, and to be one of the people who made the difference between an idea working and not working. As a musician, he’s played with some of the best and continues to take pleasure in per-forming. “I’m very satisfied,” he said.“That’s the best way I can explain it. And I’m happy to share that satisfaction with other people.”14 ENGINEERING A GOOD TUNE