Title: Rain Drop Keep Falling

Date: June 22, 2026

By: Docker Dunkenstein

By the time I was entering middle school I was taught to play the piano.  There, was a piano in our formal living room from the time I can remember.  My mother played a little, she could read music, but she wasn’t very skilled and didn’t have the required musical flow.  This didn’t stop her from demanding that I and my two sisters learn to play the piano.  She sent us for weekly paid lesson to the resident instructor, an elder retiree who held lessons in her beautiful well kept immaculate home, Mrs. Piano teacher.

Once a year, Mrs. Piano teacher rented the school auditorium  for a display of her student’s capabilities and music abilities.  I played several times in the yearly event.  However, my demanding teacher — who would on occasion, swat my fingers with her ruler during lessons for mistakes made in note reading and playing bad sounding notes — and I never seemed to see eye-to-eye on how the music should be played.

She would tell me I was wasting my talent and not playing in the ‘classical’ manner by which she thought it had to be done, and she demanded that I did it her way.  For years, I endured her and subjected myself to her classic teachings.

I liked to ‘Jazz’ the music up, run scales with a blues note tossed in, and use a fourth  note finger on cords, reaching out for variations to keep the mundane practice somewhat interesting.

Mrs. Piano teacher would have none of that in her house during her lessons.  If she bothered me too much, which was often, I’ld go directly into a made up ‘Jazzy’ version of whatever song I was to rehearse ten thousand times for her at the lessons.  That’s usually when her ruler smacked my hand during a song.  Followed by one of her patent lectures on proper classic piano.

The final limit came while learning the song: ‘Rain Drops Keep Falling On My Head’ ,  by Burt Bacharach, and used in the Movie, ‘Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid‘ – filmed in Utah.   After years of her piano teachings, basketball and sports were demanding more time, and “Raindrops” was the last Jazzed up song I ever played in her house.  I escaped on that day without the punishment of the ruler.

To this very day, of my elderly years, I can play and remember every note of the sheet music to ‘Rain Drops Keep Falling On My Head’ … … … .

I loved music as far back as I could remember.  Records were tossed around my house like flying frisbee toys, but not at my grandparents house.  There,  records were to be treated like a golden disc and handled with great care, preserved for all time to play at a later date.  My grandparents had a large brown formal furniture oak stereo console player in their living room.  Record playing was sacred and frequent.  We spent many hours listening to the music they enjoyed from the 1920’s to the 1960’s.  They had an eclectic large collection, and a second stack of older records in a storage box in the back room.  If you wanted to go deep into Jazz music,  you could make my grandfather pull out the storage box and select albums.  Reading album labels, learning about all the different artists and hearing the great musicians play music was just one of the many  enjoyable endeavors while in the presence of my grandparents.

I stopped playing the piano before I attended college.  But as I began to stay in Hotels in my basketball career, I started spending more time at the hotel pianos.

Later in life, I had a 2 year study of Piano Jazz in Denmark under the tutorship of a former student of the GREAT ‘Oscar Peterson’.  He brought me deeply back in love with Jazz Music.

I am not  a great piano player by any means, but on occasion, I can be found down at the Grand Hyatt hotel in Sarasota, Florida, entertaining the guests walking by on their way to the beach.

One of my famous performances came in the Marriot Hotel River Front in Copenhagen, Denmark.  At 2:00 AM in the quiet hours, I played, “Lover Man’, a legendary jazz standard composed in 1941 by Jimmy Davis, Roger (“Ram”) Ramirez, and James Sherman, for Mike Tyson, the Champion Boxer, as he sat alone quietly in the hotel lobby next to the piano.  It was just a limited audience, admission was free, it was  the desk clerk, the bartender and the one and only ‘Iron’ Mike Tyson. 

He did not applaud, but in his squeaky voice, as he stood up to return to his lonely hotel room, he did  say,’ Thanks, that was really nice.  I appreciate that …” .  I responded with a smile, I thought it was an appropriate selection for you Mike, you’re more than welcome.

I love playing and listening to all types of Jazz Music.   As I lived in Europe and South America for many years playing basketball for a living, I indulged myself in the local nuances of the music.  I found the Brazilian music to be unbelievable,  the Bossa Nova of Antônio Carlos Jobim, the voice of João Gilberto, and Sergio Mendes always stop me in my tracks for a listen.

It took some time, but those piano lessons eventually paid off big returns.  It was worth the hand smacks.  

I share this affection of Jazz music with one of my  favorite basketball players, Lewis Alcindor.  I met Kareem Abdul-Jabbar while in college.  It was an honor.